Fresh Stuff Occasionally
PV Watch for Apple Watch displays energy and power generation from PVOutput.org in a watch complication and in a watch app. The Apple Watch has a relatively small display. I needed the app to display power and energy measurements ranging from a few Watts (when the sun has almost set) through to mega Watt hours…
After monitoring my solar inverter for over a year now, I have had a couple of instances where the daily energy graphs went a bit strange. It turns out that the inverter’s internal clock will occasionally drift by several hours. This causes the daily energy production figure to reset at a time other than midnight. Setting the…
I recently had a 5kW solar array installed and it came with a Growatt 5000MTL inverter. This inverter is installed in my garage and comes with RS232 and RS485 ports for monitoring. I wanted to connect to PVOutput.org to publish my system’s production. I found a Python script that could do the job on sisand.dk but it needed…
How many mince pies have you eaten this festive season? Keep track of this vital statistic with this easy to use app! Share your current mince pie tally with your friends on Twitter, Facebook or via email. Includes a “Today” extension so that you can see your current pie count with a simple swipe of…
In part 1 I described the hardware for this project and how to connect it. In part 2 I described the Arduino code that runs in the LightBlue Bean. In the final articles we will take a look at the iOS code for a simple application that triggers the lock. Due to the size of…
In Part 1 I described the hardware for this project and how to connect it. In this part I will describe the Arduino code that runs in the LightBlue Bean. Punch Through Design, the creators of the LightBlue Bean, provide a library that provides integration between the Arduino and the other hardware on the Bean….
This is the first of three articles that will describe how to create a Bluetooth enabled electronic lock. Technically it isn’t actually a lock, but rather a relay that could be used to operate a lock or other device such as a garage door opener. Before we go any further, let me say that this…
Just before the election I made my NBN predictions. Less than two weeks after the election there is some speculation that my 5% chance option 1 – continue with FTTP – may happen. Although I didn’t include the use of fibre-to-the-basement (FTTB) as an option for apartments and other MDUs such as shopping centres in…
It seems almost certain that in about 15 days we will have a new coalition government. Broadly speaking their NBN policy is a switch from FTTH to FTTN. Much has been written about why FTTN is inferior to FTTH and why, given the state of the copper and the likely lifetime of an FTTN solution,…
I have built a new OS image for the weather station Raspberry Pi and reinstalled WView, so the weather pages are back up. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to recover the new HTML template I made, so it is back to the standard page for the moment, until I can recreate it. *NOTE TO SELF* –…
