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…
Category: Computers
Monitoring a Growatt PV inverter over WiFi using Python
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…
Bluetooth Low Energy Lock using a LightBlue Bean – Part 3 – iOS Code
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…
Bluetooth Low Energy Lock using a LightBlue Bean – Part 2 – Arduino Code
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….
Bluetooth Low Energy Lock using a LightBlue Bean – Part 1 – The Hardware
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…
My NBN Predictions
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,…
And we’re back…
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* –…
Service Information
Last week I migrated to a different server at my hosting provider in order to get access to some additional features. Unfortunately this had a serious impact on the performance of this site. After talking to GoDaddy support last night they were able to migrate me again, but this time to a newer hosting farm…
Reformatting a FAT32 drive to HFS+ – Never trust a GUI
I bought an external drive for a relative to use with Time Machine. Of course it cam pre-formatted as FAT32 and while this would work it wouldn’t give the best performance, so I wanted to reformat it as HFS+. I fired up Disk Utility, selected Journaled file system and click erase…and error. A bit of…
So much spin I’m getting dizzy
This is kind of old news now, but I have been too busy to post in the last week or so. The chaser “invasion” of the APEC security zone was funny but also extremely alarming. The authorities applied “spin” to the issue, claiming that the security worked as the Chaser boys were arrested and that…