December 4, 2018

Barn projects update

Well, 2 years seems like a long time for an update. Naturally, an eventful time. I retired from being an exec in the tech industry (yay!). Since building the VoltBarn, have spent time equipping it with a variety of tools, and started learning a bunch of different crafts, in addition to electronics projects. Also gathered a small collection of pinball machines, since the combination of electronics and mechanics fascinated me.

October 21, 2016

The Barn

Yes, there really is a VoltBarn!

October 21, 2016

Solar and power monitoring

We installed Solar a year ago. After digging through all the manuals and websites, unfortunately the technology inside inverters and battery chargers is still very primitive. At least 20 years behind what we’d consider modern functionality. The battery chargers (from Midnite Solar) speak ModBus over Ethernet. The inverters (from Outback) spit out a lot of data over the network, but don’t allow any control via the internal network. Well, they do, but only via a proprietary protocol they don’t publish.

March 8, 2016

Closing the store for a while

With the big move also came a lot of work at my day job, and a lot of commuting. I did get the workshop built, and have built out a few projects: A security/sensor system driven by a Raspberry Pi, moving my weather station data gathering to Pi, and after we installed a solar array and grid intertie, put together software to monitor and graph and report on all that. Fun stuff, but haven’t written them up yet.

January 9, 2015

Back online soon!

Made a big move in 2014, moving full-time to Mendocino, CA. I have been working on planning and building a new workshop (the real VoltBarn!) for the past year, which has taken up all my recreational hobbyist time. Have a lot of things in the queue to work on later in 2015, once the workshop is finally done, hopefully by the end of February June 2015! But, here’s the workshop exterior as it has progressed so far…

February 23, 2013

SensorPack Wrapup

This has been sitting in draft mode for about 6 months, figured I’d just publish it in its current state, and improve when I get a chance. I’m now playing with a couple other receivers, one a handheld, battery powered version. Putting together a kit with all the pieces for making a SensorPack, but didn’t get an Adafruit-quality how-to done, so never put it up in the store. Should just sell the parts, since everything is labled, no more challenging than a paint-by-numbers assembly.

October 5, 2011

Station display improvements

I now have the real-time station display working almost perfectly. It can be read on my Android running Nook from across the room, indicates which items changed since the last refresh, along with increase/decrease indicators, and the old value. Only thing missing at this point is wind direction, but I get the information in different formats from WeatherUnderground and my VoltBarn Sensor Packs, so need to do a bit of parsing/normalization.

September 27, 2011

Next big Android/Weather Station feature

As always, its the magic behind the image that is the cool part here. A constantly updating display screen, inside the basic applications framework. The new bits here are that the screen runs as a separate intention, scrolls between all the loaded weather stations (check out the screen indicator at the top). It auto-updates the screen every 30 seconds. A few optimizations remain, like only updating the surrounding screens, and cancelling the update timer when the app is in the background.

September 12, 2011

Gauge detail screen up and running

Thanks to the code from Ivan Memruk at Mind The Robot, and refinements done by Freddy Martens at atstechlab, I made some additional tweeks to get a reasonable detail gauge for the weather. I still have more work to do on the details, the current code, although very flexible, makes a lot of implicit assumptions about the values the gauge will have, and the resulting geometry of the face. So, for instance, you can’t get a 300 degree thermometer face, and have the hand point at the right spot, just by changing upper/lower values, and tick mark settings.

August 26, 2011

Android Weather Display, updated

Made a bunch of progress on the Weather Display. I started with Weather Underground data, since I send data from several of my SensorPacks there. I don’t send information from all my SensorPacks there, only ones actually measuring outdoor conditions. In addition to those outdoor weather stations, I have a sensor I move around the house just to test xbee signals from different places. I also have one in a closet in the garage where we keep wine, which has two accessory sensors as well, one in a wine bottle filled with water on the shelf, and one in the wine chiller.