cpmills.com

Western Digital TV Live – Unboxing and Setup

Chris — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:59:28 +0000

On Saturday I purchased a Western Digital TV Live from my local Currys/PC World. I wouldn’t normally advocate buying anything from there, but it is currently on offer at £76 making the price very reasonable indeed. Link here if you are interested… I have included a gallery showing the unboxing and initial set-up below. First impressions are that it works really well. It seems to play everything I throw at it and effortlessly passes Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS out of the Optical Audio jack for my amp to decode. Since the device itself doesn’t have an internal hard …

Node 0

Chris — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 22:52:02 +0000

I spent a couple of hours in the loft at the weekend mounting my rack mount server (at last) and tidying up some cables. I thought this might be a good opportunity to talk a little about my ‘Node 0′. Located in the loft I have a 12U wall mounted rack. In this rack I have a 24 way patch panel, mostly unpopulated at the moment but the intention is to provide at least two CAT5e ports in each room in the house. Below that is a cable management panel followed by a 24-port ZyXel 2024-PWR 10/100 POE switch. This …

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

Chris — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:45:54 +0000

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…

Monitoring temperatures using FHEM, RRDTool, PHP & JavaScript

Chris — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:11:05 +0000

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 …

Household Temperature Graphs Updated

Chris — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:05:49 +0000

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 …

Netflix UK on Wii – Quick Review

Chris — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:52:44 +0000

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 …

Fourth LightwaveRF Dimmer and Good News on LEDs

Chris — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:47:47 +0000

I have just fitted my fourth Lightwave RF dimmer. This time in the living room and on the same fitting as the one I have recently replaced with LED lamps. The dimmer works fine as I would expect and is actually much better than the home easy dimmer it replaced. The LED lamps dim much lower than they did with the home easy dimmer. I recently robbed an LED out of the fitting to demo it to a friend, while I was fiddling, I put this LED back in. The even better news is that the Lightwave RF Dimmer was …

Update on hammering TRV – 2

Chris — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:10:22 +0000

I spent some time yesterday clearing my garage a bit. While doing so, I found the original head to the new TRV I’ve had fitted to my bedroom radiator. Previous visitors will be aware from here and here that the TRV was sounding like a jack hammer. My plumber thinks this is due to the radio controlled actuators I have fitted. The following video proves this isn’t the case as it does exactly the same with the original head on it. Sorry I filmed it with my iPhone in portrait mode! It looks to me like it is definitely a …

DemoPad controlling LightwaveRF

Chris — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:22:31 +0000

Its the wee small hours and I really should be in bed but I have just installed DemoPad on my iPhone (and iPad) and been playing with trying to get it to control my LightwaveRF installation. It works! What I needed to do was find out the actual IP address of my LightwaveRF WiFi Link (because DemoPad doesn’t currently support UDP broadcasts) and I had to run DemoPad on a device already authorised by the WiFi link (i.e my iPhone rather than iPad). I added a couple of simple buttons to the screen, configured them to send the correct UDP …

New telephone system

Chris — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:52:51 +0000

I now have a full Voice Over IP setup at home that I am happy with. I will blog technical details later, but I wanted to put something up about what I have. At the core of the system is a Trixbox virtual machine running on my VMWare VSphere server in the loft. I currently have four handsets connected to this. A Grandstream GXP2000 Enterprise IP Phone upstairs which is connected to a Power Over Ethernet switch, one downstairs (connected via the wireless network) a bog standard analog handset connected to a SIP ATA (more about that in a sec) …