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.

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

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.

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:

Daylight measurements

The next project, now that the door bell growls in the mac and the power orb is orbing like mad, is to make a small weather station, with a wind speed meter and a daylight meter in order to control the sun shade in the kitchen.

In the late afternoon the kitchen gets a lot of direct sun, and while that is a good thing in the winter months, it is not as nice in the summer, as it makes it very hot and the refrigerator has to work overtime.

I have an electric sun shade, of the extending type, which is connected to an ELV device making it controllable from the server. However, I cannot lower it automatically, since if it is raining or windy or simply cloudy, it is not a very wise thing to do. I do raise it automatically every day at 20:30, which should cover it most of the year, and in case I need to go out of the house and don't come back till late while the shades are off.

So I started the weather station by getting an LDR and connecting it to the arduino. Using the standalone temperature logger I made a few months back I could leave the arduino in the kitchen the whole day logging the amount of light.


The results are great I think! with the steep rise around 14:00 which is when the sun comes around the bend, and a clear difference between the times when the sun shines and when it doesn't. I think a threshold at around 800 will do the trick.
Furthermore I am quite happy with the excursion of the sensor, going from 0 to 916 at least, which is a 89% coverage of the 5V conversion range!
Now, off to the wind speed! Already spent the night disassembling an old VCR, and got some promising parts out of there!

One more note. I thought a lot about how to make a rain sensor. Not necessarily measuring it, but just to detect if it is raining or not, but concluded that if it is rainy, the sky will be overcast, so it won't be necessary to lower the shades!

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).