Cool Stuff

Things you find on the internet...

The Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) Hydrology dept monitors the water temp at its gauging stations (http://www.hydrodaten.admin.ch/en/) including the one downstream from Lac Leman. Soneone else is feeding these into pachube as a data feed (https://pachube.com/feeds/43397) which means it's trivial to generate an on demand plot of last weeks water temp:

Machine Tags

Flickr has had machine tags for several years now (and they are a Good Thing), but one of the problems with introducing new namespaces is the lack of any formal definition, so people are free to add as they wish (this is generally a good thing, but can lead to garbage data).

So: I propose a new namespace for the Amateur Radio community called say 'hamradio:' that would then mean an image such as http://www.flickr.com/photos/elwell/5397112294/in/set-72157625667743349/ could be suitably tagged. - The visual information in there shows callsign, date and position - but should it be plotted on the senders locatation, or the site that received it. Or both....

Since I don't have enough time, Someone Else (tm) should create a noticin.gs style QSL lookup that can integrate with hamlog.eu or qrz.com. Or something.

Discuss...

Teleinfo update

I''ve been using a teleinfo shield on a nanode to try and datalog our electricity usage, but the logging to the CSV file kept truncating as if the arduino had locked up. There have been discussions elsewhere that this may be related to the code in arduino 1.0 so I decided to rewrite a step at a time to try and debug the problem.

Some observations on the way:

1) having to flip a jumper over on the shield between programming and run is *very* annoying in a cold garage, so I'm going to rewire it slightly to use SoftwareSerial on a spare input (leave JP1 open and wire from one side of it to a spare pin) - I already have a link since the shield tries to use DIG6 by default which is used by the red LED on a nanode.

2) the arduino IDE doesn't like anything other than 8N! on the serial monitor. close it and use kermit. if you can't read serial with kermit, then it's *very* broken :-)

3q) our usage is going UP not down :-( -- lowest figure I managed to get the baseline to was 340VA

With a very simple logger

    Serial.print(char(meter.read()));

I can stream the output to a kermit session log as

^B
ADCO 040222048573 <
OPTARIF BASE 0
ISOUSC 30 9
BASE 040912359 ,
PTEC TH.. $
IINST 002 Y
IMAX 029 J
PAPP 00340 (
MOTDETAT 000000 B^C

next trick is to try and get the processing organised into blocks and validate the checksum, but my code doesn't seem to detect the stx/etx properly

void loop() {
if(meter.available()>0) {
  if((c = meter.read()) == 02) {     // start of block
    Serial.println("DEBUG: Start Loop");
    while((c = meter.read()) != 03) {      // Loop until end of block
      Serial.print(char(c));
    }
    digitalWrite(LED, LOW); // Flash LED
    delay(50);
    digitalWrite(LED, HIGH);
  }
}
}

so mode debugging called for. Once thats done, then I'll send the values to an emon style display over rfm12b

plaquewatching

Some scribblings that may be of interest to those folks over at open plaques (@openplaques) about the Scottish Film Council, now merged into 'Scottish Screen'

Googling for plaque info reveals that there was a plaque erected in 1996 in Castle Gardens, Dunoon. Later taken down as Eric Campbell came from Cheshire (Ref)

One in Aberfeldy main square unveiled in 1997? for Donald Crisp -- may also be fake (ref) [1353]

Sean Connery unveiled his own one after it had been down for 4 years (ref, ref) after the demolition of S&N plant and building of 'Springside' development [8553]

Chariots of fire at St Andrews (pic pic) [added as 8822]

Duncan Macrae in Millport (pic) [already there as 8521]

Fedora / Netatalk / OS X Lion / TimeMachine

Being the cheapskate that I am, I'm not buying a shiny apple-branded time-capsule for backups when I have a perfectly stylish NAS (since the pic was taken I'm using the via-eden board there's a 1.5TB HDD in the box)

I'd previously used netatalk with leopard under mythbuntu, but following a clean-up and migration to Fedora 16 (Verne) it needed reinstalling (esp as we upgraded to Lion on some of the macs)

So, a HOWTO if anyone is hunting for this and some notes

• You don't need avahi separately anymore - new netatalk includes it
• You need to allow tcp/548 in your iptables rules (I added to /etc/sysconfig/iptables)
  -A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 548 -j ACCEPT
• SELinux. Yeah. probably needs fixing but 'setenforce permissive' worked :-/
• I'm not convinced you need the 'defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1' anymore. 

Here's what I did

1) Create a separate disk partition for time machine and mount it (I'm using LVM and XFS)

$> grep time /etc/fstab
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv /export/timemachine xfs defaults 1 2
$> df -h /export/timemachine
Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/linuxvg-timemachinelv  200G  6.0G  194G   3% /export/timemachine

2) create a separate user for the backups (not strictly needed but I chowned /export/rimemachine to that user to sort out permissions

#> useradd timelord
#> passwd timelord
#> chown timelord: /export/timemachine

3) Install and configure netatalk (although 2.2.0 is in Fedora 16, I decided to use the rawhide version of 2.2.2)

#> yum --enablerepo rawhide install netatalk

The config files are in /etc/netatalk and (see the gude at An Esurient Trollop ) you'll need to edit afpd.conf
(I added -mimicmodel Macmini and uams_guest.so to -uamlist: I have a ro media share)

- -tcp -noddp -mimicmodel Macmini -uamlist uams_guest.so,uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword

and AppleVolumes.default

# Share out the Videos
/export/media/Video Videos options:ro,noadouble
#Time Machine
/export/timemachine TimeMachine options:tm

Startup netatalk

#> systemctl start netatalk.service
#> systemctl enable netatalk.service

 So far so good -- assuming no failures you should see something like this in your logs

afpd[28742]: AFP/TCP started, advertising 192.168.1.251:548 (2.2.2)

Now, onto the mac -- I wasn't seeing the host automatically appear in the finder, but a simple command-k (connect to server) and typing the hostname worked (it expands to afp://hostname automatically), and was prompted for my (normal) username and password to connect to $HOME on the netatalk server.

In the time machine preferences I could then select the remote TimeMachine volume on the NAS, enter my 'timelord' username/password combo and it started to so a backup.

More news (and a rest restore) to follow...

Metering

So I finally got round to wiring in the 'Teleinfo' shield into my EDF meter (see my earlier post for more info) and left it running while we're away. Hacked up an initial couple of graphs using trusty gnuplot: exhibits A and B -

It's rather easy to spot where the fridge-freezer kicks in, but more worrying is the fact that the baseline never dips below 170VA. The only things that should have been running in that time was my via-eden server, with one HDD, the livebox and samknows monitoring box. I suspect I need to investigate more.

Made a minor hack to the shield as digi-6 is used by the LED on a nanode - but digi-7 is free.
Details were tweeted over here. Next up is to get it sending the info out to main box (well, another nanode or my bifferboard) and spitting to pachube and / or a jeelabs display board.

Happy Birthday

I finally got round to assembling my birthday present. Shiny toys FTW :-)