Posted By: SteamyTea What I am after is a way to monitor the temp and individual electrical circuit power to a stand alone, very low power, easy to read and set up 'box of tricks'. If it can be remotely accessed all the better.

Is the OW-SERVER what you are looking for http://www.embeddeddatasystems.com/ Bit pricey but I think it may do what you want.

My house seem to stay between 3 and 4 degrees above ambient, I get a fair bit of solar gain at the back in the mornings.
Dug out all the old iButton data I could find and have plotted this, most was before I put the new glazing in (08/2010) and extra insulated the loft (02/2011):

Posted By: djh: “Right, that's the same sensor as Sheepwalk use in their module, but that price is for a thousand unit minimum order quantity. It won't let you order less.”

Oops, yes. One off it's £12.71:

http://search.digikey.com/uk/en/products/HIH-4031-001/480-3168-1-ND/1886073

I've been looking at simple, low power Linux options today. Anyone else seen the Raspberry Pi? (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) £16 for a board that will run Linux, has an SD card, enough I/O ports to do pretty much anything and runs at low power (around 1 W or so).

At the price, I intend getting a couple to play with as soon as production units are available.

ST - What is CC?

Hi JH

Yes, Rasperry Pi is almost too good to be true.
Almost no reason it should be cheaper than established options like the Fox G20
http://www.acmesystems.it/
except that the developers are driven by wanting widespread uptake rather than making a bit of profit (not that there is anything wrong with maing a bit of profit). I don't fancy their chances but their motives are genuine and I wish them well.

Other than that, the cheapest linux host option would probably be one of the re-purposed router firmwares like OpenWRT/Midge (http://linux-adm5120.sourceforge.net). Can be done for approx £22 ish (including PSU and case though)... only for tinkerers though. Rasperry Pi is probably a bit more capable (eg. self hosted development) but for that price you are probably looking at an assembled PCB and USB powered.

Slight innuendo-free digression on numbers...

Just did a preemptive calc of carbon footprint for heat'n'light this year and, mainly due to the milder weather, it looks as if we're slightly carbon-negative (-300kgCO2 for the house for 2011), which is good.

That's assuming 0.43kgCO2/kWh electricity for both consumption and generation: at 0.5kgCO2/kWh we're at about -500kg for 2011 by the looks of things (we're currently a net exporter until I can get ASHP in).

We're definitely not PH levels, but with heating at ~50kWh/m^3/year (ie gas use at under 4MWh/y cf national average of 18MWh/y) I don't think we're doing too badly.

Disappointingly our gross electricity consumption looks to be within about 1% of last year's value (down maybe 20kWh on ~1550kWh); I'd hoped that we might have done better than that, though imports from the grid are down more like 10%...

Rgds

Damon

Hmm, so many deep questions ...

Posted By: SteamyTeaSo is this Perl script thingy easy to do.

Perl is both the devil and an angel. I hated it when I first met it, but now I've grown to quite like it.

Can I use the standard Serial to USB lead and what do I have to do to Linux to get it to recognise it.

Ha! For USB, it entirely depends on what version of what distro you're using. Mostly stuff works. But if not try (a) your distro support forum and (b) whatever the USB device has in the way of support lists/fora. Not necessarily in that order.

My main issue with the world of Linux and the associated licence-free software movement is it's apparent snobbishness and total disregard for entry-level developers. My background with software is admittedly limited - I started using machine code and Fortran to do 3D trajectory simulation on a punched card entry machine in the 70's, moved to a mix of Fortran 77 and BASIC under George III on a teleprinter-driven "networked" ICL mainframe, then to writing machine code for "high-speed" data logging on 8080, followed by years of writing assembler for 6800 series u's, also for weapon instrumentation. I still tinker with 8 bit ucontrollers from time to time, usually PICs or something similar and am comfortable working with most low-level languages. I've never so much as powered up a Unix box.

Despite this, Linux (at the bit-bashing level) seems an impenetrable closed society, where even the language is so unintelligible to those outside the clique as to make picking up the basics near-impossible. There seems to be an assumption by Linux fans that if you don't understand the basics then you should just stay away from their world, something I find pretty irritating - in fact nearly as irritating as all the "benefits of free software" preaching that one has to endure on virtually every Linux related site on the web. I have got a small distro of Debian running on a VM on my main machine, but apart from trying to look like a Windows knock-off I'm not wholly sure what good it is. Even simple things like finding applications to do what you want seems impenetrably difficult, as the really massive downside of free software is that no one can be arsed to tell people, in plain and simple language, what any particular package really does.

I'm not knocking the free software idea at all, it's just that one major downside is that, because there is no need to market it, no one bothers to accurately describe it in simple terms that those outside the clique would understand. The best you're likely to get is a crappy wiki written in nerd-speak, that means little or nothing to someone just looking to see whether something might meet their needs. Add in that the free software ethos means no advertising, and finding out about things becomes a game of hide and seek. This approach seems doomed to keep Linux etc in the nerd arena, rather than allow it to move out to the mainstream, which seems a shame (and I do know of, and have a couple of, machines (Asus Eees)that started life shipped with Linux - one now runs Windows, because I simply couldn't get Linux to do what I wanted, even after hours of trying, the other just sits by my printer as a wireless print server).

'Only sell the benefits, never the product'. Think we had a thread about making insulation 'sexy', it was a short one.

Oddly though, I had a conversation yesterday with my lodger about wanting thing to just work (was to do with her food processor/mixer that has more attachments than an Ann Summers shop).

Posted By: JSHarrisDespite this, Linux (at the bit-bashing level) seems an impenetrable closed society, where even the language is so unintelligible to those outside the clique as to make picking up the basics near-impossible.

I do find your position a bit odd. Is bit bashing in Windows any easier? Horses for courses I think. Linux to me is a set of tools that work amazingly well considering it is fighting the closed Windows monolith. I have taken to using my dual boot laptop, running Ubuntu 10.04/XP almost entirely in Ubuntu as Windows is so slow. Chrome, xmarks, dropbox, LibreOffice and Gnome RDP to connect to other machines just works. Virtualbox is a revelation and I connected my new weather station, via usb to the XP VM running on another box and 'It just worked'. Amazing. OTOH, I tried to run a syslogger that came with my new Vigor ADSL router on XP. Worked for a while, threw a fit now I get an impenetrable C++ error and it will not run. A registry error I suspect; a real closed system.

I heard that in Linux, 'everything is a file' and what is the best 'desktop' to use. What's all that about.

Maybe someone should start a new thread about Linux and Data Logging on the cheap. Would fit in with the ethos of reclaiming/recycling. Over to the people that know what they are talking about.

OK if you have a PC with a disc drive and have got a copy of Linux on a CD/DVD, but not if you just downloaded it on a disc-less machine. I have one old laptop with a CD/DVD drive, all the rest of the machines in the house are (like a lot of newer PCs it seems) disc-less, which meant that I did what I'd guess many might do, I downloaded both Virtual Box and Debian from the web. Virtual Box installed like a dream, really easy and intuitive to use. Installing Debian was like going back to the dark ages of DOS, without the benefit of a command line user manual!

I accept that familiarity makes understanding simpler, but the comparison with Autodesk happens to be a good one. AutoCAD is an appallingly difficult thing to pick up, I went on a week-long course 20 odd years ago when it first rolled out and came back no more than a novice. I freely admitted in that thread that the interface is arcane - it is a good example of how not to design something to be user-friendly and easy to learn. If I hadn't had a persistent need to use it I wouldn't, it was that bad (and still is, in my view). Linux seems to be taking exactly the same route - restricting itself to a clique of familiar users. There's a good lesson here, because Autodesk lost a big hunk of market share when other CAD systems came along that were easier to get to grips with, and when people woke up to the fact that it didn't have to be so painful to use a good CAD package.

I managed to get Debian running, but it required typing in several command-line level instructions just to get the downloaded files to install, then to load a means for getting hold of applications without needing to use the command line interface (which works OK, except the applications are so badly described and classified that, with the exception of one or two, means the only way to find out what they actually do seems to be to download and install them!). As it happens I've run Open Office for years, an open source suite that is user-friendly and relatively easy to use for anyone with no experience of Linux. If all I needed was office-type applications, plus a web browser, then I could happily use a Linux machine with just Open Office, Firefox and a decent email client installed. The problem comes because I'd like to explore using Linux at the bit-bashing level, to directly control things and read sensors. It's seemingly capable of doing this, and there are some attractively priced low-power boards around that have the right hardware, but finding out how to get at stuff at the low-level I needs is challenging.

Posted By: JSHarrisInstalling Debian was like going back to the dark ages of DOS

Ah, choose your flavour carefully. IME Debian is an 'enthusiasts' distro, Ubuntu more polished (but that brings its own issues though they are not usability). My first foray was Debian; I have never been back.......

Posted By: JSHarrisLinux seems to be taking exactly the same route - restricting itself to a clique of familiar users.

Again, choose your distro carefully. They all have pros and cons, but I would not describe Ubuntu as an OS in a 'clique'.

JSH, the idea that there is no info documenting unix (which is what you are compaining about not understanding in terms of basic commands and concepts) is ludicrous. Apart from anything else it really hasn't changed much in 30 years.

Equally telling us that 'controlling IO via the parallel port is dead easy in DOS/Windows, but impossible to find out about in Linux' just means that you already know how to do it in Windows. And anyway - it's been an awful long time since I got any new hardware with a parallel port on it, so that knowledge is rapidly becoming irrelevant now. Typing 'bitbang parallel port linux' into google got me some pretty good destructions and example code as the 3rd hit:
http://www.electronics-related.com/usenet/design/show/123369-1.php
Is that info not telling you what you need to know?

Bashing bits down i2c is as simple as writing bytes to a file:
echo “0” > /sys/bus/i2c/devices/0-0038/write
(full details in my hotwaterballoon talk: http://wookware.org/talks/hotwaterballoon-Fosdem2009.pdf )

And it's not a clique. The community of users is everyone who uses it - that includes you. Ultimately it's up to users to write user-level docs, because software authors are (generally) incapable of writing good novice-level docs. It's not their fault - they simply can't remember the things they didn't know when they started, and can't step back far enough to write for those without a basic knowledge of the subject. Only someone new to the subject can do this with the right viewpoint. An enormous amount of good documentation has been written, but of course there are still gaps.

I'm not sure what was hard about installing Debian for you. The installer does have more flexibility than some other installs (and thus provides the options needed to do quite complex LVM-over-RAID dual-boot setups if that's what you want), but it can famously still be installed by a chicken - you just have to keep hitting 'return' and the thing will be installed after a while using defaults.

As has been pointed out Debian is a great distro - in many ways the one true distro, but it is set up for maximum flexibility not maximum handholding. If you want things to be done for you and to be all pointy and clicky then pick mint or Ubuntu. (I use nothing but Debian on all my machines, because I value multiple architecture support and consistency and flexibility over shiny stuff).

If you ask specific questions about problems or subjects rather than making wild generalisations about how all the terrible cliques are against you, then you'll probably get them answered, or told where answers can be found.

I'd also like examples of how "the applications are so badly described and classified that, with the exception of one or two, means the only way to find out what they actually do seems to be to download and install them". Debian has 17,000 packages and packagers generally go to a lot of trouble to make the description useful for finding out what it does and why this packages might be useful over some other similar packages. If you can point to cases where that's not happened then please file bugs (use the 'reportbug' packages/command), or tell me and I can fix it/report it.

We should possibly continue this conversation over on steamy's new thread.

In summary - we are happy to help you, if you actually want to learn, rather than just rant.