10 AUGUST 2012
XBee Central Heating Control via Raspberry Pi
Following from the previous post detailing the plans to build an XBee & Raspberry Pi central heating controller we have now built the control board and written the Microchip...
08 AUGUST 2012
Now the solar monitoring and logging system is working we are going to build the wireless remote control for the hot water and central heating boiler and controller/programmer.
We currently have a variant of an ACL Drayton...
01 AUGUST 2012
Following the 4th Apple iPad charger failing and not wanting to spent even more money with Apple to replace them we decided to try to make 12v powered chargers to make use of the excess PV power we now have during the daytime...
25 JULY 2012
Today one of my projects was added to the popular hacking site Hack a Day for the Raspberry Pi solar logging project.
Normally the blog receives on average 30-40 visitors and around 80 page views per hour.
Within minutes...
24 JULY 2012
The Raspberry Pi solar data logger project is now live and is the latest version of our previous data logging systems using Arduino and Android + IOIO board projects.
The data is used on a custom reporting website on home.briandorey.com...
20 JULY 2012
To make it easier to connect the various cables to the new Raspberry Pi ADC board we decided to make a second PCB with header pins to connect to the ADC board and take these to screw terminals. Also we wanted to have a temperature...
14 JULY 2012
The code sample below shows how to read the ADC values from the MCP3428 16-Bit, Multi-Channel Analog-to-Digital Converter with I2C™ Interface and On-Board Reference by Microchip via I2C on the Raspberry Pi using Python.
The...
11 JULY 2012
The original plan for the Analog-to-Digital Converter was to use the Dallas 1-Wire system and use the DS2450 1-Wire Quad A/D Converter which was advertised as being a 16 bit device but after buying two of the chips which...
10 JULY 2012
Currently working on a new I/O board add-on for the Raspberry PI computer. The PCB will have 8 16bit A/D inputs which are connected via buffers to the I2C port on the Raspberry PI GPIO port. There will also be a built...
06 JULY 2012
The plan to use an Android phone and IOIO board to log the solar data has been abandoned after repeated failures of the IOIO boards to run for more than 24 hours without crashing or resetting. It maybe that I have purchased...
26 JUNE 2012
As part of the home solar PV and hot water project we are now using an IOIO board with an android tablet to process the sensor data and upload to our online reporting website. The code below is used to get the sensor data...
26 JUNE 2012
As part of the home solar PV and hot water project we are now using an IOIO board with an android tablet to process the sensor data and upload to our online reporting website.
The code below is used to get the sensor data...
25 JUNE 2012
My project blog has been featured as Site of the Day on the EEWeb Electrical Engineering Community website.
www.eeweb.com
11 JUNE 2012
The planned Arduino based Solar PV and Hot water monitoring and logging system was found to be very unstable and despite repeated attempts and several code rewrites we had to give up on the Arduino based solar logging system...
31 MAY 2012
After several problems with slate suppliers, the builder who is replacing the front roof was able to get nearly all the slates installed by yesterday and we then fitted the solar hot water panel frame and pipework onto the...
26 MAY 2012
Following from Arduino based Solar PV and Hot water monitoring and logging posts the various hardware and parts of the software have been installed into the PV control cupboard and the new logging hardware and software is...