As I mentioned the other day, I have Funky v3 PCBs waiting to be populated/tested. I did finally have some time to do that, here is how they look: I plan to use this particular one to run tests, so…
Funky v3 PCB populated
OLED status display on the RFM2Pi board
I added a 6 pin port on the RFM2Pi board that can be used for a number of applications. The port has GND, D3, D7, D6 and VCC routed, and by no coincidence matches perfectly the pinout of the Digole…
Funky v3
I have made a major reshuffling of the Funky v2, added 8 more pins to the side headers while keeping the form factor. I had to go for ‘pads’ instead of through-hole to make this possible: The newly…
Yet another power monitor
I seem to be doing power monitoring projects a lot, started with this one, then moved on to this, then this and now I am again putting up a power monitor.. This particular will be using a small transformer with…
Analysis of electricity usage per year
I started collecting electricity usage data in April 2012, and wanted to check how am I doing this year compared to last year. Of course, as of today, only few months overlap (May-August), but still that will give me some idea…
Thoughts on AVR ADC accuracy
I was thinking about the accuracy of the battery measurements the other day, are these accurate or not? I measured the battery using Fluke 27 multimeter and compared that to the readout using the internal bangap method and found a small difference.…
emoncms base-station with SD card based .ini file configuration
I have been tinkering for some time now on creating a pure hardware, highly reliable emoncms base-station solution that isn’t pain in the rear to set-up. The current approach is to use a NanodeRF, but that requires re-programming the unit with…
CR2032 battery discharge pattern
The Funky v1 + DS18B20 room temperature monitoring project that I installed in our living room on October 31st 2012 has stopped sending. This actually happened few days ago (Aug 10th 2013), but I just noticed it today while checking…
Clapping to control RF power sockets
I did a fun experiment this evening, clap controlling RF power sockets using Funky v2‘s radio module and a sound sensor breakout module. The latter is pretty cheap one, respectively low quality and performance: It has couple outputs: analog…
Raspberry Pi kernel with Frame Buffer TFT support
The 1.8″ TFT display that I use with my Raspberry Pi is really fun, but setting the kernel to work with it was a nightmare. Not any more thanks to the work of @notro. With the following instructions, you can…
Door sensor
I have recently purchased a magnetic contact switch to toy with. These are really cheap sensors that are used to detect door (or window) opening/closing events. The principle of work is simple, the sensor consists of two parts: one is…
Domestic hot water for free
Tricky blog post title, mostly true, but as you know there is no such thing as free lunch 😉 Anyway, those of you following my blog know that I have a Daikin air-to-air heat pump hacked into air-to-water solution for…
Rock-solid RFM2Pi gateway solution
I have had a good share of frustration with damaging Raspberry Pi SD cards due to wearing out/improper shut downs as a result from power failures and was looking for solution to this sort of problems for a while. At first…
Raspberry Pi root file system in read-only mode
I have found my Raspberry Pi running the root file system off a USB flash drive in no good state this morning, the following error showing up on emoncms that was installed locally: Can’t connect to database, please verify credentials/configuration in…
Every μA counts
When you run a project on battery, you are always thinking on how to conserve power so that you run longer. In the case of wireless remote nodes you do that by sleeping a lot and only waking up briefly to…