Wetness Sensors

I jumped in and picked up a bunch of wetness sensors mentioned here. I'll be using them under sinks, behind toilets, under the water heater and the AC drip pan. These will work great with the eternal DS10A deal.

Haven't had much time for automation the last few weeks. I am experiencing major X10 noise problems for the first time. Three different light switches upstairs are intermittently controllable and one turns on by itself. I spent an hour unplugging just about everything in the house, but no luck. I tried changing house and unit codes too. It's very odd as everything was working great 3 weeks ago but I haven't plugged in anything new. Sometimes, device power supplies will all of a sudden start spewing noise onto the powerline, but those have been easy to track down & put on a filter. I'm a little stumped right now and considered replacing them the light switches with UPB ones, but they are so expensive.

Current Sensing the Dryer

I got a few of the current sensors mentioned in this thread to monitor if certain devices are powered on. The first one I used on the dryer. I opened up the small access panel where the plug is terminated (as mentioned here), disconnected a leg, peeled it apart from the rest of the power cable and inserted it through the current sensor. I turned on the dryer to test it out (it was on the 'air dry' setting), but the sensor didn't activate because the heater wasn't on. If I switched it to a heated cycle, the sensor triggered. So I had to move the current sensor to the other leg, which is active whenever the dryer is on. After putting everything back together, I attached the sensor output to a DS10A so that it can send the dryer's power status wirelessly. Now, whenever the dryer turns on, the laundry room exhaust fan turns on and when the dryer is done, the laundry fan turns off 2 minutes later.

Camera Server Efficiencies

Our CCTV system has been hacked and pieced together over the last 10 years and became more convoluted than necessary. Now that the Avermedia setup is running, I've been able to simplify things quite a bit. Our system previously used an IR controllable 4-1 composite video switcher to select an active camera based on user input or motion sensors. The automation server would use this feed to take snapshots of the activity. Each camera was also modulated so we could view them on our TVs or Slingbox. Now, the Avermedia records all 4 cameras based on its software motion detection. Also, the software is running full screen as a quad viewer. Since the server is headless, I've connected a VGA to composite video converter and modulated that output. This allows me to remove 3 modulators and the video switcher while still allowing the automation server access to all 4 cameras (albeit smaller views). Finally, an old series 1 TiVo was recording the camera feed continuously and that too got turned off along with its modulator.

Mediasonic HD9-U2LA NAS

I bought a few things off of eBay of late, taking advantage of the 30% cashback from live.com. One of those things is Mediasonic HD9-U2LA NAS. It's a very simple NAS device that takes an IDE drive up to 1TB and has both a 100 Mbps ethernet connection and USB 2.0. Performance is not great - it looks like it sinks about 15-20 Mbps, but that's OK for my needs. Another annoyance is it uses FAT32 so file sizes are limited to 4GB. On the plus side it's fanless and quiet, relying on its aluminum casing to dissipate heat. Unlike a lot of cheap NAS cases, this one features a configurable idle period before the hard drive is powered down. For me, this is a key as the NAS is just for weekly backups run in the middle of the night. I suppose I could put it on an appliance module and power it on and off when I need it. I'll measure its power consumption later today.

Update: It uses 4 watts with the drive powered down and 11 watts with it active.

Airave Update

We've had the Airave a few weeks now and it works nicely. We've now got a solid signal for our Sprint phones and the quality is very good. Dialing out takes about 1-2 seconds longer, but incoming calls are seamless as is the transition to regular cell towers when we leave home.

X10 Web Interface Added Slug

Last night, I installed the lighttpd web server and BlueLava CGI interface on the Slug. Now, we can web control the lighting at our other place. It's a bit sluggish as the CPU seems to get bogged down a bit after issuing a command, but it does the job.

Camera Server Update

I had time yesterday to connect up 2 more cameras to the system. Oddly enough, the CPU utilization went down! It went from 26% with 1 camera to an astonishingly low 10% with 3 cameras and motion detection on each. I thought since it was dark out by the time I got the cameras connected, there wasn't much CPU used for motion detection on mostly black cameras. But it's bright outside now and the CPU is still low. Maybe with 1 camera, it does motion detection at 30 FPS, but dials it way down with more cameras? Who knows. I was thinking that I would have to reduce the resolution from 640x480 when I added more cameras, but it looks like I'll be able to leave it like that. I also put the server case on its side so the CPU heatsink would have better airflow (it's right under the power supply, which has no fan). That combined with the lower CPU utilization has the CPU temp down to 55°C from 66°C.

D201GLY2 Camera Server Testing

I received the Avermedia NV3000 Monday and I've had some cycles to play around with it. I've only hooked up one camera so far, but I've got it set up for motion detection and remote access. It works well so far, but I can't stand that it requires IE to view its web interface. Stupid ActiveX components. With the 1 camera running, I'm using about 26% of the CPU and it's getting quite hot - about 66°C, but from what I've read, that's typically how hot they run under load. I was hoping to get away with minimal cooling but it appears I'll have to add another fan to the case. There's already a 120mm Antec Tricool in the rear of the case. I'm looking at adding an 80mm on the side panel to exhaust directly over the CPU. Hopefully, by this weekend I'll have 2 more cameras online.

The NSLU2 and CM11A have been deployed at our other house. The Airlink IP cam is also there. I've been monitoring the system and everything is working fine. I'll need to do some tweaking to the lighting schedule in the future and add a few more lights to the system at some point.

Slug Doesn't Mix with Edgeport

The 2nd NSLU2 arrived and I started hacking it. I installed SlugOS, moved it to a 2GB flash drive and then installed gcc. Next, I installed HeyU, compiled the source right on the Slug. Then I installed the Edgeport driver ( kernel-module-io-edgeport ) and put the Edgeport/2 on one USB port. It was recognized according to the syslog messages in /var/log/messages, but I couldn't get HeyU to recognize CM11A connected to the Edgeport. I tried a whole bunch of things - reflashing SlugOS, recompiling Heyu, reinstalling the drivers, installing Misterhouse, trying a W800 on it, etc. In the end, it appears the Edgeport driver doesn't work on the NSLU2.

I headed over to Fry's and picked up an Airlink USB to Serial adapter. It has the PL2303 chipset that is known to work on the Slug. I installed the kernel-module-pl2303 driver and presto, everything worked. I'll need to add a USB hub later since this, unlike the Edpgeport/2, only supports 1 serial port. Now, I need to work on a HeyU lighting schedule.

Planning & Waiting

I have a couple projects waiting in the wings - upgrading our security camera system and doing basic automation at our other place. I've been spending the last couple weeks figuring out what and how to go about things and I've finally got my plan together.

For cameras, I'm looking at upgrading to some day/night bullets. I still need to find specific cameras, but in the meantime, I can use what I have. I have re-purposed the D201GLY2 based kitchen PC to be a lower power camera server. I moved it from its slimline desktop case to a tower so I can fit more hard drives and an Avermedia NV3000 capture card. It has 4 video inputs and can capture at 30 FPS total, which shouldn't be a problem. I only have a couple cameras I want to monitor so this should be sufficient. I also moved the Sparkle Power SPI180LE high efficiency power supply into the tower, but since it's a low profile supply, I had to create a mount to use it. I ended up hollowing out an old AT power supply, snipping some parts off and drilling some holes so I could mount the SPI180LE inside it. Then I was able to install the unit into the tower. It looks pretty good. Now, I'm just waiting for the NV3000 and some BNC to Cat-5 baluns to arrive.

The remote home automation project will be starting shortly as well. I picked up another NSLU2 to use as the automation server. I will be installing OpenSlug on it and implementing very basic control with HeyU and a CM11A. The CM11A will be connected to the Slug via an Edgeport USB to Serial adapter. I may also pick up a W800 X10 RF receiver so I can put some sensors (like moisture/leak detectors) on DS10As. HeyU conveniently supports the W800. Finally, I got an Airlink wired IP camera to test out. It works nicely (and has a Java interface in addition to an ActiveX interface) so I will probably put it over there as well. I'm waiting for the Slug to come and then I can start working on this.

Comcast 250GB Cap Goes Live October 1

For all you Comcast users out there, Comcast has decided to cap your previously unlimited Internet service at 250GB per month. That number is the total of your download AND upload usage. Comcast won't provide their customers with any tool to measure their usage and could care less how you figure it out.

So how can you measure the usage of all your devices??? It's easy if you have a Linksys WRT54GL router (or some versions of the WRT54G and WRT54GS) and the Tomato replacement firmware. It has a great built-in bandwidth monitor and graphs for various time periods (daily, weekly, monthly) so you know exactly how much bandwidth all the devices behind your router are using.

Sprint Airave Coming

I just got off the phone with Sprint, our cell provider for almost 2 years. They're going to send us their Airave femtocell, which has been widely released last month. We live in an area which has marginal Sprint coverage, which has been the only negative about our service. This device is like a cell phone repeater, except it will route your voice over your internet connection - so it's like a cell phone VOIP adapter. The Airave costs $99 and $4.99/month but Sprint hooked us up for free with free FedEx shipping. Now, we'll get 4 bars at home to go along with our SERO plan (unlimited EVDO, unlimited SMS, 500 minutes/month and nights & weekends 7-7) for just $30/month.