In my last post about counting events with Arduino and PCF8583 I talked about this “yet another weather station” project I was working on last summer. The station was deployed in the garden of a cute apartment we rented in an old “masia” near Olot, 100 km north of Barcelona. It is in the mountainside, surrounded by woods and 10 minutes walking from the near town. It has a beautiful garden with plenty of space....
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....
“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: 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....
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....
