Dashboard source...finally

After a long time not having the time to take care of this, and knowing that a lot of you are out there eagerly awaiting it, I finally decided to publish it.

Then the problems started: my outdated OS doesn't interface well with github, which in turn doesn't allow for easy upload of binaries via the web interface.

So after a log of fiddling around, I managed to make a tar.gz file, with, I hope, all the necessary files to get an idea of how it works. here is the link to google docs, where I hosted it:

Dashboard: click here to download

There are a series of PHP files in there ending in "_service.php". These are the files called by the HTML5 page to update the data. They now have fixed data, and you'll have to adapt them to your own infrastructure. Also, I didn't include these service files for every functionality in the dashboard, leaving that as an exercise to you.
Also there are a few places where you'll have to insert the links to your own google agenda(s).

This is how it should look like if you dump it into a folder and access it via a suitable webserver.

Anyway, I think you probably can deal with it, and want to have it more for the design aspect then the actual infrastructure. Either way, enjoy it and have fun with it!

Having seen the recent developments in web technology with respect to sockets and stuff, I think I'll soon take my time to make this more real-time!

Let me know if it works, and if you use it, and also what you make with it!

Dashboard once again

It's been more than a year since I last published about the dashboard. And that it because not much happened in that front.

Meanwhile, a friend gave me a tablet, cheap chinese thing, which I planned to use to display the dashboard in a visible place in the house.
The thing could even display the HTML5 and handle the AJAX calls and all, but it was unstable, sleep mode would spend the battery almost as fast as normal mode, slow to boot, bad touchscreen (resistive), and so on, and so on, so I quit on it, and consequently on the progress on the dashboard, as the experience while using it is, in my opinion, of great importance!

A few months later, my wife offered me an iPad, the new retina display model! so that rekindled my interest in the dashboard. I came back to iWeb, expanded the design a bit, and have spend a couple of evenings implementing the functionality...this is the result:

And for the explanation:

electricity and gas consumption: the pointers move, as the data is updated, and shake slightly when stable, to indicate that the thing is alive. The numbers are updated twice a minute.

House control: this interfaces mainly with the FHZ1000 part of the automation. It reads set, measure and desired temperatures, displays the measured, and makes the box green if the room is set for comfort temperature (even if it has not yet been reached) and blue for low temperature. The boxes turn orange is there is no reply.
The buttons for the awnings are toggle buttons: click to extend them and click to retract them, since the system has no idea of what their status is (they can be operated locally). They briefly blink through orange to give feedback that something happened!
climate limited: is a button to limit the maximum temperature to which any room can be set
holiday mode: should set all rooms to a low temperature and out of the standard program. this is the only button not yet functional (and therefore transparent).

Door events: list of the last 4 events on the RFID door.

System messages: reports errors on the system, like now, the weather station has stopped transmitting.

Agendas: list a few items (enough to fill the respective boxes) taken from google calendar. I have a google calendar for the house, where I put the garbage schedule, and other maintenance activities that need to take place.

Outside temperature: like the name says, displays the data from the weather station. Now it displays nothing, since the station stopped working - see system messages :)

And that is it! data is updated on timers, and the agendas on loading of the page.

There has been talk in the tubes about some mechanisms to update data in real-time. That should be the next development, but that might take another few years :) This is nice enough to show to my friends :)

AH! last but not the least, I found out that one can include some lines in an HTML page to make it a iPad app, so, by adding:

    <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
    <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black-translucent" />

I can save the page onto the iPad desktop (is it what it is called?) and run it as any other app, without the safari address bar. Only the top bar with the clock and stuff is still visible, but that is even a plus, as it gives you a clock and iPad info!

I'll try to post a screenshot from the iPad soon!

Switch Box

This weekend I finally finished a project that has been on my mind for quite some time: a Switch box!

In a few words, it is a box of electrical plugs, each with its own switch.

A few months ago we changed our old CRT TV by a new flat modern HD thing, mainly to get rid of the annoying little decoder box that we were forced to use in order to see the channels that we liked that were moved from analog to digital, and, since we every night switch off all devices, in the hardware switch we made sure the new TV had such a hardware switch.
So when we come home, all happy with the new TV, and switch, we discover that the nice sound bar that came with the TV not only required a separate power supply (plug) but didn't have a real switch, that allied to some devices hanging around that did not have a hardware switch (DVD player) which required a unplug action, until I hacked a light switch on to the cable, I decided to make the following contraption.

 Under side

 Top side

It is a series of 6 plugs, just like an extension cord, but where each individual plug has its own switch, UK style. I then hid it under the furniture where the TV and all devices rest on, with the plugs nicely hidden under it.
I think these things should be sold in shops! As a side note, I did consider having a remote control for this, using a micro-controller and some SSRs,  but that would complicate it, both in terms of build time, and safety considerations.
I am also not sure I it will ever recover its cost in saved energy, but hey, if we account for the energy I save going around unplugging devices at the plug, it already payed it self off today!

I hope you can get a good idea of the result from the pictures!

 

Mounted in place

Another view of it in place

Small update!

It has been a while since I posted something here...the truth is, not much has happened in the electronics front.

The JeeTherm has been working flawlessly since I installed it, on the 15th of January, so that it over 2 months ago. During those 2 months, we had some serious cold coming this way, I measured -15C on my weather station! That is the lowest ever recorded here.

One interesting thing about this whole story of the efficiency of an HR boiler, is that, due to some graphics I found I limited the temperature setpoint of the boiler to 55 degrees, as this is the limit above which the efficiency decreases rapidly, thinking that, if it gets really cold, I could raise this limit, as it is all software anyway, and there was no need to recompile anything (on the JeeTherm the limit is 80C, on my PID controller implemented in PHP, the limit is 55C).

As the cold came and settled in, I noticed that the boiler, and the whole heating system was still able to warm up the house, and keep it warm, even in the coldest days! so I ended up never having to raise it! I was glad, I had days where the boiler worked nonstop, but down to a simmer. My energy saving correlation calculation also indicated that the gas spent was way below expectations, although the curve fitting was not done with any data in that kind of cold range.

What bothers me the most, is that I could never really find any good info about this efficiency story. In many forums you can find people saying that an HR boiler needs a 20C difference between feed and return to operate at optimal performance, but all the graphics I find of performance, none indicates such a difference, the efficiency being a simple function of the return temperature. Furthermore, if that is the case, then the boiler should be set to start modulating to try and achieve such a difference, but the behaviour I see with my boiler is that it modulates to have a 7C or 8C difference between feed and return. sometimes even 5C. I start to think that all that matters is the return temperature...and that one, I have it limited to 55C now!

Now I'm in the mood

For doing calculations, as I have to ascertain whether all the effort was worth it or not.
So, I have this curve fitting against which I can compare my gas consumption based on the average outside temperature for the month. But his is done for a month, and I wanted to see if I could go to a lower level, so I found in the KNMI website a service from which you can download all kinds of meteo data for a time period.
I downloaded the average month temperatures for "De Bilt" as that is where I have been basing my calculations all these years, although not the closest station, and plotted it against the daily gas consumption. I couldn't go away without putting it here, so here goes, for the month of November:

On the way to a finished project

An enclosure is also important! and now that the OpenTherm interface is working, all the software is written, and I just put it to work less than an hour ago (lets see how that goes...), I also went searching for a box.

I went to my trusted shop, probably one of the last in Holland to sell components offline, it is the last one for at least 40Km around...probably more...and found some boxes from Hammond Manufacturing.

These are great, as they have card guides and can fit a Jeenode precisely!! here are some photos:

1591MSBK

1591LSBK

The low one, one has to cut the flange of the lid to be able to close it (and maybe grind a bit of the sides of the JeeNode), the higher one, which I will be using just fits it all with no problems!!

Here is also a graphic of the gas usage with the first hour with the OpenTherm:

before I always about 4 blocks of burning, as a saw tooth -  burning level increasing slowly, from 0.01 to 0.05m3 per minute in 4 to 5 minutes...maybe I'll try to get one of those images for comparison.


And a bit of the radio transactions already digested:

seq: sequence
set: set temperature received from server
out: temperature of the water leavng the boiler
ret: temperature of the water returning to the boiler
status: status of the boiler

seq       set   out   ret  status
3483    38    42    37    10    @    Sat Nov 26 16:04:19 2011
3523    38    42    38    10    @    Sat Nov 26 16:04:59 2011
3563    38    43    38    2    @    Sat Nov 26 16:05:40 2011
3603    38    39    38    0    @    Sat Nov 26 16:06:20 2011
3643    38    38    38    0    @    Sat Nov 26 16:07:00 2011
3683    38    38    38    0    @    Sat Nov 26 16:07:40 2011
3723    38    38    37    0    @    Sat Nov 26 16:08:20 2011

apparently, the boiler allows an overshoot, or tries to control the water such that the return temperature is controlled...still need to investigate this further...

New Dashboard

Progress of the OpenTherm interface is going very well! but that is not what I am here to report today. Today it is just a short post to share the prototype of the new design of my dashboard. My wife made the design, and I implemented the functionality. Still some rough edges to adjust. Here is a snapshot:

All information gets updated regularly via HTML5 and AJAX calls. Half of it is already working even, but there is still some to get done. I'll share the code once it is ready!

By the weekend I should report on the Opentherm!

Home dashboard V2

Since the last post, not much has happened, but I have been busy with the dashboard.


I made some changes to it, so here it is:

The left dial is the electricity consumption, and the one on the right is the gas. They go from 0 to 5, so at the moment I took the snapshot, there was a very high electricity consumption - vacuum cleaner :)
The pointer indicates the instantaneous consumption, the white number the total for the last hour, the blue number (month) is the running total for the last 30 days, as well as the cost, which is simplz the number in blue multiplied by the average cost.

It is all made using HTML5 canvas, and AJAX (I think...). On the server side, php does the job of answering the requests. The thing updates every 5 seconds, and the temperature updates every couple of minutes. The agenda fetches data from google calendar and does that only at the moment the page is loaded, so the plan is to reload the page every few hours (my agenda hardly changes...)

I now have to polish it a bit, to display properly in portable devices - it works in android 2.1 - and to lighten the load on the server...my database structure is far from ideal, and the requests take a very long time to process - 1 to 2 seconds - when most data doesn't change that fast.

Home dashboard

Here is my new dashboard for the house! this built with HTML5 and AJAX technologies (sorry if any of the terminology is incorrect, but it's hard to keep up with all these mash ups :)

This is a project that I have been thinking about for many years, and now I finally found the technologies to get it all together! And especially, the touch screens are becoming affordable, with all the tablets around, the final piece of technology will come together and I can finally stick a touch screen somewhere in the house, showing what the house is doing, and allowing control!

It became possible when I found out about RGraph, I then spent a night or two getting some graphs together, but they didn't look very slick, so I investigated, and I found a few nice dashboards, and then I almost copied one of them, this control4 energy, and after one night of iWeb, vi, php, and HTML5 coding, I got to the result above.

I think it looks really nice! I still have to make the whole interface language better and get labels closer to the fields, and that kind of usability stuff going on. This is an AJAX thing, fetches data every few seconds, and adapts the graphics and displayed information. The other pages, for gas and agenda, are not yet ready.
I am particularly proud of the pointer, which moves smoothly between the values, and keeps waving when it reaches a value, mimicking a real pointer on a car or analog meter - it's a pity I can not show it here...maybe I will do a movie...or put the html in here one day.

Hope you enjoy it!

As for the batteries of the RFID lock, they didn't last nearly as long as I had expected, so I am now powering them from a small adapter...will still consider powering them from a solar cell connected to rechargeable batteries.

Heating season report

The temperatures around here have been souring, although today it is back to normal, with low temperatures, and the threat of a storm approaching, but I consider the heating season officially closed!
So here is a final report of this season - 2010/2011.
Last year we started pretty early with the heating, in August, due to the birth of our little daughter, and the fact that the end of August was pretty cold already, at the end, with the last days averaging less than 15 degrees.
After that, the boiler didn't stop working, during a pretty long and cold winter, with snow for about a month, and an average December temperature of -1.1C, when it is normally 4.0C.
Last year we got a new boiler installed, a new condensing boiler, so I was very curious to be able to compare the performance of this boiler to the previous old one with pilot light. Since that one spend about 0.7m3 a day just on the pilot light, I guess I would have about 21m3 a month less than usual, which, for the 7 months of heating translates to about 150m3 less, and about 90 euro of gas (about 60 cents per m3).
But, I could not do a proper comparison, since, with the arrival of the baby our habits changed a lot. First, the overall set point was raised by 1C, from 18C to 19C; second, my wife stayed at home for most of the winter on maternity leave, so the house was warmed the whole day instead of the usual night only; third, and similar to the previous, we spend most (if not all) days/nights at home, whereas before we were going out quite often for dinner, movies, parties...

With all these to take into account, I knew that it would not be easy to compare. But anyway, here are the values, and a small analysis (sorry for the bad formatting, but couldn't figure it out...):

month	Spent	Predicted	temperature
August	38.01	59.553	16.8
September	65.75	121.541	13.6
October	150.74	217.062	10.4
November	309.34	413.124	5.8
December	523.18	837.144	-1.1
January	415.31	537.14015	3.5
February	350.72	475.666584	4.6
March	252.13	398.224854	6.1

I did not include April although for almost half of the month the heating was still on.

This leads to a grand total of 2105.18m3 spent, against a predicted (formula based on the first year of occupancy of the house) 3059.46m3. So we spent 69% of the predicted gas consumption.
The other years this value was around 55%, so there was a large increase in our consumption, although, the comfort levels were increased and the time the house was occupied also increased significantly. Maybe it would be a nice idea to make some statistics on this, since I have all the data available.
I cannot however conclude much about the improvement, since the usage conditions have changed so dramatically. I am nevertheless convinced that if I had kept the other boiler I would have spent more than the prediction.
So overall I am quite happy with the result. Next project is still to get a PID controller going based on opentherm (maybe starting with opentherm lite) to try to get the boiler to operate in its ideal range. Now it is still on/off control, which isn't the most efficient. I do try to run the boiler efficiently by limiting the temperature of the water to 55C whenever the outside temperature allows it.

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!

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:

Power Orb complete

Finally!! you might say!
I fact, it has been a while since it is operational and running on the wall, but I had no time to report.
So here they are, the photos! where you can also see my home made home server enclosure.






The little black dot at the right, where the balls hit the wall (not the screw) is a little piece of metal that pushes the push button when the ball is touched, and it also helps keeping the ball in place, as it is pivoting on the other side on one screw only!

During the day it is not very visible, as the led is not very high power (on the contrary), and there is plenty of light coming in through the door, but the red and the purple are quite visible, even during the day, which is good, because those are the colors that it is relevant to see.

So for details. The processing is pretty simple: if there are more than 2 pulses from the gas meter in 20 seconds (0.03 cubic meters per minute) or 2 pulses from the electricity meter in 10 seconds (6Wh per minute) the light glows red. As soon as that doesn't happen, it turns back into green.
It is in my plans to make it average the consumption, so that it gives a better indication, since now we will probably not see it while it is red, since by then we are either in the shower (spending gas) or in the kitchen (spending electricity). Also should change the amount of glow depending on the amount of consumption. But all that is for later!

As for the purple, it comes up when someone rings the doorbell, and overrides all other indications. To reset, all you have to do is press the ball lightly, and it will turn the the appropriate color, indicating the consumption.

The code will come soon, I guess in a google code acount. If you want it, just drop a message!

Doorbell and meters code

Just before I update the code to include the power orb, which, by the way is already mounted on its place, I decided to put here the current code...since I am not great a keeping versions.
Once I setup a cvs server at my computer, but that was z
years ago when I did some serious software development under Linux. Now...I didn't yet have the patience to do it, so I thought blogger could be my repository. So here is the code (hope that this time it comes out better than the previous time - I am using code labels to get it fine):


--- Update: code removed...I don't know which version it was, but it was definitely not the right one...I really should do some configuration management...


Progress in the power orb front

So, if you have been following this blog (not likely I know!) you should be waiting for the ambient orb, or power orb as I just renamed it, to materialize. So today, after watering the plants and practicing the music, I decided to progress with it.
So I made two little breakout boards (is this what they are called?). One for the RGB LED and one for the button that will serve to reset the door bell indicator. Here they are in all their glory:



I like to use telephone cable, as it has plenty of conductors (5).

Now I will place it in the wall of the meters cabinet, from the inside, wire it up to the arduino that is doing the measurements, and hope that it will all go according to plan!

I'll try to do it quickly so that you don't have to wait long!!

Boiler off!!!

Yesterday, 3rd of April we had an almost tropical day here! so I decided to turn the boiler off, thereby ending the heating season...from now on, if the cold comes it is to be fought with blankets.

so, for the statistics:

6 Months of heating - from the 4th of October to the 3rd of March.

1640.81 m3 of gas for the winter, 712.71 m3 in 2008, 928.10 m3 in 2009, it was a pretty cold winter with plenty of ice! At about 60 cents per cubic meter, that is about 985 euro.

A total of 23464 minutes that the boiler was burning gas, or 391 hours, or 16 and a bit days, that in a total of 181 days, which makes it that the boiler was on for 9% of the time. Doesn't look like much does it...in the coldest month, January, that total was 14% of the time, in October it was a mere 2.5%, and in the current April 0.4%. Maybe I could derive an indicator to tell me when to switch it off based on the usage.

This total of minutes leads to 0.07 m3 per minute. Although this last number is not very reliable, since we also used some of that gas to take showers and cook...I should try to calculate the baseline cooking/showering gas consumption to be able to derive this number more accurately.

And all this heating was achieved with the server being up for 201 days, non-stop!

The doorbell rang a total of 99 times. A number of them (not many) it was me testing and making sure the battery is still working - should have made an indicator - an another (quite a few) number of them was a TV crew that came to shoot a program with my wife's research, and they had to film the presenter ringing the bell, which led to almost 20 rings, that added to the fact that they were trying to hear the bell ringing (which it didn't at the time!)

For some more statistics, there were yesterday, when I switched off the boiler, 46 daffodils flowering around the house! I'll try to keep track of how many blackbirds will be born this year on the garden!

For the coming times, I'll try to do some statistical analysis on all this data to derive occupancy rates, or in other words, to see statistically how often are we home on a certain weekday. Maybe I could adapt the heating with a neural network to heat according to the probability of us being home that day. That is the future!

More on the consumption

The progress on the light to indicate energy consumption is going steady, but the camera ran out of juice, so I can't put a picture online. Maybe tomorrow.
So I decided to report to you about the consumption curves.
In the picture you can see a plot of the gas consumption versus the average monthly temperature for the last 3 years - 2006, 2007 and 2008. The "trendlline" is a excel computed trendline, and its equation for 2006 is my basis for the energy saving calculations.
In 2006 I did' have in place any energy saving measures for the heating, and a sinple manual thermostat, so I consider that to be the baseline against which all gains are to be measured.
I think the line approaches quite well the measured results. It is a second order polynomial equation.
Also in the graphic is the date for 2007, when my automated zone controlled system was already in place.it;s line is quite deviated from the line of 2006, so I can safely assume that there have been some considerable savings, and that my calculations might be close to the real thing.
As for the data points referring to 2008, these come quite close to the predication from the trendline for 2007, apart from the 2 slightly removed dots at the right. These correspond to February, when we spent a week off and therefore saved quite a bit on the heating bill, and December, when most of the roof insulation was already in place! Which makes me very hopeful that the insulation really is doing its job and saving quite some gas and CO2 from going up into the atmosphere!
Byt the way, for January, which just finished, I got a saving of 40% with respect to the 2006 equation, whereas in January 2008 and 2007 the saving in January was only about 12%.
I am hopeful to see what the coming months bring, with the added sun exposure hours (they do make a difference)!
I'll keep posting about it!

New developments!

I decided that all the effort in measuring electricity and gas shouldn't go unnoticed in the house, so I decided to make a light indicating the status of the house. Furthermore, when arriving home, the only way to know if someone had rang he door was to check my intranet (on the iPod Touch), although, at work I can see it in twitter anyway.

So, I bought an RGB led, one with 6 legs - strange - the pinout is in the image. Some simple connections to the Arduino and a small fading program later, and I had an initial prototype.


My idea is to have a small switch connected to it to reset the doorbell indicator.

So on to the enclosure.
I had laying around a ball from some promotional thing, which splits in 2 halves. The ball is rather big - about 7cm in diameter - which makes it look good, and has a rough finish which is also good to difuse the light...although not good enough. So I tried roughing it further with sandpaper and some other mechanical tools, but no good result. The solution appears to be paint! - A light cover of white paint from a can.



I made all these experiments in one of the halves, now i have the other half to do the real thing. Hopefully soon!

3 years of gas consumption logging

For the last 3 years, since we have been in our current house, I have been taking very regular readings of the gas and electricity meter, usually daily, sometimes, skipping a day or 2. Recently, I have automated that process with the help of an Arduino and some additional electronics. That has removed the burden of collecting the data, and allows to see the evolution of the consumption to the minute! (note to self, explain the circuit to collect gas data!)
But all this accumulated data also has a good purpose, besides making nice graphics. It allows me to evaluate the measures I put in place to reduce the overall energy consumption.
In the first year, we only had an old Honeywell thermostat, manually operated. That was replaced in the second year by a fully automated system (see post regarding the uptime of the server). In the 3rd year nothing changed, but now that the 4th year is about to start, I am about to finish the roof insulation. All the accumulated data allows me to compare the increase in performance.
So here is a graphic of the monthly gas consumption for the last 3 years, along with the average temperature for that month as reported by the KNMI (dutch meteorologic institute) for Holland.

It is funny to see the relation to the temperature. In fact, from the data of the first year, I have managed to calculate a second order curve which relates temperature to gas consumption, so for a given monthly average, I can calculate how much the consumption would be. It is using this curve that I calculate my savings. I'll elaborate more on that soon.

Worth noticing is also the fact that December 2008 was much colder than December 2007, yet the gas consumption remained similar. I attribute that to the roof insulation, which I did mostly during November (not yet 100% finished).