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Monthly Archives: February 2012

Monitoring energy consumption with a Current Cost Envi-R – Coming Soon

Posted by on February 27, 2012 No comments
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On saturday, I took delivery of a Current Cost Envi-R purchased on ebay. I have had a few problems with what appears to be a dodgy current clamp transmitter, but thanks to the loan of one from a friend, this has been resolved. All being well, I will write some code over the next few days to capture the XML output from the serial port, store this in a round robin database and output some pretty graphs to this site. Watch this space… Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Tweet about …

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Monitoring temperatures using FHEM, RRDTool, PHP & JavaScript

Posted by on February 24, 2012 No comments

My Household Temperature Graphs page displays various statistics from my heating system. In this post, I intend to describe a little more about how I get the details I do and what I do with them. The heating system is based on a number of these Conrad FHT 80 BTFN sets. The programmer controls the actuator via 868Mhz RF and the signal is received by an FHT 1300 PC. The RF received is interpreted by FHEM and it is this system that I query using my code. The following script is started on the FHEM server every five minutes using …

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Household Temperature Graphs Updated

Posted by on February 21, 2012 No comments

I have updated the page showing my household temperature graphs. Previously I was logging data to the cloud using Pachube and while this works well, the tools available for graphing the information are not great. As the number of readings increased, the tools I was using to render the graphs became slower and slower. What’s more the graphs used flash which wasn’t particularly helpful if I wanted to view the graphs on my iPad. I have now reverted to some home brew data logging using RRDTool. Data is stored in a Round Robin Database and then rendered using some more …

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Netflix UK on Wii – Quick Review

Posted by on February 15, 2012 No comments
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I’ve recently taken a free trial from Netflix UK with the intention of evaluating it as a replacement for Sky Movies.  I have a couple of devices I can play it on, but last night I chose to try it on my Wii console (because I couldn’t be bothered to connect my laptop to the TV).  I am thinking it is time to shift my TV to Virgin Media (due to my flaky Sky+HD box) and VM want a wallet busting £30 per month for the Sky Movies Collection. If new movies are what you are looking for, then Netflix …

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