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.