Solar Panels Installed!

Here is this final product - a Sunny Boy inverter and 16 230W Sharp panels. Installation took only 1 1/2 days. It's all ready to go, just waiting on the utility to swap out the meter and for the city inspector.

ChromeOS on Acer Aspire Netbook

Just tried out this build of ChromeOS. It boots fast, but doesn't work well with my netbook. The trackpad barely tracks and the tap to click trackpad feature doesn't work. ChromeOS really is just the web, but I need Remote Desktop to access my servers. I see no reason why ChromeOS can't have an RDP client - my Nokia N800 does. I liked Jolicloud on the netbook better, as it's really more of an OS than ChromeOS.

New NAS

I just bought a DLink DNS-321 NAS. I'm hoping to use this for SageTV recordings, which are currently stored on the media server. I want to do this since I hibernate the SageTV server a lot, but would like the recordings available.

I'm going to be evaluating whether or not I can dump 4 HDHomerun streams to it while playing from 2 HD200s. I'm guessing no, but it's going to be an interesting experiment. While I was copying the existing recordings over, the maximum bandwidth I was able to achieve was 100 Mbps over gigabit links. An existing 1 hour HD recording took 5.5 GB, so that's about 12.5 Mbps. Four streams would be half of the maximum bandwidth I've seen and that doesn't include playback. If it doesn't work out, I play on using it for backups.

Dog Feeder Demo

There was a recent thread on Cocoontech about pet related automation and this is a rehash of my post there about our automated pet feeder. Here's a snippet from a screencast I did that demo'd some parts of our HA system. This clip shows the automated dog feeder and how it's controlled from our GUI, including calling our dog over using TTS and watching the result via a camera popup. (The TTS audio is dubbed in for effect - it's what was pushed out of the garage MP3 player to the backyard speakers.)

Jab2Twit - IM your Tweets

I've just released Jab2Twit, a small app that shows up in your chat client friends list, and lets you IM your tweets. Read more and get it here.

A GUI Scripting Engine

This is very cool. Sikuli is a scripting engine that allows you to automate almost any interaction with a GUI. It can find visual elements on your screen given screen captures of what you're looking for.

iPad Thoughts

I don't use Apple products, but I was interested in their iPad announcement as I'm eagerly waiting for cheap tablets to use as home automation control panels. I have to admit, the $500 starting price is a lot lower than I expected, but I don't think they really had any choice. CES was filled with so many cheap tablets that Apple didn't have much pricing room, even with the Apple premium. The low iPad price should mean a very competitive tablet market. I'm hoping for some $200ish tablets in the near future.

In the meantime, I haven't done much HA work lately. I tend to do stuff in spurts and this is one of those idle periods.

xPLWav Enables Remote Controlled WAV Playing

I've released another app, xPLWav, which allows you to make a remote computer play a WAV file. I'm using this in combination with our Noise app to automatically scold our dog when he's barking and we're not home :) This app is necessary since the closet PC to where our dog usually barks (and where Noise is installed) is not the HA server. To do this, I've recorded WAV files of us saying corrections ("Quiet!", "Stop that!", etc.) and upon a short period of no noise, an automatic praise is played ("Good dog!", etc.) So far it's working. Anyway, give it a try.

Noise 1.1 A Complete Rewrite

I wasn't really happy with the XAML based GUI of my original Noise app. It required .NET 3.5 which limited what machines it could run on. I didn't like the configuration method I chose either. So, I completely rewrote it. Same link as before.

Using Google Visualization API for Power Monitoring

I just started playing around with the Visualization API today and it's pretty cool. Here's a short screencast I just did showing real-time power usage from our Brultech ECM-1240 power monitor. Every second, data from the ECM-1240 is stored in MySQL. The gauges are in a simple HTML page with a little AJAX to fetch the power data each second from MySQL. The API takes care of the graphics and updating them.

xPLGPix connects xPL to Google's Picasa Web Albums

Continuing with my Google tangent, I've just created a new app called xPLGPix. If you send it an xPL message specifying an album and JPG file, it will upload the picture to the specified album on Google's Picasa. You can read more about it here. I've tested it just a little, so it may be a little rough around the edges.

xPLGSheet: An xPL interface to Google Doc Spreadsheets

I'm welcoming in 2010 with a new app called xPLGSheet. It allows you to query and edit a GDocs spreadsheet using xPL messages. Aside from the typical use of automated updates of a database, this app opens up possibilities of syncing remote systems via a shared spreadsheet. For more, go here.