I’ve completed the first pass of what seems to be a popular electronics self-education project: a home thermostat. I’ve already written about some of the software, and now I’d like to share some of the hardware details. Continue reading »
Jul 192011
Jul 182011
For Hot or Not, I wanted to leverage as much existing code (open-source libraries) as possible, so I could focus on the more interesting application logic. I found a library to work with the database (RRD), but there were a few things about it that didn’t fit my needs, so I ended up releasing a new library. What follows are the reasons I decided to build my own solution, and the downsides to that course of action. Continue reading »
Jul 082011
Recently, I’ve worked on two projects (Power Hungry, Hot or Not) which (among other things) collect write-once data over time, and graph the results. The projects collect very different data, but this task was painful enough in postgres that I ended up switching to a temporal database for the second go, and it made the data collection & querying much easier. What follows is a brief discussion of the problems I faced with postgres, and how moving to RRD solved them. Continue reading »
Jun 272011
My latest project, Hot Or Not, is live! It combines Arduino, NodeJS, Coffeescript, and Google Calendar, to make a thermostat which is remotely controllable via the internet. You can check out graphs of the data on the site, and get the code on github. Continue reading »