I'm back! and this time with a completely different project!

I've been away from posting here, as I did not have much available time to report.

I did some things, which I still intend to report, but this time, I am redoing the upholstery on some old chairs!
These are some pretty old chairs, that belonged to my grand-mother, so they are at least 40 years old, I guess more than that.

About 15 years ago I replaced the internal foam and elastic bands on the sitting area, but left the top intact. Now, after an unfortunate incident, the cloth got destroyed, so I had to fix it!

Started by removing the bottom from the chair, and the artificial leather cover.

 

You can appreciate the work that went into the cutting and placing of the cover!

The round headed nails were placed by me during the foam replacement. The original nails are the flat headed, and they are very short and tapered, very interesting nails! Possibly special upholstery nails...don't know...

I then cut a piece of new material and stapled it all around. It is not as stretched as I would like to, but it was the first time...I'll try to do better for the second chair!

 

I also inserted some screw studs (sorry don't know the correct name) to be able to use metal screws instead of wood screws.

Overall the result is pretty neat! but I'm not gonna do the back, as that is something for a professional.
The photos aren't great, but the phone was all I had around.

I'll try to make a time-lapse movie of the repair of the second chair! stay tuned!

Fan Controller reloaded II

So here is the continuation of the previous chapter, the saga for a nice product.

Final version:

The eagle eyed among you might notice some small changes. Nothing major.
The ones really paying attention might notice the mistakes: DS18B20 is one wire, not I2C, as is indicated (cosmetics), and the silkscreen for the 12V and the 5V regulators is inverted (cosmetics with high potential for disaster). The soldering holes for the screw connectors could also be a tiny bit bigger, but that depends on the connectors used (could be problematic, as I used some big ones).

I only noticed these mistakes after the boards arrived, luckily before soldering the regulators, so no harm done!

but, following the intense design sessions, I sent it out to be manufactured by Fritzing, and the boards arrived, a bit more than a week later! Great service is all I can say. Here they are in all their glory:

 I really think they came out amazing!

And here in the box, with some components located, not soldered yet:

And finally, in the box, with the components (attiny is missing):

In the third chapter, the completed thing, with screws, micro, lid, everything! and some considerations for improvements.

Fan Controller reloaded

I've been busy redoing my fan controller, and now, that I'm about to post about it, I just realize that I never presented the previous work finished, so here's a picture of the prototype:

So there it is. I especially bought those little orange and gray connectors to try out for this project.

It had been working fine for one year, but the power supply that comes with the radiator is in a DIN rail format, so I have been wanting to find a DIN rail enclosure, and make a PCB to put inside it.

I found a nice box in Conrad, and proceeded to make a shield for a JeeNode, that would fit the box. I decided to use Fritzing, to try out the manufacturing service.

1st attempt:

Great! only to realise, that the JeeNode on top of this would cover the access to the screws of the connectors. Not to mention, that the box had some mechanical constraints.

2nd attempt:

Notice that I have completely replaced the JeeNode by a Attiny of 8 pins. I decided I do not need statistics on this. So it is now a fully standalone micro-controlled controller.
notice also the mounting holes in the middle, and a big hole for a big plastic column in the box (pictures will follow). Time to print the thing and check that it fits.

3rd attempt:

Of course things didn't really fit, so I had to shift a few things around. I also decided to add some connectors to make the whole thing tidier. This is almost it! 

In the next post I'll put some pictures of the final product: beautiful boards, made in Berlin! and the assembled thing.

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

Project finished!

This is it! The OpenTherm JeeNode/Arduino interface is finished! and all ready to roll!

The prototype had been working for almost two months now, and finally the boards arrived from fabrication, I think the result was worth waiting for, and worth doing it! I got three identical boards, so if I mess up one I can go on with the next:

Bare boards

Very simple, but very effective :)
I thien collected the components, whe to buy the optocouplers, and incorrectly bought the 4N35 instead of the 4N27 that the prototype used, but only realised after they were already soldered, so I tested it, and they work fine! crisis averted:

All ready for assembly

Mounted everything, both the JeeTherm, and a JeeNode v4 I had around still to be assembled, and put it all in the enclosure:

Assembled, and in the enclosure, attached to the JeeNode

Another view

Had to fiddle a bit more to get the screen fitting in the cover, and connected to the JeeNode:

All ready for action

Checked that it all worked, and got it connected, instead of the prototype. It is now running happily:

Talking to the boiler

I am quite proud of the final result, it looks good and well packed, and I tried not to cut any corners this time, took my time, and tried to do it patiently...very often I end up messing up things in the rush to get them finished.

It is now in beta test phase, if it works well for the coming days, then I will attach it permanently, now it is still floating :)

Already thinking of the next project!