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"

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. 

Low-Level hardware hacking

In our 3 shiny new computer rooms (supercompute, IO, Tape - Each with slightly different environmental and cooling requirements), the architects have fitted a single temperature sensor on the back wall. Out of the airflow. This isn't giving us a terribly accurate picture of the supply air going into each rack, and so an alternative DIY method is underway.

A Raspberry Pi in each room (small, low enough power that it can be fed from PoE via a splitter) acts as the local 'head' and grabs the data to send it to a central message broker. From there, we can choose what to do and how to display it.

The sensor hardware consists of: A single DHT22 attached near to the Pi - As useful as these are on an arduino, on a R-Pi they are a bit harder due to the need for timing. The Adafruit interface for these grabs directly from memory address and seems well, a bit hacky. As suggested on IRC, a proper kernel module may be helpful. hint for someone else to complete :-)

The main sensor array is a set of DS18B20 sensors from fleabay (cheap if you're ordering 50 at a time) attached to the sheepwalk i2c interface 'RPI2'. These are then strung around to suit depending on location (ie, for our watercooled racks I'm going to affix the sensors directly to the flow/return lines on the watercooled racks to give us the delta-T across each set of door radiators (The BMS only gives flow/ret temp overall) which when tied to the internal temp sensors in the back of the racks should give us an idea of how well we're shifting the heat away from the machines. All this hardware comes in at less than 100 AUD per room - and some soldering time to make up the sensor chains to suit. To get an idea of the stratification (and therefore how do we position floor tiles relative to the overhead extraction vents) I'm going to put 15-20 sensors on a piece of plastic waste pipe to get a nice vertical profile - cue trip to bunnings (local DIY store) later this weekend.

Software

Hat-tip to the excellent MQTT people - nice n simple to use a python publisher script to send to a mosquitto broker on the lan. From there we can republish to Xively (useless as it doesn't respect timezones in the plotting so I can only see data I sent 8h ago...), Google spreadsheet (in a refactor of the original adafruit idea, and currently to a simple python curses console

Once we go into production and kit is running properly I plan to use the broker for all the machine status info and we'll dispatch accordingly for alarming.

More info and code will appear at https://github.com/ivecops/EnvMon