jpdw.org

3 days, did so many things: got the bread, got a new bathroom light; fitted the new bathroom light; cleared out 3 bags of junk from the spare bedroom (aka junk room); tidied the front garden; tidied the back garden; 3 loads of garden rubbish to the tip; new bulbs for the landing light; made soup; lunch meal out; watched 3 films; added xAP Heartbeat to the tempcaster software; Sorted out backing-up my SVN; and probably a few more things....

Our electricity supplier (currently British Gas) have just done a meter exchange fitting us with a "Smart Meter" instead of the really old analogue wheel variety. The new meter has a mobile modem & sends daily readings back to them so no more estimated bills, ever.

A long term projects has been to build some smaller temperature sensors that can be dotted around the house. These would store data back centrally but mainly be used to feed additional room data into the Idratek Cortex system that controls the house heating.

This has ended up being a project made up of part development and part integration but as of today I've got the initial integration of the various components working - albeit to a limited extent.

It all starts with a little Nanode board. Wedged above it is a small digital temperature sensor.

The green cable is to the network. Every few seconds the Nanode makes a pretty rudimentary web call to a predefined web address (which happens to be a VM on my server, but where & what isn't that important). The call includes an identity of the Nanode (there will be several eventually) and a set of temperature readings from each of the (currently one) sensors.

The server (running some basic php) stores the data into a database.

To help me test the interaction this far, the server also hosts a very basic web page that lists the last few readings received, displays a big red "Temperature now" reading and has a graph of the last 100 readings. As I'm lazy, it auto refreshes and the same frequency as the Nanode transmits. Here's an image of it on the iPad:

Display on iPad

The next step is to get this temperature data pushed into Cortex and recognised there as data for one of the objects defined in Cortex. To make this leap, I'm using the xAP automation protocol which is support by Cortex for both inbound & outbound transfer.

Another module of rudimentary code is on the same server that receives/stores the data. This takes the last two readings and if they differ (the assumption here is a temperature change) then the code builds an xAP packet and squirts it at the Cortex server. xAP is apparently normally a broadcast protocol but as the two servers involved here are on different networks the xAP packet is sent unicast so it'll get routed to the destination (in reality the 2 VMs are both on the same physical server but are on different networks for reason that once made more sense than now). For speed and convenience this module is currently triggered by the refresh of the web page so wont actually work unless that page is being viewed somewhere, but now it's working I'll move the trigger to a cron or something similar.

Finally, Cortex receives the packet, pulls the data out and applies it to the DTS Temperature Sensor module defined in the guest bedroom.

After several years of not seeing much in the way of new films except on Terestrial TV or on the back on airline seats, I am suddenly catching up on the missed years with a combination of a love film subscription and 6 months promotional Sky Movies.

With viewing options of the TV ( Sky broadcast, LoveFilm DVD & LoveFilm streaming ), iPad ( LoveFilm streaming, SkyGo ) and PC ( SkyGo ) there are Soooo many ways to watch! But not enough time!!!

This page is a collection of links to useful looking libraries for Nanodes (probably Aruino also)

https://github.com/njh/NanodeMQTT/zipball/0.1.0 (Nicholas Humfrey)
https://github.com/sde1000/NanodeUNIO - Driver for Microchip UNI/O devices on Nanode (eg. the MAC address chip) (Stephen Early)
https://github.com/sde1000/NanodeUIP - Port of uIP library to Nanode (Stephen Early)

I've barely added anything here for so so long.

Too much time work, following the extension progress, spending time with the family & trying to figure out a new micro-venture.

Really should find some more time here....

A few weeks on from getting the HP Microserver and it's working out even better than expected!

I mean, with the current long-lasting cashback this has a net cost of around £140. For that price you can get a reasonable (Netgear) NAS. For a little less, you get no actual drives in it. For a little more, you get 1Tb. Bang in the middle is the HP with 250Gb and 3 spare bays for more drives. Official bays. And more space for more drives....!

After running several different MiniITX servers over the last 7-8 years I've now upgraded to a new HP microserver. Attracted in part by the awesome price (£139 inc VAT after a £100 cashback from HP) this little server should finally allow us to run a number of different things from a single machine. And at a relatively low power consumption and cost.

For the last couple of years, the home server has been running Windows (for Cortex) with a virtual FreeBSD running DHCP/DNS etc (FreeBSD chosen mainly because it seemed to run better on this server than Ubuntu or Fedora).

We got planning permission !

Granted with Conditions - but the conditions are things we'd expected anyway. So effectively -- we got what we wanted !!!

Upgrading this site to the latest 6.x release of Drupal seemed to go fine, but I started to get emails warning of cron failures. The specific error being recorded was

Fatal error: Call to undefined function json_decode() in myhostingpath/sites/all/modules/twitter/twitter.lib.php on line 258

Now, although I'd forgotten I'd even got a twitter account or that I'd got a twitter module installed, I assumed that disabling the module in mentioned would just have thrown a similar error for another module. So best to fix the problem.

So in the interests of helping anyone else who's (googled for and) got this problem here's how I've fixed it:

Just processing the last of this year's tomato crop. In total this year, we've had 21.4kg of tomatoes - thats only counting the usable ones, so the 3.4kg of ones that started to rot on the plants during late September might have lifted the figure further if they'd ripened. But still that beats our previous record, from 2008, of just over 20kg ! The figure does include just over a kilo of toms from the allotment so the garden yield is only just over that of 2008.

One thing that is certain about continuity (and normally proved right) : Things change and move on. They evolve. Continuity ceases or breaks eventually. Sometimes this brings change that is better, sometimes it's just different (=code for "maybe worse but we don't want to put it that way").

Its been a while but for a strange set of reasons I'm off travelling this week.  Some random and useless statistics have occurred to me:

• This will be the first time I've been on a plane for almost a year (a while back, 11 days was a long time)
• This will be the furthest I've been away since the girls were born in June 2008 (yes, further away than I was when they were born
• ... and the longest trip too (4 days / 5 nights)

Sat here doing some work (and drinking a coffee) at one of my regular en-route stops and there's a fella just sat down at the next table with an iPad.  As he sat down, he nearly toppled his coffee over the thing.  I, jealous of course because I'm still using a device with an old-hat actual keyboard, was forced to suppress an amused smile :-)