Adam's Home Automation

Update: Temperature Monitoring

Adam — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 08:08:22 +0000

Temperature Sensor

Just to give you an update on the temperature monitoring, I have taken a picture of a sensor connected to the cable, so you can see how easy and quickly I have set this up for the time being. Click on the image for a larger, un-cropped version.

The image shows the two ends of [...]

HowTo: Enabling a USB device in a VirtualBox VM in Ubuntu

Adam — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:00:19 +0000

I recently had the need to get a USB to 1-Wire bus adapter working on an Ubuntu Virtual Machine running inside a Ubuntu host. Both systems were Ubuntu Server 10.04.

However, after testing under Windows, where the USB device worked perfectly, when exported to the Ubuntu host, the USB device was always ‘busy’. Here are my findings [...]

Info: Embedded Moisture Sensors

Adam — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 07:47:03 +0000

While I have been looking into the design and installation of a temperature probe string into the stone walls of my house, I suggestion was made to me ‘What about moisture measurements?’.

Um I thought, that is probably just as important as getting a temperature gradient.

So a few days later I started to search the Internet to [...]

News: Temperature Monitoring

Adam — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 08:18:38 +0000

Over the last few days, I have been installing temperature sensors into all the rooms of the house. These are to capture a record of temperature fluctuations as we live and work on the house.

The idea is to capture some thermal properties over a winter before we make any changes. Then we can see if the [...]

HowTo: Install OWFS onto Ubuntu 10.04 Server

Adam — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 05:00:20 +0000

OWFS, the One Wire Filing System for Linux is a very useful interface for communicating with the Maxim 1-Wire range of devices.

Most of the commentaries on how to install OWFS refer to much older versions of Ubuntu than 10.04, this article is an upgraded version to cover the newer versions of the packages concerned.

This article covers [...]

Proposal: Stone Wall Probe String

Adam — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 10:18:18 +0000

I am about the spend a lot of time and effort in ‘upgrading’ my property and it would be interesting to know if this insulation investment improved, reduced or made no change to the thermal dynamics of the building. Here is my proposal to monitor the changes made….

The walls of my property in Orkney are [...]

Ref: 1-wire Connections

Adam — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:02:13 +0000

The 1-wire bus developed by Dallas (and now Maxim), has been adopted by several outfits to form a standard bus system, used by many different sensor systems for Home Automation purposes.

This page document details this common standard.

Note: Click on images for larger version.

A standard that has developed in the Home Automation projects, this standard is detailed [...]

News: 1-wire Temperature Monitoring

Adam — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:29:30 +0000

Now that the house down south has been sold, I can start to install bits to start looking after the property. As it is too late in the year to get fully organised to do major building work now, so I have decided to start on some of the core electronics.

I have opted to install Maxim/Dallas [...]

Series: Movement on Coppicing

Adam — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 17:06:42 +0000

Last week on Westray there was a public visit by a consultant who specialises in forestry projects (Jenny). She was on the island to run a’ drop-in centre’ one evening. The idea being that she would be there for a few hours and you could visit her and discuss anything to do with forestry on Orkney.

However, [...]

News: Weekend Downtime

Adam — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 20:18:57 +0000

I must apologise for the outages of my various Blogs over the weekend. This was two fold.

Firstly, this was due to upgrades. Second was resolving the time synchronisation problems that have plagued me for a while.

The upgrades were to update many of the plug-ins used, and to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress (3.0).

The next [...]