2 Bit Hacker » hacks

XBee for Home Monitoring

Chip — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:00:16 +0000

Now that I’m moved in to the new place, I’ve been giving some more thought to my temp and power monitoring projects. In the old place, my server was located in the same closet as the punch-block for the phone wiring. In the new place, they’re not even close. In order to have more than 2 thermal sensors, I’ll need to put the Basic Stamp II in with the punch block, so I’ll need a way of getting it’s reading back to my server for monitoring.

I was considering serial, using the phone line to the office as RS-485, but I remember all the headaches I had with 485 when working at SimPro, so I’m kindof leaning away from that. For the price of one 232/485 converter, I can get two XBee modules and carrier boards at Adafruit.

I’m also considering hacking apart my Kill-A-Watt to make a Wattcher, basically an XBee crammed into the Kill-A-Watt housing to allow for remote monitoring. I could then use that to track the usage of individual or small groups of devices, which would be nice even if I do decide to install T.E.D. in my breaker panel.

So many projects

Chip — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:46:32 +0000

Finally killed my WoW account the other week, not sure if it’s stopped working yet or not, haven’t really cared to check. Delia’s considering canceling her account, but hasn’t made the decision one way or the other yet. Feels good to not be sitting in front of the computer the whole time I’m at home, though I usually wind up in front of the TV watching a DVD with my laptop going, but still…

With my new-found spare time I managed to get one of my projects done; I now have a working garage door opener remote! Ended up buying a 4-relay box from PepBoys and wiring it to a power supply from radio shack and velcoing it to the back of the door opener unit. Near as I can tell the relay box was designed to be used in a car to remotely turn on/off accessories like lights to show off to your friends. The outputs could be put in a momentary mode though, so it worked out perfectly for the door opener. As a bonus, I know have 3 spare relay channels in my garage that I could use for something, if I think of anything cool to put out there.

I’ve got a few coding projects I want to work on too, the most important of which is an online scheduling calendar for Delia’s De-Stress Center. I had started it in PHP, but now that I’m working with Mason all the time at work, I decided to switch over and use that instead. It should be relatively simple to throw together, I just need to sit down and get it done one of these nights. It’s harder than I think it should be to sit down and code after getting home from a day of sitting and coding.

I also want to take pieces of the old SimPro code and turn it into a home automation controller. I think the data collection and scripting stuff would work out great with an X-10 interface and a couple of tweaks. I want to scrap the website side of it though and rewrite that from scratch, which will take some time. It’s all in PHP currently, and I have a hard time following the code in a lot of places. That’s probably going to be a long term project.

Also, Evil Dave wants to build a recipe website, which I think would be really cool. I just need to make time to work on that as well. So many projects…

Fixed Laptop Hinge

Chip — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 22:17:00 +0000

With the help of Mark at work, my laptop is now fixed again! We took apart the screen to find that Sony made the panel in such a way that all the screws for the hinge went through the hinge and LCD assembly, and into the plastic backing. With the plastic broken, there was nothing holding the LCD to the hinge. We put in a little screw and nut just holding the LCD assembly to the hinge, and it’s working fine. The plastic is a little loose in that area, but it’s a lot better off than it was before.

So I guess I can hold off on getting a new laptop for a while, especially since I’ve been tweaking this one a bit more. I just started using cpudyn to throttle my CPU when the load isn’t high. Keep the temperature down, which is nice when I’m using it on my lap.