Solar Array Powered Up and Some Graphs

The installer powered on the solar array on Tuesday after the inspection. After he left, I installed current sensors for the solar breakers and ran those along Cat-5 back to the ECM-1240. I was debugging the charting and got it pretty much sorted out by Wednesday night. Here's the first few RRDTool graphs from Thursday.


You can see it generated nearly 21 kWH yesterday. I'm really happy with that as we typically use 22-25 kWH/day. I didn't expect to get that much production in March. Does this mean the assumptions I made in my Solar Spreadsheet may have been a little pessimistic? There's still a lot of rain & overcast in March (of which we're seeing today), so it will probably average out. We'll have to wait for April to get a good full month to compare.


With a southeast facing roof, you can see we catch the morning sun very early. The array woke up around 6:22AM and peaked around 11AM. Once the sun passed over the top of the roof around noon, production started to drop and around 2PM it started to decline rapidly. By then, it produced about 80% of the total for the day. I wish I had room on the west facing roof to catch the afternoon sun, but it would only fit maybe 4 panels - good for another 1kW. Maybe when we get an EV ;) Production stopped almost exactly at 6PM. You can see some of the spikes in production as the sun was behind some clouds.


This is just a net usage graph. Solar production for the day caught up to our daily usage by noon. Between 3-4PM, production fell below our usage and about 9PM, all our credits were used up. For yesterday, we basically paid the utility for electricity for the 3 hours from 9PM-12AM. Pretty cool.

xPLWebControl Released

I released an xPL interface for CAI's WebControl. The app communicates with the WebControl via its web interface since it has no other means of control. You can read more about it and download it here.

New Toy: CAI WebControl and Random Updates

So I finally broke down a bought a WebControl device. It's a network enabled IO device that's been discussed heavily at CT and HS message boards. I got it from this seller on eBay. I'm surprised it actually powers on. It was shipped in a USPS Flat Rate Priority envelope. The device itself was in a small bubble pack pouch - just a single layer of bubble pack to protect the sharp corners of the device's components. The corners of the ethernet jack poked through the bubble pack, puncturing the envelope in several places. For $8.71 in shipping, is it too much to ask for 2 or 3 layers of bubble pack????

Anyway, I powered it on, assigned it a static IP address and new login info, but didn't get much further than that. I hope to test out the digital IO and 1-Wire interface this weekend before I'll believe it's undamaged. I have no idea what I'm going to use it for. I am planning on building an xPL app to interface to it, but I'm not in any big hurry. Still feeling a bit burned out on HA.

It's been 10 days since the solar installation was completed and I haven't heard from the city about inspections nor has the utility swapped out my meter. It was frustrating waiting nearly 4 months from signing the contract to the installation (due to weather & backlog), but this is even more frustrating because I just want to flip the switch!

This week I did update xPLTweet and Jab2Twit to use OAUTH for Twitter authentication. That way there's no stored username & password and has the added benefit of my apps showing up as sources for tweets :)

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.