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Then the problems started: my outdated OS doesn't interface well with github, which in turn doesn't allow for easy upload of binaries via the web interface.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

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:

Considerations on the boiler system

The behaviour I mentioned at the end of the last post, does make sense.
That is, for the boiler to overshoot by a few degrees, once it has reached the set temperature, and by those means bringing the return temperature to the set point is the only way of avoiding it to cycle more.
Once the boiler stops burning, the temperature of the outgoing water drops almost immediately to the return temperature, so to avoid it turning on again, the return should be close to the set temperature, and that is what the boiler is doing, thereby keeping the water in the whole system at the set temperature, and not at the return temperature that happen to be there when the set temperature was first reached... (I hope someone can make sense of all this rambling...)

The system , with the DIY OpenTherm master, has now been running for a few days, with no problems, and quite an accurate temperature in the rooms. The PID controller just needs some small adjustments in order to converge a bit quicker, and converge always (I sometimes have 0.2 degrees below the set point, which is no big deal anyway...)

I found a few graphics depicting the boiler efficiency as a function of the return temperature. Here are a few, all in Fahrenheit (didn't find any in C):

http://www.mnshi.umn.edu/kb/scale/boilers.html

http://blog.triangletube.com/blog/hydronic-heating-solutions/outdoor-reset-maximizes-spring-energy-savings

http://www.navitron.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=9066.0

The last is not the efficiency, but the relation of water temperature to outside temperature that I am using. I use a curve near the "1" curve.

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...

OpenTherm interface ready!

If you have been following this, you know I have been busy getting a JeeNode (arduino compatible) to talk to the boiler suing the OpenTherm protocol.

I am glad to report that the circuit, which you can find here works fine, and the code available in github, is also functional! Sometimes it hangs when first connecting to the boiler, but a reset of the JeeNode solves the problem. Will try to investigate (I have some ideas)

Today I was busy finalising some details, and implementing communication with the server to get the set temperature. All is ready, except one little linking piece of software: the listener that listens to messages coming from the JeeLink has to now accept messages via the serial, which are sent by the module that calculates the set temperature. Maybe for the next post I make a diagram of the software layers involved.


Anyway, here is a picture of the little thing!

The little icons represent: radio link, OpenTherm link, flame, Central Heating, and Hot Water. T1 is the outgoing temperature, T2 is the return temperature, Ts is the set temperature, under the reported set temperature, and to the right of the Ts the received from the radio (for debug...will delete that). The 5 is just a number that changes once a cycle, and serves as an indication that the whole thing is still working.

You can see the yellow antenna, and the home made PCB, the one with the blue connector block.


I will get a PCB done externally, to learn how to do that (although Joao is taking care of that), and then get the whole thing in a nice enclosure.

The next hardware version will be to get the thing powered from the OpenTherm bus, which should be possible, as it provides 5mA for the master to operate. That should be enough, given that the radio only transmits once a minute!

OpenTherm Circuit diagram

Here is a nice circuit diagram, made by JCS (from Coffee, Bits and Bikes), who is helping me with it.

The value of R2, which is indicated as 470 Ohm, is not yet final, as I still have to do some tests. The problem is the CTR of the optocoupler, which can be quite high, and so I will have to define the resistor such as to cause the transition in the proper place.
Next posts will be the code! so stay tuned!

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.

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...


Boiler on, boiler off...

After having switched off the boiler last week, I found myself having to turn it on again, since, as usual, there is no way you can trust the dutch weather to evolve in one (logical) direction, so after a very nice last weekend, it turned cold again, so I had to turn the boiler on.
And again off, yesterday, so it was only 3 or 4 days extra to all those statistics. I hope this time it is for good.
Since also soon we'll be getting a new boiler, which shouldn't have the pilot light, and as such does not need to be turned on and off. I hope I can keep my computer control for the new boiler. It would be great to be able to interface with it via the OpenTherm or similar protocol, but, as far as I know, it is not yet possible...I'll keep googling for it!

Here is a graphic of the gas consumption:


And enjoy the good weather!!

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!

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).