Category "projects"

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....

“Say Hello to The Rentalito!” That was the first message The Rentalito displayed almost 2 years ago. The Rentalito means something like “small rental monitoring thingy” (free translation from “rental” and “ito”, which is the suffix for “small” in Spanish). It was born to display the rentals in a VOD project my team was working at that time. The Rentalito displayed total rentals, rentals by day and it beeped every time a new rental showed up in the database displaying the movie that was just rented....

[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....

This is going to be the last post for the smart meter pulse counter setup series. I want to wrap up several things like the final hardware, the code and the data visualization. Final hardware This is what the pulse counter sensor looks like, almost. The final version that's already “in production” has a switch to hard-reset the radio from outside the enclosure. Nothing special otherwise. Everything goes in a socket so I could reuse the components, the photocell probe connects to the 3....

So far I've posted about hardware and theoretical stuff like network architecture or naming conventions. I think it's time to move to the software side. The core of the sensor network I'm deploying at home is the Mosquitto broker that implements MQTT protocol. It manages the messaging queue, listening to messages posted by publishers and notifying the subscribers. I've been working in parallel to have at least some pieces in place to get and store information from the pulse counter sensor....

Naming stuff is one of the core decisions one has to take while designing an architecture. It might not look as important as utilising the right pattern in the right place or defining your database model but my experience says that a good naming convention helps identifying design flaws. In a previous post I introduced the network I'm building for my home monitoring system. As I said it will be based on MQTT, a lightweight messaging protocol....

This week I have had some spare time - well, I should say I've borrowed some time from my sleep - to work on the smart-meter pulse counter setup. In my last post about this I analized the signal from my photocell sensor. My conclusion was that the signal was clean and neat, even before throwing in a schmitt trigger to make it more “digital”. I have found out that it is also very dependent on the environmental light so I good isolation is a must for the sensor....

All of us tinkermen eventually end up working on a home monitoring/automation system sooner or later. And that's for me the big background project at the moment. I have already some of the pieces in several stages of readiness but I was lacking an overall view of the system as a whole. My initial approach was to store everything in a MySQL database and develop a web application to graph the time series values....

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”....