Sparkblocks are a text-only version of the sparkline charts, using just unicode symbols. These are a convenient way to represent trends in pure text, quite useful when you want to use SMS, tweets or even the subject line of an…
My house is second to the power supply transformer and I have been observing some pretty high AC voltage levels. I previously had a really cheap multimeter and thought that the readings are off because of its bad quality. Never…
A local forum guy asked me to help him setup a system that logs his solar hot water tank and few other temperatures. The thing is he wasn’t sure how many temperature sensors he’d use and wanted to expand as…
One of the goodies of home automation is that you can actually turn appliances on and off based on some pre-defined conditions or via the Internet. Typically that task will require setting up a relay or multiple relays and hooking…
I have installed the first sensing shield on an Arduino Uno near my house’s breakers box. I finally got a 9V AC/AC transformer so I wanted to monitor my voltage, power factor and effective power usage in my house. I…
I have successfully managed to get my Arduino Ethernet board based on WizNet5100 chip to work with the Sensing Shield‘s RFM12B. The Arduino Ethenet (don’t mix it with an Arduino Ethernet shield, this one is a complete Arduino+Ethertnet on one board)…
The sensing shield PCB is ready, I placed some of the components already and am testing it. Looks good so far 🙂
Few weeks ago I decided to teach myself Eagle PCB so I can put my current spaghetti-style solution for heat pump monitoring to some order. That’s just an excuse of course, I was curious how laying out a new PCB works to…