Business As Usual At The Factory Of Idiot Dreams

Moving modules

2008-11-17T10:38:50Z

If you remove modules with the intention of reusing them elsewhere (rather than temporarily for decorating) it's a good idea to reset them to factory defaults before removing them.

This can be easily done using the Insight Editor to send the 2 packets, tell Cortex to ignore the new units when they pop up on reset.

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Jobs and the Web

2008-11-16T21:18:05Z

Much has been written on the darkside of the web for job applicants, how employers may find your Facebook profile and read of that drunken student exploit, or of political view they disagree with, or to cross-check your CV for those little *ahem* embellishments.]]>

I won't bore you with the details - it doesn't matter. What does matter is that in the inside-out world of the web reputation will operate both ways.

Why Bother?

2008-11-10T00:05:29Z

Not in a metaphysical sense, but why bother with home automation? After all, you can always just walk to a light switch and turn the light on*, can't you? I had a very stimulating evening with a fellow Idratek enthusiast and amongst other topics we touched on this typical reactions we get when we (dare to) mention HA in public.

Now, I remember when TV remote controls were not very common, and exactly the same objection would be raised by my father. How many people would do without their remote control now? Of course, TVs have become more complicated, and the remote is a neat packaged user interface that avoids despoiling the front panel aesthetic of the moderm TV with horrible knobs and buttons.

But the fact is, we like the convenience, we like channel hopping, we like being able to mute the TV. And the remote control has allowed the introduction of much greater functionality. Would you use teletext if you had to go back to the TV every time you wanted to read the next page? Or rewind the PVR 30 seconds to catch that unspoken but mouthed exclamation?

So it is with home automation. I like the convenience of being able to walk through my house carrying something with both hands and not having to operate the light switch with my nose. I like being able to run up the stairs and not remember halfway up that I should have turned on the landing light (in fact this is the exact reason I started looking at HA several years ago).

And in my house this is done without pressing any buttons at all, it is not remote control but automation. Within parameters that I control, the house decides what lights to put on and when without further actions from me.

Already we see that this kind of technology has made more interesting lighting schemes acceptable to the user through simplification of the interface. The architectural use of light, light level and colour schemes matched to moods, time of day or current activity is becoming much more common. Many home automation systems allow multiple "scenes" or "moods" of lighting to be called up from a remote control panel with a single button press, rather than changing the settings of a bank of wall switches and dimmers.

But I think the promise is much greater and extends far beyond lighting control. In the same way that the TV remote has been one of the enabling factors of the PVR, I expect home automation to enable applications we can't conceive today.

*In fact, this very simple user interface hides an enormously complicated system for extracting power from a thermal source, converting it to electricity, delivering it over hundreds of miles and converting it into light, all with a stunning reliability, for which we should be very grateful.

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Thank God for Siberia

2008-10-31T22:13:39Z

I've never like trick-or-treating. As far as I am concerned it is an imported American habit (much like those ghastly school "proms" that seem to have sprung up every summer complete with screaming girls hanging out of limo windows) with little to recommend it. No doubt it has been imported through endless teen movies, although there doesn't seem to be the full follow-through.

My recollection for Halloween is toffee apples, costumes, carving pumpkins (or in our family swedes because they were much cheaper), parties and ducking for apples - what was wrong with that? OK, I can't really take offence at a few tots dressing up and being escorted round knocking on doors in the hope of a handful of sweets. But more usually it's a gang of teenagers demanding money with menaces, the "tricks" being thinly disguised vandalism and any offer of sweets as treats being turned down with a sneer.

So thank God for Siberia, or more particularly Siberian winds, because that seems to have done the trick and I've not been treated to any unwelcome visitors tonight.

Update: Oh Dear.

I invented this...

2008-10-31T00:07:41Z

It keeps happening. Every time I have a brilliant idea, a few days or weeks later I will come across something to find it has been done. But this time is different. I actually proposed doing something very close to this several years ago but it was rejected by my (then) employer's invention process as stupid.

Now that I have an increasingly automated home, it makes more and more sense to me, since it is much easier to localise a visible light transmission to a single room than an RF transmission. The downside is that such a transmission can also be blocked by clothes and other obstacles. However, I think this could be a viable solution to certain problems with presence detection and identity that some people have been trying to solve with RFID or even Bluetooth sensing.

And there is also the converse possibility. Imagine a configurable remote control device, some kind of portable touch screen or web tablet. Have each room have an IR beacon that transmits the room ID and the tablet receive and process it. The presented interface can now be very easily made appropriate to the room the control device is residing in. I can think of ways of mocking this up now.

I already have an IR TX/RX infrastructure provided by my ceiling mounted Idratek modules. This was obviously conceived for RC4/5 remote control purposes, but my devious mind is busy thinking up some other uses. One of the advantages of the Idratek system is that it is not a passive IR distribution system like, for example, Xantech stuff, but actually attempts to recognise frames and can process them. It can also forward unrecognised frames to Cortex. I'm not sure whether I am constrained to RC4/5 frames, at least with the current firmware, but even within that limitation some interesting possibilities spring to mind ...

... must read up some more on RC4/5 and IrDA, and find out whether the Idratek modules can do IrDA ...

Amazon Error Arbitrage?

2008-03-12T00:09:59Z

I recently went looking for some Coltrane music to add to my collection, I guess prompted by this review which highly recommended First Meditations. This was recorded by the classic "Love Supreme" quartet, before it broke up and the tracks were re-recorded with Pharoah Sanders' primeval additions. It was not authorised for release by John Coltrane himself but later released by his wife. Since Love Supreme is one of my all time favourites (and I don't normally do favourites) it had to be worth listening to another recording by this band at the peak of their creativity.]]> expensive at £25, but then I noticed that a disc with the same title, same artwork but listed under Alice Coltrane was much cheaper. Taking the chance, and since I like Alice Coltrane's work in any case, I placed an order.

I did indeed receive the John Coltrane disc. It's an understandable error, Alice Coltrane was John's wife and probably authorised the First Meditations release, but it is obviously a John Coltrane album. I thought Alice Coltrane is likely to be a much less popular artist than John Coltrane but in general her sales ranking is actually pretty good, perhaps John Coltrane's sales ranking is diluted by the scale of his output. Instead it is likely that the erroneously listed discs are simply not found by buyers and hence get priced down. Good news for me - and the many other Coltrane fans who have spotted the same error, especially as there are at least 6 other John Coltrane albums erroneously listed.

So I started to wonder how many other errors are in Amazon's system and what the opportunity for arbitrage is here? With First Meditations there is a spread of nearly 300% on offer.

And yes, First Meditations is an excellent album.

6 Million Idiots

2008-03-07T00:28:49Z

Apparently because 6 million idiots injured themselves by not watching where they were going the taxpayer has to provide padding around the lampposts. ]]>

It reminds me of the genius idea my friend Barry came up with to connect the camera on the back of the phone to the screen on the front to show the pavement in front of you whilst you are texting when walking.

I Love The Smell Of Wet Plaster In The Morning...

2008-02-26T23:03:56Z

... it smells like ... progress

The ground floor plaster was cut back to 1m high and replaced with tanking membrane included, knackered stud wall stripped back and recovered and various other walls re-skimmed for cosmetic reasons. The stairs landing slanting false ceiling was removed and a horizontal one refitted. Another damaged stud wall was stripped and recovered and a redundant doorway was removed on the landing and the walls made good, as well as recovering various cosmetic defects.

There's still some more plastering to be done when the new front door is fitted and quite a lot of drying out to wait for, but it's the culmination of the worst, messiest part of the business.

I also discovered that wallpaper strippers do a fantastic job removing old black gunky tile glue.

Of course, I took the opportunity to work in a new PIR sensor at the foot of the stairs which should speed up detection of people before they round the corner at the bottom.

I'm still pondering lighting for the stairs, but thinking of a large array of LED downlighters, which should be quicker to turn on than CFLs but much more energy efficient than halogens. Given that the new ceiling can only be reached with a ladder, the bulb life should prove advantageous as well.

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Completion of Mail.app Migration

2008-02-05T00:08:12Z

I went to write an email and found the address wasn't in the Mac's address book. This reminded me that I needed to export the address book from Thunderbird to the Mac's address book.

Turns out that Thunderbird can export as LDIF and Mac address book can import it, with a nice interface to manage most of the conflicts. The ones it didn't handle were where two valid email addresses were conflicting over a single field, eg "work email". Since one of them was either out of date or improperly labelled I can't blam the Mac.

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More Appleification and a bit of Google-Magic

2008-02-02T00:59:45Z

Despite switching I have retained Thunderbird as my mail client - partly because I saw some complaints about Mail.app crashing and partly because I couldn't be bothered to import all my old mail.

But Thunderbird is doing a poorer and poorer job at spam filtering (or the spammers are getting cleverer) and it's starting to get a bit irritating. In addition, mail access from my mobile device is even worse since it doesn't get the benefit of Thunderbird's filtering. Even though I have flat rate data, filtering out 100's of spam a day on a mobile screen was too much, so I stopped using it. But one of my friend's showed my his iPhone, generating instant gadget envy and I decided I really ought to mobilise my life a bit more - even without an iPhone. So some kind of server-side spam filtering was clearly needed.

]]> Gmail is getting pretty popular as a spam filter and has done a good job on filtering my mail lists. This, and the recent addition of IMAP support has made it a very attractive solution.

Forwarding all my email accounts to gmail pretty quickly proved the superiority of gmail's filters. It looks like there might be a point to my Vario-II after all.

I then set up IMAP access for my laptop, but to avoid confusion during a test period used mail.app to access them, rather than Thunderbird. I also turned off mail.app junk mail processing, since Gmail should be a handling it and it can otherwise cause conflicts. This also effected a switch to mail.app, which means Tamzin will no longer ask "why don't I have Thunderbird" as if I was keeping some choice morsel from her and I will also be able to help her when required. I should also the benefits of increased integration between Mac applications.

At this point I thought things weren't working properly due to persistent mail activity, but it was just taking time (3 days) to sync all my stored Gmail maillist stuff.

The next step was to import all my old email into mail.app. I thought that may be Leopard's version might have sorted out Thunderbird import, especially since it had a Mozilla/Thnderbird specific import filter, but it lost a lot of email on the way in. So a bit of googling and I found the free utility Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. This has done a proper job of pulling in all the old mail.

Lastly I moved the contents of my old Inbox into the Gmail inbox so it's all in one place. I moved it in lumps of about 100 emails and found that I couldn't move an email with PDF attachments.

So now I still have my email archived on my laptop, but I also have web-based access and mobile access to my inbox, sent items etc. I still need to sort out my address book, and there is the dual effort of moving contacts from Thunderbird to Mac Address Book and also to the Gmail contacts list.

Unfortunately Gmail doesn't automagically take care of answering, filing and actioning, so I've got a bit of GTDing to get it back under control.

Update: Major advantage to this scheme is that it makes scanning through large volumes of mail list mail much easier than the Gmail web interface. I'm starting to catch up with the ukha_d list now.

Outdoor Sensor

2008-01-28T21:20:45Z

Amongst my recent box of goodies from Idratek was an outdoor sensor.

I mounted it on the side of my shed facing back to the house. This is approximately NE facing, so shouldn't get too much solar gain affecting the temperature readings. Since the box leans back a bit because of the shed siding, I made a small rain deflector from some spare roof flashing.

As I connected the module it was detected as normal and I added it to the "garden" which is a floor outside the house. The light level connection automatically propagates into the "Outside light level" of all internal light object behaviours. Clever stuff, this Cortex.

An obvious thing was to set up a threshold on the light level to close the automated curtains:

I set up a large hysteresis due to possibility of clouds and small mammals.

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Using logic gate to inhibit heating

2008-01-28T20:35:21Z

I thought I'd have a play with the new General Logic object and when reviewing my heating set up yesterday I spotted an opportunity. ]]>

but it occurred to me that it was a little unfair to turn off the heating if the kitchen door was closed when the backdoor was open. Multiple entries can be added to the inhibit list, but they would act as a logical-OR, I needed an AND.

So I added a general logic object to the dining room, opened up it's behaviour and added a gate:

(these images are clickable to see the full-sized versions)

As you can see, I set up the door states as the inputs and gave a usable name to the output. You can also see that the current state of the doors is shown labelled on the gate and the resulting output. This realtime animation is common in many areas of Cortex and is really useful. Just to prove the point (and the logic) I opened the backdoor*:

Excellent, the AND gate works. So close that and we see the new Gate in the General Logic object:

Note that you are not adding a single gate object, but that the object can contain many gates. This wakens old memories of HILO (probably), a logic simulator where you built up netlists by defining the gates and named their inputs and outputs to connect them. At least, I'm assuming that is how this would work, because I've not tried it. I wonder if it detects feedback logic ?

And finally I replaced the inhibit input in the HVAC behaviour with the output from the new gate:

Heating Inhibit with General Logic? Done.

with apologies to Gordon Ramsay.

* actually I simulated opening it because I didn't want to run round the house.

Quick HA Porn Fix

2008-01-27T23:37:39Z

]]> After updating my N800 up to OS2008 it was easy to get VNC running and then access Cortex running on my HA server. It's a little small, I plan to investigate device specific web server renderings later.

Slightly more successful MT4 Upgrade

2008-01-27T20:22:22Z

So I was just about to write a long post and Tamzin Skyped me to tell me one of the links wasn't working.
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So I'm sorry if the RSS feeds have been all over the place.

Which one will I keep ? Well, MT has some lock-in due to issues with perma-links and the console is much slower than MT3.2 or Wordpress. On the possibly positive side it also has an asset manager.

The other deciding factors will be the ease of changing themes, the ease of customising templates and the quality of the built-in editor. I do have a slight bias to WordPress due to it's open source nature, I guess I could go to MT GPL, but I think they have already lost the mindshare.

Adding Zone Valves

2008-01-27T16:33:14Z

I've mentioned I added radiator valve actuators to improve my heating control, so here's a walkthrough of the steps in Cortex to add them.

]]> My valves are controlled by switching on and off a 24V power supply generated centrally using a QRI-002 DIN rail relay unit. This sits alongside a DIN rail mounted 24V transformer. After adding the QRI module to the network in the usual manner, the first step is to add the individual zone valves to the matching relay channels.

Here you can see the uncommitted relay module, so I select the first relay and use the Add button, selecting a Zone Valve.

This dialog has seen some improvements relating to setting up where the icon will appear in the plan. Since my QRI-module is associated with the ground floor (since it services the whole floor) the default is that the added object will also be associated with the ground floor. But I actually want this object to show up in the hall:

The zone valve needs enabling into the network (this really means bring it under Cortex control rather than the physical Idranet) from the properties menu. This is also a useful way of temporarily disabling objects, perhaps if you need to disconnect some units:

The object is added with an automatically built name, but these can be a bit long, so I highlight it in the structure view and change it:

Just to confuse you, I'm now working with the Dining Room zone valve.

The next step is to associate the zone valve with the room HVAC object. HVAC objects create demand for heating (or cooling) and without zone valves they connect directly to the boiler object. Where zone valves are present they connect instead to the zone valve:

Open the zone valve connections:

Select the HVAC box and the Add the Dining Room HVAC:

You can see that the zone valve already has an output connection to the boiler object (it's demand relay in physical terms):

So that's all the zone valve connections set up, next I set up it's behaviour:

The manual (ON) setting could be useful for radiator balancing, although I have Honeywell valves that allow balancing on the wheelhead valve rather than the lockshield.

Also interesting is the load building setting, which allows the zone to be allocated a number of load units, this then interacts with the boiler object that can be set to only fire if the total demand is above a number of units. The units are arbitrary, but should be consistent across the house. So you might use it to ensure the boiler only fired to heat at least 2 rooms, or you might have some efficiency data that would allow you to set it up in kW or BTUs.

The final stage is to review the HVAC object. First check the connections:

You can see the HVAC creates demand that is output to the zone valve and this will forward it to the boiler. Demand can be modified according to various factors and also inhibited, here it is inhibited if the back door is open, but another typical inhibit would be the windows.

Next lets look at the HVAC behaviour set up:

All kinds of complicated stuff here. I only have heating so select the appropriate mode. For the moment I have not configured anything to modify the settings and I am using a simple on/off controller.

The other part of the behaviour is the profile setup, which I showed in another entry.