v1rtual

Browsing in my photo archive, I stumbled across a very old hardware project: my first surround amplifier, which worked well until the cheap commercial ones with more features and remote arrived.

However, the case was great (renewable! in the 90ties!). Built from some wood pieces lying around.

Only problem:  wooden cases tend to burn very well, so perhaps only usable for low current stuff.

Almost every hotel has it: nightstand remote to control lights etc.  With FS20 8 channel transmitter module (FS20 S8M) I modified my simple IKEA nightstand in less than 1 hour (prototype quality ;) There are 8 buttons to control lights and motor-shutters. And the red one is the master-alarm ™ :-)

Controls feel a little like the 80th (especially the LED, which definitely is from that time) in contrast to all the touchscreen stuff around these days.

some simple examples to get munin graphs from fhem logfiles. see github repo

gas and power meter reading below

As the optical reading of  EM1000-GZ / EM1000-GZS combination (from ELV) is very inaccurate, I replaced the optical parts with a reed sensor (MK471, reichelt), removing LED and photosensor and soldering to T3 connections. MK471 fits perfectly into BK-G4 gas meter. Sensor position has to be adjusted carefully to get a clear signal. For me the position displayed works fine.

em1000gzs modification

BK-G4 with MK471 reed sensor

I utilize fhem and ~300W room lights to wake up by “sunrise” every morning.
Forget Philips wakeup light etc. ;)

6:54 lights start at 6% (dimming up to 100% in 6 min)
7:00 lights are at 100%
7:03 support light dimming down to off in 60sec
7:04 open motorized shutters a bit; support light dimming down to 6% in 60sec
7:10 main light off

Wakeup time is around 7:00. Lights stay on a bit for orientation.

define wake dummy
attr wake room sz

define wakeup at *06:54:00 {\
  if (!$we && $value{wake} eq "on") {\
     {fhem("set papierlampe dim06%;; set papierlampe dim100% 300") }\
     {fhem("set schrank dim06%;; set schrank dim100% 300") }\
     {fhem("define wake_schrank_2_on at +00:09:00 set papierlampe dim06% 60") }\
     {fhem("define wake_schrank_2_off at +00:10:00 set papierlampe off") }\
     {fhem("define wake_papierlampe_2_on at +00:10:00 set papierlampe dim06% 60") }\
     {fhem("define wake_papierlampe_2_off at +00:16:00 set papierlampe off") }\
     {fhem("define wake_roll_stufe1 at +00:10:00 set _rollaeden on-for-timer 4") }\
  }\
}

Wake process only executed weekdays and not on holidays. Wake flag is used to disable temporarily.

Next: utilize squeezebox radio to play music or annoying birds :)

As the (most probably) last binary day in my life is approaching, here a ruby line to remember all the 36 binary days:

bd=(0b010100..0b111111).to_a.collect{|b| x='%06d' % b.to_s(2); [x[0..1],x[2..3],x[4..5]]}.delete_if{|e| e[0]=='00'||e[1]=='00'}.sort_by!{|s| s.reverse}; bd.each{|bd| puts "#{bd.join('.')} -> #{bd.join.to_i(2)}"};"#{bd.count} binary days !!!"

todo: refactor ;-)

result: Read more »

Our shutters are controlled by FS20 switches except for the ground-level for security and reliability reasons. These are bus controlled (ethernet) using Arduino+Ehternetshield and a few relays.

The Arduino reacts on simple HTTP GET calls with action path in url, (i.e. http://192.168.1.1:8089/roll1-open)

hardware setup

hardware stuff: driver board next to arduino stack, relays and high voltage things separated

Source example below.
Read more »

For great products I owned and enjoyed over the last decade and for inspiring the whole computer and internet universe.

FHEM displays power consumption using the EM1000WZ (from ELV, no EM1010 needed) to get an optical reading of the power meter and a the CUL (from busware) out of the box:

To get better history a graph functions I use CACTI which already displays a lot more graphs from other machines. The nightly max consumption is the dish washer :-)

Setup is simple: setup FHEM to log to database (mysql used here), to a current and history table. Cacti calls a small script to read out the current values to its RRDs every five minutes (a little coarse, but the EM1000WZ only sends data every 5 minutes). A nice tutorial is found here (german!)

Next project is to add a power meter to the Aquaterrarium and the IT infrastructure (EM1000EMs) to get more details. Cacti can display the values in the same graph.

Gas flow is also of large interest for the upcoming winter. But the EM1000GZ has to be modified with a reed relais before to be accurate.

After using my own simple homecontrol (rhome) for 2 years, I switched to fhem again, because it supports more device types. Perhaps there is time to adapt jqtouch/jquery mobile to fhem in future.

I just upgraded the iMac with the 120GB OCZ Vertex2 SSD (and 2TB Hitachi drive). Performance increase is amazing, and no more stupid and annoying hammering on system disk and waiting for I/O.
Random read/write is up to 10 times faster now. Sequential read/write about 2 times. See below for my xbench results.

I replaced the superdrive, because I nearly didn´t use it at all. No problem with cheap external USB drive.

Read more »