Electronic components

Vigilant readers (ha, who am I kidding) will have noticed I've been starting on some ATmega hackery, but I'd like to prototype up without needing to but an arduino (clone) card for each one. So, off to the electronics equivalent Laminated Book Of Dreams (ie, farnell) to stock up on core components.

Discussions have come up with something like the following list, but what else should be added?

* LEDs - Was going to get both a selection single and a couple of RGB ones
* pile of resistors
* capacitors - elecrolytic and ceramic
* Diodes - signal. power, zener
* Voltage regulators
* 2n7000 mosfets
* generic transistors
* couple of atmega chips, crystals etc (core componets of arduinos)
* battery holders
* reset switches
* hookup wire
* breadboard (one decent and one small)

More specific bits I also want are
* rf12 boards
* opto isolator for telemetry input
* moar jeenodes :-)

EDF metering and 'Tele-Info'

Just discovered via some google-fu that we have a Sagem C1000 series meter in the house, which includes

* Interface de télé-information client permettant le raccordement à un système de gestion d'énergie

so, with a bit more googling I discovered that it's 1200 baud, 7 bits one stop. and lo - there's even an arduino shield already made for it!

--- update ---
Have discovered that there are many hacks around to parse this teleinfo - some of which need a licence fee (!!!) and do fancy things like export to bdpv.fr

Sample of the data stream is at http://www.planete-domotique.com/blog/2010/03/30/la-teleinformation-edf

Hardware Hackery

I've just purchased a nanode to be the main part of the energy monitoring in the new house. More details about it are at http://wiki.hackspace.org.uk/wiki/Project:Nanode - I plan to use the nanode as the head unit, perhaps with a somple lcd display, talking to slave nodes (jeenodes or emontx boards) which do the data logging.

more info and construction details when it arrives.