Weather station Prologue IW006-DCF (Clas Ohlson 36-5364)

Well... on this one. Let's start with the good.

Advantages:

• Very nice weather station with color display that does not need Internet to show the weather! Everything else I found wanted to show me some nice pictures, temperature and forecast from some weather service. I can easily use my 3 years old tablet for this, if I wanted.
• Indoors and outdoors temperature and humidity readings. It has wireless remote sensor that pair with the station without any problems.
• Constantly lighted large screen where the time numbers are the largest - yes that is what I want!
• Radio time synchronization - it has the most stable synchronization from all of my clocks with such feature.
• Battery backup.
• Pressure sensor with some sort of forecast.

Disadvantages:

Eaton 3S 550 and Raspberry Pi

Briefly about the setup: Eaton 3S 550 powers a constantly running Raspberry Pi (RPi), wireless router, ADSL modem, cordless phone, wireless energy monitor (Eliq) and home automation device (Tellstick Net). All in all they are 10% of the UPS capacity which gives me about 30 minutes safety window before the RPi will shut down (shut down is triggered when battery is below 20%).

The Raspberry is running latest Raspbian and monitors the UPS using Network UPS Tools (NUT) which can power off the computer, send notifications etc. I have set up script to log the events and get an SMS on power failures (using Android phone and SMS Gateway).

Below is a screenshot from the NUT monitor GUI and results from a test run of the setup. I have manually started a bash script to collect the battery status by pooling every 15 seconds with "upsc eaton3s@localhost | grep battery.charge:"

Tellstick Duo revisited

For one or another reason I have replaced/upgraded my first Raspberry Pi (RPi) /256MB RAM/ with the latest RPi2 - the advantages are kind of obvious. I used to run the old telldus-core and now it was perfect time to upgrade it and rewrite my programs written in python with bash script using the new features in telldus-core-2.1.2.

I have tried before but failed with the device recognition and lost my patience to find the cause for the problem i.e. missing controller configuration - here is the solution.

There is really nice way to compile everything in a very clean way: instructions written in Swedish (perhaps here as well ). I got tempted to try the GUI suggested there but the repository was 5 years old which was clear NO to me.

Anyway, before I had python program running as a daemon to log selected device events and automate different switches + poor man's security monitoring solution. The only reason I was using python is to catch device and sensors triggered interrupts.

Universal thermostat CE UT-200

There is not much to write about it. It is an digital thermostat that one can easily use to maintain temperature below or above certain value. Conveniently enough, depending on the "on" and "off" setting you can set the thermostat in heating or cooling mode.

We have small room attached to the house that is not centrally heated and during the winter gets easily quite cold. We use it as gym, so maintaining a temperature around 5 degree seems reasonable enough (one can easily heat it better but of course it reflects on the electricity bill). I have hooked a regular 700W passive heating element that has its own digital thermostat, but that one is only regulating the temperature of the element.

I have Raspberry Pi that receives the temperature readings from outside and the room and in principle I can just use a regular remote switch that could be controlled by the computer. Except, that my philosophy is that I want to have a centralized system that controls the stuff around the house, but I want it to be also autonomous. I have the network version of the home automation module (Tellstick NET) and on couple of occasions when the internet connection was lost things could have got confused... Luckily, the local version (Tellstick Duo) is running independently. Unfortunately this one is also prone to failures, despite that it is running backed by UPS. So here is how I ended buying the thermostat.

Here are two graphs from the monitored temperature in the room (green line) and outdoors (red line), just to illustrate how well it works. The thermostat is set to switch on the heating below 4.5 and switch it off again above 5 degree Celsius.

Since it works as expected, I just need to mention the single disadvantage - it speaks German ;-)

Raspberry Pi 2: tigervnc - the easy way

For a long time I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi (RPi) as a VNC client to my linux machines. The first RPi was a bit too slow for all the tests I have done, so I simply gave up on it.

With the new version, I thought this might work... Unfortunately, the VNC clients packed with the Raspbian image repositories are performing poorly, with one exception - ssvnc (after some tweaking), but the programs last update was in 2011... and I want to change F8 to something else...

Then, here is the long story short.

I remembered that Thinlinc is using TigerVNC in their product and they have ARMv7 hard-fload version on their download page: https://www.cendio.com/thinlinc/download . I have downloaded the Linux Dynamic package for this purpose. After extracting the package, one simply needs to run this binary:


tl-4.3.0-4538-client-linux-dynamic-armhf/lib/tlclient/vncviewer

Enjoy!
Thanks to the ThinLinc team.

Update 2015.03.27: RealVNC binaries for Raspberry PI can be downloaded from the software developer's page http://www.realvnc.com/download/viewer/

WiFog: what is worth for

Briefly on the service  http://wifog.com/

the company offers free mobile Internet and some free time calls within Sweden to any phone, in exchange of watching commercials. It is difficult to argue about what you get since is sort of free, but here is my experience with the service that could give you more on what to expect and is it really worth it.

• Yes, it fits perfectly on my old spare Android phone.
• No, you cant use it as replacement to your main phone.

D-Link DCS-935L: first impression

Well, I had ideas of utilizing some of my old stuff as wireless camera like Raspberry Pi (RPi) with an USB camera and WiFi. Or an old Eee PC netbook. The problem with the Eee PC was that is old, slow and a bit noisy. The RPi is also slow, with plenty of cables etc... An old Android phone comes closer for the purpose but... all would have had the very same problem - no real use in dark conditions.

So, I decided to buy a wireless web camera - something with decent resolution and hopefully with motion detection option.

The cheapest that have these specs (and I can easily buy) came to D-Link DCS-935L Home Monitor HD.

And straight to the good and bad of the camera.