New Year!

Happy New Year!!

And this, I declared the "Bag Free Year" :) I explain: we have a bag in the kitchen, where we put all the bags we get from shopping, and, which are to be used in further shopping, garbage collection, etc. It is always our plan to carry a bag around in the pocket, so that we do not need to get one from the shop when buying something. I often have one in my bike rack, but still, the bag in the kitchen has been growing, as there are many occasions when we do not have a bag!
To add to the whole thing, the city where I live has started to collect plastic separately since the beginning of the year, so we decided to try to reduce the amount of plastic, and other garbage. In fact, we decided that if we have to buy a package, we will prefer the plastic ones! as those can go in the recycling instead of the burning oven. Metal is still allowed as that is easily separated.

So, to implement this I will place a paper in the kitchen, where we have to write every plastic bag we bring from the shops...sanctions are not yet in place...lets see what happens! maybe I create a pachube feed for the plastic bags :)

Lets hope this reduced the size of the bag in the kitchen!

Also in my plans is to measure how much garbage we generate by weighing all the garbage that leaves the house...but that is for later.

Meanwhile, have a happy New Year!

Temperature control

The weather station is almost ready. Due to complications, it took much longer than expected, but that will be the subject of a different post.
This one is about the temperature control system, of which I am very proud!

This year, since turning on the system, I had a problem, with the value of the actuator not being sent to the central, and since my control depended on it, it did not work. So I removed that dependency, since, as long as the desired temperature is higher than the current, the actuator will be open.

In the figure you can see a section of last week thursday, where the temperature was set to high for about 6 hours, and the actual temperature followed quite straightly.


Since the graphic is very compressed ( I only have 4 points per hour, thus 4 pixels per hour) normally it is difficult to see this!

The green line is the desired temperature, and the red is the current temperature.
The blue line in the bottom is the actuator, which is always at 0...

Here is a picture from last year, where the actuator was very visible.

Further news from the polar front

One more quick post about the polar coordinates display for the energy consumption.

I have adapted the graphics from the last post to have a logarithmic progression in the size, so that an increase of consumption would not lead to the bars going off screen, while allowing to see small variations as well. So this was the result:


Not bad in my opinion, but I think it is a bit too difficult to read, partly due to the difficulty in adjusting the coefficients such as to have a nice variation range.

So I decided to make it constant width and only change the color:


I think this is a better display, although the colors aren't the best...must work on that. The red area was the washing machine centrifuging the clothes!

One other idea, would be to combine the electricity and gas in one sole graphic displaying the cost, e.g. in euro, or in CO2 emissions!

Weather station

Finally, I decided to progress in the weather station front! mainly due to having received my JeeLink, and having successfully gotten it to work with the JeeNode!

So, the plan was to get a wind speed and amount of light measurement so that I could automate the sunscreens at my place. Of course, I didn't want to buy a commercial weather station, because the ones that do interface with the PC are expensive and you do not have much control, not to talk about Linux, which they probably won't support. So i had decided to take it in my own hands and build it myself!

Some time ago I got a light meter to work, and temperature I had already mastered, so all I needed was wind speed, and maybe direction, and a way to send data around, which was solve by the JeeStuff!

I have built the anemometer before the holidays, but did not have the opportunity to blog about it, so here goes a picture:



It was just a check of whether it moved in the wind, and if you look carefully you can even notice that it is rotating!

And today I bought a weather proof electrical box, and started the process.

First, the JeeNode did not fit inside, by an estimate 0.5 millimeters, so i had to get the dremel tool out and get a some of it sanded into dust, in order to fit.



Then I devised a transparent lid for the light sensor, which I will show you in a future post, when I get a decent picture of it. I did it by warming up some rigid package plastic and forcing it into the hole with a rounded end of a spoon. Then I cut it and inserted it, screwed it and it looks great! (in my opinion!)

I also made some sort of plugs/shield, but I am not yet 100% sure of how it should be.

I did decided to change all the electronics for the sensors to work with 3.3V.

The initial plan was to run it from 5V, but since the JeeNode has a 3.3 LDO regulator, it would be a waste of energy to have say 6V, converted to 5V for the sensors, converted to 3.3V for the jeeNode. And since soon this will all run from a battery and solar panel, the less power the better!

So tomorrow (or today, since it is pretty late) I'll have to redo the detection of rotations for the annemometer, and install the whole thing temporarily to see if all is functional!

I still have to figure out the temperature measurement, but I'll probably end up going with one of those temperature/relative humidity digital combined sensors, instead of the good old LM35.

Back, with polar ideas!

A lot has happened in the last 2 months or so since my last post!

I was on holidays for quite a while, and then I came back and kept experimenting with the JeeNodes/JeeLinks from JeeLab, but that is not what I will write about today! I'll keep it short and show something I just got together in the last hour (instead of practicing the trombone!)

Based on this article in Make magazine, I decided that that is a great way to show the electricity consumption, so I decided to adapt my old fashioned looking graphs to the modern polar graphics!

Here is the first iteration!


In the bottom you can still see the linear bar chart, so that you can relate the consumptions to the pie slices! Let me know if you want the code...still must investigate a way to get it online!

The next stage is to integrate in one sole graph the consumption of the last hour (displayed above) and the last day, just like "hours and minutes", and of course, make it pretty!! something I am not very good at!

It is all made in PHP!

UPDATE:

Been trying around with fancy stuff, first color dependent on the consumption, going towards red as we go up, and then, some rounding of the courners :) check it:

Heating system rundown

Recently I met one of the persons behind the Wattcher, a nice little device to measure the electricity consumption of the house and show it in an accessible way to the users. Furthermore, it is a design piece as it was designed by the famous dutch designer Marcel Wanders.
Talking about the wattcher and my own power ball, I mentioned by automated heating system, and he was interest in it, so I wrote an extensive email about it, which I think should come here to the blog as well. So here it is, slighly adapted for the bolg:


Here is a quick breakdown of how my system works.
First, in Holland, the central heating works by having a thermostat in the living room which commands the boiler to burn gas when heat is needed. The remaining rooms then keep a temperature which is relative to the temperature in the living room, since the radiators in those other rooms will be more or less opened depending on the wishes of the inhabitants.
Some places have thermostatic valves, in which you can set the desired temperature and it will open and close the radiators according to the need of heat. However, for this last setting to function it is necessary that the living room thermostat turn on the boiler time enough for the heat to get there, and at the necessary moments.

This situation always annoyed me, since to get some decent temperature in the sleeping room in the morning, the living room would have to be heated up in order for heat to circulate in the system and heat up the sleeping room. The same for e.g. the bathroom.

So, I thought of a system where each room would have its own thermostat, able to request heat from the boiler (turn it on) and ways of opening and closing the radiator valves.

These systems are not new, and they exist for office buildings, high end residential buildings, and in other countries where the standard central heating system works according to different principles. Companies like Honeywell also have similar packages, but they are very expensive.


So, I found these room thermostats and radio controlled valve actuators, in elv.de

http://www.elv.de/FHT-80b-Set-2-Raumregler-FHT-80b,-1-Stellantrieb,-Batterien,-Adapterset/x.aspx/cid_74/detail_10/detail2_10647/flv_1

These are room thermostats, and function just like a thermostatic valve (like mentioned above), but one that you can program the day/night cycle. Furthermore, these thermostats can communicate with another device from ELV:

http://www.elv.de/FHZ-1000-PC-Software-zur-Ansteuerung-der-FS20-,-HMS-100-Komponenten-der-FHT-80b/x.aspx/cid_74/detail_10/detail2_9859/flv_1

which is a device to connect to a computer and that receives state data from the thermostats.

So, I got all these together, and built a computer system which receives desired and current temperature data from the thermostats and decides if the boiler needs to be on or not. If the boiler needs to be on (somewhere there is need for heat in the system) the system turns on a relay switch (also a wireless switch from ELV) that turns the boiler on.

I hope I didn't make it very confusing.

Meanwhile, ELV developed a device that does essentially the same:

http://www.elv.de/Wauml;rmebedarfsrelais-FHT-8W/x.aspx/cid_74/detail_10/detail2_22834

JeeNodes

I just bought a couple of JeeNodes from JeeLab, the Lab behind bringing affordable wireless technology to the arduino! It is not mainstream yet, in fact I think only a couple have been built and sold, but I think it is great simple technology!



So I got my kits, 2 boards, with all the necessary components, and assembled it. The Atmega168 that comes in it already has the arduino boot code burnt in it, along with a demo of the RFM12 radios for test purposes.

To interface with the little JeeNodes a FTDI interface cable (?) is necessary, but since I didn't have one, I remembered that the Arduino can function as a serial data relay when the Atmega is not there, so I connected the jeenode to the Arduino. Only 4 cables: GND, Power, RX and TX. I guess you could only connect the reset, but I couldn't figure that out, so I left it out.


My plan is then to burn the images using the arduino and then transfer the Atmega to the JeeNode board.

Plugged it in, only one, and I could communicate with it. Checked both, and both work!! great little boards, kits and service from JeeLab!

now I still have to solder the antennas (forgot those) and the headers (was too much in a rush to get it running) and then start playing with these little devices.

I am even happier since I think one can connect 8 inputs to it. I thought it was only four. So I can make my little remote weather station, with wind speed sensor, light sensor, temperature, humidity (maybe these can even get in through the TWI) and if I am lucky wind direction sensor.