Category "learning"

Hey! I've been away for some time. It's not that I had stopped tinkering, but work and laziness have kept me away from the blog. During these months I have been working mostly on a new weather station (yes, yet another weather station or YAWS). The project was a step forward in a lot of aspects, from carpentry to remote reporting hacking cheap chinese routers and 3G dongles, from new libraries for Arduino to a bidirectional HTTP to MQTT bridge in node....

My last project is a über-cool Geiger-Muller Counter. Final box, with a LCD showing the last average CPM every 6 secons and sending the info to the server every minute... Hardware: Radio Hobby Store Geiger Counter Radiation DIY Kit (second edition) Some weeks ago I suffered a radioactivity fever, so to speak. I backed the APOC Mini Radiation Detector at Kickstarter and also bought a Geiger Counter Radiation Detector DIY Kit from Radio Hobby Store at Ebay....

Keeping on registering data from different sensors my next project has been the all-time favourite weather station. This time I wanted to build an 100% autonomous outdoor sensor. To achieve this goal I started playing with a LiPo battery and a solar panel. The Arduino Fio looked like the perfect out-of-the-box platform to be the center of the project. It's a ATmega328P (the same micro as the UNO), has a connection for a LiPo battery, a charge circuit based on the MAX1555 (with an USB connector) and a socket for an XBee radio module....

UPDATE: check my post about my new Moteino based door monitor. In the past I've been monitoring my home door with an IP camera and the motion software in my server. Whenever something was moving in the camera range the server saves a little footage, takes a snapshot and calls a couple of scripts I use to send notifications via NMA and email. The problem with this set up was that it had lots of false positives....

[UPDATE 2013-03-01] I have added links to the encoder chips these two remote use and removed some miss-assumptions for the Noru remotes. The explanation now is simpler, but the main questions about the Noru codes remain. In my previous post I explained how I decoded the data from two wireless outlet remotes using a couple of libraries for Arduino and a Bus Pirate in logic analyser mode. Now I want to go more in-depth, showing the captures from OLS and the data I obtained....

[Update 2013-03-01] I have added more documentation on the codes these remotes use in a different post. I'm starting to move towards not only gathering information but also acting. My first project in this subject will be controlling some lights and the house heaters. So last week I visited the urban market of “Els Encants” in Barcelona and bought some very cheap wireless outlets. Two different remotes I bought two sets of three wall plugs, each set with it's own remote....

Now that I have started to monitor some magnitudes at home, like power consumption or the front door opening, I have to do something with this information. The sensor information can be useful for two purposes, mainly: analysing it to know more about your environment or your life-style patterns (like when and how you spend the money you spend on energy) taking real-time actions based on events from your sensors (open a light when you pass by a dark corridor at night, receive a notification when someone enters your house,…) To analyse the information you will first have to store it in some way you could retrieve it later, graph it, summarize it, perform different time range roll ups or moving averages or detect time patterns,… whatever....

Thesmartmeter pulse counter will be the first standalone sensor I will deploy so power economy is a requirement. I will have to power an Arduino Pro Mini and an Xbee radio. I plan to power the Xbee from the 3V3 regulated output. The Arduino VCC output can provide as much as 200mA which is far enough to power the Xbee. The built-in regulator requires at least 3.35V and up to 12V so 3 AA cells will provide enough potential to drive the whole setup....

Endesa has recently updated my home energy meter to meet new UE and Spanish regulations. The new meter it's a smartmeter by Meters and More and it basically provides the means to perform remote meter readings and supply changes. The goal of the new regulation is to provide better and more accurate information to final customers regarding their energy consumption habits to promote energy efficiency and saving. The reason I'm writing about this is that the meters has two communication ports on the front side, an I/O optical port with unknown protocol and a simple LED labeled “4000 Imp/KWh”....