HP Color LaserJet MFP M277dw - first impressions

Here we are. I got tired of buying ink for my MFP InkJet printer to find it dried out or unusable some time later. So, went for Laser printer - HP Color LaserJet MFP M277dw.

What I was looking for:

• Low cost per page for infrequent use - mostly BW. Speed is not critical.
• Multi-Function Printer (MFP) i.e. printing and scanning, preferably with Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), I don't care about FAX
• Wireless connection
• Easy menu operations - preferable with some not that minimalistic screen
• Scan to USB - this one I find very handy
• Duplex printing - desirable

Renault Clio III 1.2 TCE100 SportTourer - 5 years later

I just decided to summarize the experience with the car and perhaps to revisit my first impression observations. I will mention the positives and negatives with the car in random order with some sort of comments about the seriousness of the issues.

In general, the car is reflects the purchase price in the positive context. The interior is rather simple with no fancy lights or smart devices - just fine with me. More importantly, the coupe is spacious for the size of the car. The back seats are a bit shorter to save space but comfortable enough. The model was equipped with computer controlled AC which is really good option. I have to admit immediately, that it maintains perfectly the temperature in the front seats but is a bit weak, on both, heating and cooling on the back seats. The engine has low momentum turbo that gives the cat about 100 HP but it feels that it is a bit weak for the weight of the car. Despite that, it has wide acceleration span. At  110 km/h on 5th gear the engine runs at 2500 rpms and usually has enough power to accelerate. Distinct exceptions are uphill roads, where you start asking yourself "Where the 100 horses go"?

Using the AC actually feels on the engine - I can distinctly feel when it couples to the engine and some torque is lost. This actually makes the car a bit more fuel efficient during the winter, despite the dubbed winter tires.

The car is most fuel-efficient at about 90 km/h where the consumption is about 5.7 l/100 km. On the highway (110-120 km/h) it spikes to between 6.2-6.4 l/100 km. It is about the same downtown.

Problems that are worth mentioning

• Well, changing the front light is one hell of an experience!
• Some time it is a problems to start engine, so far it seems that this occurs more frequent when the car is parked downhill...
• The wiper arms can not be lifted upfront, which is not practical at all during winter and when changing the wiper blades itself.
• The balance of the car is a bit... if you lift the front wheel at the designed jack point, you will be lifting the back tire noticeable as well.
• The engine compartment is stuffed completely, which suggests rather difficult access to anything.
• The water drain holes between the engine and the windshield are easily stuck with dirt and difficult to clean - something I have read in other places as well.
• The door frames are covering the plastic sealing which perhaps works perfectly in the hot sunny weather to protect them from the sun, but it is complete nonsense in snowy winters. Regardless how well you clean the snow, when you open the door you will get plenty of snow right on the seat.
• Changing the light bulbs on the back are not the easiest as well. It takes some courage the first time to pull the plastic body from the car body.
• The lock mechanism on the petrol hatch got stuck, fortunately at open position. If you are unfortunate, try to reach the are from inside the trunk - there is a way to pull it manually.

GY-MCU90614-BCC Serial IR Non-contact Module: Python code

It seems that this variant of the module, with serial interface, is not that popular or at least I could not find code that I can easily port to Raspberry Pi. One can find a Windows program that prints the values from the serial port but that is all.

Anyway, I found description of the protocol on several pages, and it looked doable. Later, I found an Arduino example code, which could have helped, but...  I start programming before I had the module, which explains the reason why I first convert the characters to hex and then decode... This way is easier to debug it... So, here is the Python code (at the end of the post) that tests the checksum, decodes and prints the values to the standard output. (by the way, I still do not know how to get negative values for the temperature...)

Example output:

$ ./IRserial.py
TO: 21.36   TA: 24.04
TO: 21.36   TA: 24.04
TO: 21.36   TA: 24.04
TO: 21.57   TA: 24.04
TO: 21.57   TA: 24.04
TO: 21.57   TA: 24.04
TO: 21.57   TA: 24.08
TO: 21.57   TA: 24.08
TO: 21.57   TA: 24.08

BroadLink SP3 SPcc Contros Mini WiFi Smart Home Socket

Ok, this guy has enough reviews and videos on the Net and pretty much all of them are positive.
And these are my few lines of wisdom on the subject.

Pros:

• Good build quality, size, look, and feel.
• Relatively easy to configure and upgrade the firmware with the Android app.
• Two-way communication - you get the current state of the switch even after manual toggle.
• Fast to connect to WiFi and with good range.
• The Android app is good enough and has CloudBackup/Sync, so one can easily clone the setup on multiple devices.

Cons:

• Lack of official support for desktop platforms, more importantly - Linux.
  I have found an alternative solution to this, read more below
• The device will be alive as long as BroadLink's servers run as every proprietary protocol. 

LTS-86 Kitchen Bathroom Faucet Water Filter 2 Pcs Ceramic Cartridge Tap Water Purifier

Here we go again...

Some three months ago I bought "LTS-86 Kitchen Bathroom Faucet Water Filter 2 Pcs Ceramic Cartridge Tap Water Purifier" with the Lettoos barnd on it from Banggood.

Just to be clear - it is not Banggood's fault.

Anyway, the reason I post here is the same. Last time I wrote a negative review on the product page, Banggood did not publish it or acknowledge at all. No further comments - just letting you know what you are buying.

OK, so it was time to check what is inside. I will not use pictures from the product page, since they can be proprietary and will upload only my own pictures.

Svensk Bilvård i Uppsala, Karoj Invest AB - personal experience

I will use my blog to publish my experience from "Svensk Bilvård i Uppsala, Karoj Invest AB".

Discalmer:

• This post does not contains comments from the author and does not take any particular side. 
• Only facts that can be proven (official documents or physical evidences) are presented.
• This post describes my personal experience and at no point tries to generalize it.

Background of the story
Some time in April 2016, I needed to service the car (the model is irrelevant in this situation) - change of engine oil, oil filter, air filter, spark plugs, coupe filter etc. Using the Lasingoo.se search service, I got reasonable price, from certified car workshop.

Reading this, I got the impression that "Autoexperten Uppsala" is the service in question or at least it is what most of the information suggests i.e. that I will be served by Autoexperten car workshop. Note the small detail in gray "Fristående verkstad".

The service was done, I got one year free road assistance insurance "Assistansförsäkring 12 månader" as part of the package and everything was almost perfect - I found that the air filter was not properly fit, but this was too small problem to complain about.

The aftermath
Some 7 months later (early November, same year), the car got problems during acceleration - kind of hick ups. Essentially, it was very difficult to accelerate rapidly, but without problems while cruising or accelerating with cold engine. The car has 5 years warranty, so we booked time to fix the problem with the authorized car repair shop (the name will remain unmentioned for now). They found that the spark plugs were worn out and one was actually gone, but more importantly - the wrong type! Needles to say, I asked for the old ones as evidence.

rtl_433: simple daemon and tools

Last time I wrote about simple awk script that prints the latest values collected from rtl_433 application. I was pretty much satisfied with this "quick and dirty" solution until recently, when I needed to use the data from two different projects...
Right. It is time for simple daemon solution that will collect the data in format that makes it easy to be used from different clients. And here is my code:


#!/usr/bin/awk -f
BEGIN{
  FS=","
  cmd="rtl_433 -F csv -q -p 24 2> /dev/null"

  # Get csv column labels and count
  cmd | getline; csvNF= NF;  header=$0;

  while( cmd | getline){
    if (NF==csvNF){

      if ($2=="Proove") sensor=$3+$14
      else sensor=$3$4

      fn= "/dev/shm/rtl_"sensor
      print $0 > fn; close(fn);

      if (($5!="OK") && ($5!="")) {
        fn= "/dev/shm/rtl-BAT"
        print $0 >> fn; close(fn);
      }
    }
  }
}

Synology DS216j + DSM6.0 - first impression

Finally! I bought myself a NAS.

How, did I end up with it since I consider 2-bay NAS as pointless exercise? (I thing that RAID0 is just looking for trouble and RAID1 is too inefficient with respect to provided redundant storage)

So, I was looking for something that is at least 4-bay version (so I can use RAID5 on it)... and they are, of course, considerably more expensive. Looking around, how things change with time, I got the impression that 4 years later I will not want to keep the current hardware since it will be completely outdated. So it will be waste of money to use proper NAS for simple storage + some extra features (I do not mind to have some "Dropbox-like" feature, media center etc.. ) needs[1].

Then again, after long revision of the budget and my needs, I decided to go with 1-bay solution!?! 

Unfortunately, the reviews on the Net for the available 1-bay hardware I found, ware just too disappointing to bare with. And this is how I ended up with using the 2-bay DS216j with single disk.

NITECORE Digicharger D4 LCD Display Universal Smart Charger

Ok, let me have my say about this battery charger. Pretty much all reviews are more than positive and yes - it is a good charger (with some concerns). But is it really "the most advanced" charger as it states in its own manual?

Let me start with the overwhelming advantages:

• It charges almost any usual battery on the market (I will exclude NiZn batteries since they are rather unusual anyway), just to mention them: Li-ion / IMR / LiFePO4: 26650, 22650, 18650, 17670, 18490, 17500, 18350, 16340 (RCR123), 14500, 10440, Ni-MH / Ni-Cd: AA, AAA, AAAA, C.
• Independent slots - monitors and charges independently (but only 2 charging circuits, see further below)
• Battery type is automatically detected + different charge modes (Constant Current (CC), Constant Voltage (CV), -dV/dt).
• Low current charging mode for small capacity batteries (that is what convinced me to buy it)
• Attempts to charge fully discharged batteries.
• Hard time limit to charge - max 20 hours per battery - then it supposed to stop.
• Option to use 12V adapter.

At that point, it is pretty convincing that we are talking about rather decent battery charger. But here is what I think it is missing (or I am missing compared to some older chargers I have mentioned before IPC-1 and CM-410).

rtl_433: simple text monitoring panel

There is this really nice rtl_433 "application using librtlsdr to decode the temperature from a wireless temperature sensor (433.92MHz)"  https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433 which does exactly what is says. 

I just thought that I can write a simple script that will keep showing only the latest decoded data.
As one can see in the example output, further below, some of the sensors sends the data 3 times and if you have couple of them the data starts to get a bit difficult to read. With a small awk script (tailored for my needs) I can get this simple output that contains only the interesting data and few colors to prettify it:

===================================================================================
|        Time         |               Name             |  ID  |  Temp |   %  | Bat
===================================================================================
| 2016-03-07 10:26:19 | Gym - WT450                    |   61 |   5.4 |  84% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:26:13 | Outdoor - Nexus                |   92 |   1.5 |  90% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:51 | Indoor  - WT450                |  131 |  20.1 |  27% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:45 | Outdoor - WT450                |  151 |   2.0 |  94% | OK
| 2016-03-07 10:25:37 | Ventilation - Nexus            | 1281 |  17.8 |   0% | OK
===================================================================================

BTY AAA1350, rechargeable NiMH batteries - first and last impression

Right, since they were not that expensive, I somehow did not make the effort to search on the net for reviews, so I ended up with a pack of BTY AAA1350 rechargeable batteries. From the packaging, they went straight in the charger for evaluation - first discharge with 100 mA, then fully charging them with 200 mA current.

The results are more than disappointing. I should have run the TEST mode of the charger, which should have reported the capacity upon discharge, but this value is usually less that the value during the charging. Anyway the numbers are so bad that this does not matter. One battery stores 78 mAh which essentially means it is completely death. The other three were about 270 mAh which actually fits the reports from other discussions on the net.

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.

ELIQ Energy Online: first impressions

Since we moved in a house, the electricity bill became something unpleasant that appears to worsen during the winter... The electricity company we have signed with, does not provide any detailed information about the consumption (except of a printed graph with the bill for the monthly consumption compared to the previous year) and the uncertainty to plan is a bit too sour to my inexperienced taste... Brief search on the NET brought me to the device I am using right now: ELIQ Online


Brief info about the product:
There is a wireless sensor that one can easily attach to the blinking LED on the energy meter.
The receiver needs to be connected to power and to your router to access Internet. The receiver collects the data and uploads it to a dedicated server. You need to create an account to access the collected data from your device. The provider is localized for Sweden (with interface in English and Swedish), that is suitable for the local market. The best price for the product I found at Kjell&Company.
If you provide more information for your household, you can get detailed comparison to similar households in 6 minutes and 1 day resolution interval.

NFC tags - are they really worth it?

Let me say this immediately - I really like the idea. And how it works...  ...almost...

So, recently I got Nexus 5 replacement for my old Android phone and it comes with NFC capabilities. I thought that this is great idea and almost immediately bought four NFC stickers to play with. And everything was so exciting until I realized that to read the NFC tag the phone needs to be screen-unlocked. I do understand the reasons behind this restriction but it essentially renders my NFC solution worthless since if I have may screen on (most probably just unlocked because I want to read a tag) I am just one click away from a Tasker icon that can start whatever I want...