The writing's on the wall

For the last couple of jobs I've had, having some sort of status display has proved itself really useful. Things like an overloaded nagios dashboard help to drill down to see what system issues you may have, but on large systems there'll always be some component that's not green (however your service should work around these transparently to the end user).  In a smaller team without 24/7 operations staff and shift handovers, how do you know things aren't on fire when you walk into the office? - I'll ignore the fact that you probably read your email over breakfast.

Concerto

At $job[-1] we put a spare monitor on the office wall and ran concerto on a PC feeding it. The backend at that time was php, and made assumptions such as assuming that short tags were OK - I hacked on a branch to make it more standard with the scientific linux systems we were using at the time. Given this was (is?) a student project out of the Rensselaer Institute ir's hardly suprising as young developers want LATEST SHINY. They then went through a second system effect, rewriting from scratch and completely missing the launch of the raspberry pi, which could have made a killer combination.

The problem is that many browser based clients need the overhead of X11 and all the various hacks to remove mouse cursors and make them more 'kiosky'

info-beamer

Fast forwards a few years and I have mini-magnus on my desk showing status and a set of 3 unused monitors on a wall looking to display some info. A quick bit of research flagged up info-beamer which has been used in production at the CCC events for several years. I've been playing with it for a couple of days now in the standalone pi and hosted variant.

hosted info-beamer

The install of this is very smoothly done. Small zip file download to populate an SD card with the raspberry pi bootloader files and a squashfs  and it self-installs the rest of the distribution from S3 and prompts you to register the node to your info-beamer account (in a similar way to a chromecast).

Florian has made some really nice touches to the setup - little things like setting cec_osd_name if your TV screen uses it, a custom kernel logo, and suppression of all but the player-related boot messages. In a public area, this makes it look a lot more professional than most of the other solutions which show the operating system before launching a player should they reboot. I've only played with a couple of the sample packages, but the install process is slick, if initially confusing terminology between packages, setups and playlists.

I'd love to see this integrated with indico - the meeting software used at CERN. Hint :-)

standalone info-beamer

The personal use player is distributed as a binary executable - I can understand the reasons for that, but it doesn't feel right. It doesn't (yet?) come as a debian package - It should be trivial for me to do myself according to the docs. When that's done, I'll install and run using systemd rather than the daemontools method (which is used by the various syncer scripts used in the hosted version). My concern is that the logging is presently noisy (good for debugging, bad for SD lifetime) 

I'm also planning on managing these R-Pi nodes using Ansible (Puppet is overkill for this as I want something that can bootstrap up a fresh SD card without needing extra daemons running) so I suspect there'll be future blogging on that. 

I've not yet investigated sending values directly to the info-beamer listening port (hoping I can do something with an MQTT subscriber) but pushing json files from various subsystems seems to work well. Obligatory screenshot:

Prototype display testing

Overall, I'm very impressed. Given I'd started learning lua for some nodemcu work I should be able to develop something functional. I've asked the work graphic designer to assist, so hopefully it won't end up "engineer style"

The Physical Web. Yeah, thats a good idea.

In the last week I've discovered the Physical Web from google, and I'm sold on the idea. Apart from the "what's around here" geeky stuff, it's a great idea for sensible 'distant' digital signage. For example, $dayjob is at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, but we don't plaster our URL over the visitor area - what if guests could be gently prompted to the right URL by beacon?

Again tonight (while watching WASO play the Indiana Jones score) I noticed a set of three A3 posters explaining to users of another part of the conference centre how to connect to wifi and download <exhibit> app. This isn't even Scott Jensen's complaint of a 'dos prompt on the browser' - it's more a dig out the index card from the library, then go to the dos prompt...

All around the water tank, waiting for the rain...

Having the luxury of mains water means that I don't really care in fanatical detail about the state of the dam water levels for Perth (except that "it's lower than it should really be"). However with our new place being entirely dependant on rainwater collection off the roof into storage tanks, I'd like to know the levels of the various tanks (and therefore the volume remaining).

So, what's available - simplest is knocking on the side of the tank and guessing from the sound how full. Not terribly reliable or hi-tech, but is cheap. Dipstick also cheap, but requires removing filter cover. Next up are external gauges - Our tank supplier stocks the Yaktek Levetator, but that's not really any good when I'm not on site. Hence, it's time to investigate the electronic options:

This thread on whirlpool mentions the Electrosense Aquagauge, but at $265 each plus telemetry thats not cheap. The Jaycar ultrasonic one may be OK, but as it doesn't have a serial / usb  output from the display, I'd need to hack up something to parse the RF (as others have done). So datasheet hunting time:

The MaxBotix series looks like it's pretty much ideal - 1mm resolution, 5m max range, weather resistant. Annoyingly I can't see it cheaper than the ~100 USD on the manufacturer site (sparkfun et al. only have the MB7360 not the MB7369), but at least there's a local supplier.  A slightly different model (MB7060) is being used by the flood network.

Next up is trying to work out how to connect them - My options are:

• Wired - Etherten or possibly something as simple as serial-ethernet adaptor
• Wireless - wemos / ESP8266 for wifi (power hungry?)
• Wireless - rfm type TX/RX setup to basestation
• lora - nice but possibly expensive as I'd need a gateway.

I suspect this particular blog entry will get updated as things progress..

Traffic Light status IoT device

Following on from an all-too-regular "Is the lasercutter working?" mail thread at our local hackerspace, I've decided to come up with a nice simple IoT 'traffic light' device.


Plan is to use KISS principles and have 3 big pushbuttons (Red, Amber, Green) that light up (and stay lit) so that the next person knows if machine needs maintenance/ misbehaving slightly / all good.

Using something like an ESP8266 module (hello Wemos D1), this could trivially publish the status to a broker, and then be acted on elsewhere - updating status on website etc

Next up, finding a local supplier of parts to start a prototype at the next Arduino-U night.

Growatt inverter monitoring with Raspberry Pi

At home we have a small (2.5KW - 10*250w panels) PV system to try and offset our daytime electricity usage. This is connected to a 'Growatt' inverter that handily has both RS485 (wierd 2 pin plugs) and RS232 (9 pin D connector buried under a screwplate) outputs.

With the firmware on ours (installed Sept 2013) it supports modbus-rtu over serial 9600 8N1.

I had done some initial digging and experimentation (as announced on Whirlpool) but never really got sensible values out.When my guruplug (via a long USB to serial adaptor) finally died and I shelved the whole thing. With the completion of the structured wiring though I finally got round to reconnecting it and starting again.

Blue serial cable attached to structured wiring.

Small D9 Gender changer, + cisco console cable (all hail fleabay) gives a nice neat look on the outside, and in the garage I have another console cable plugged into the relevant patch outlet and a cheap usb-serial adaptor in a Raspberry Pi (which also has a GPS module connected, acting as a PPS NTP master)

Anyway, in the intervening time, someone had worked on my hacky scripts and wrapped the posting to PVoutput in an exec(curl) call -- first up I ripped that out and swapped for python requests.

I then went through the growatt modbus guide and made sure that it correctly calculated high and low byte values where these are split. The resulting script can be found on github,  and todays output can be seen on pvoutput. - a couple of charts are duplicated below.

Todays output v insolation prediction

As you can see, we had a couple of clouds going overhead today, so only generated 13KWh  vs 13.7 yesterday. Also the pvoutput fields are somewhat vague - 'Voltage' I've chosen to upload the array DC voltage rather than the grid AC volts (actually, I upload that and the grid frequency as extended data), and 'temperature' - I'd ideally like to have the panel temperatures, but upload the inverter temp so I can see if it's getting toasty. These can be seen on the 'all info' plot below

The observant of you will notice that the Etoday figure was slow to take off - this is because I didn't RTFM and discover that it's uploaded in watts, not kW...

Update 2016-02-08

If you pulled an early version of my code, please grab a new version - I realised the total lifetime generated (and any other 2*2word values) were off as I was doing thing[1]<<8+thing[2] and it should be thing[1]<<16+thing[2]. Ahem. 

The new version also just runs once in the background rather than being called from a cron entry every 5 mins, - it still publishes every 5 mins to pvoutput, but publishes all the messages (in json format) onto my message broker (MQTT) so I can draw a spiffy html5 canvas + websockets graph of whatever I fancy from 

solar/json {"Status": "Normal", "Etotal": 8705.3, "Tinverter": 46.1, "Pac1": 305.1, "ttotal": 32957749.5, "Vac1": 242.1, "PV1Curr": 1.1, "Etoday": 14.4, "Iac1": 1.3, "Pac": 305.1, "Ppv": 339.0, "Fac": 50.02, "PV1Watt": 339.0, "Vpv1": 303.8}

It also monitors the status, and if it changes to 'Fault' it'll look up the fault code and send an alert via pushover.