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+1 on the Elk M1. The serial interface has an extensive command set. It is also accessible over ethernet, but their ethernet module is little more than a standard terminal server so you can just as easily use your own. I have written a Perl module to communicate with it using the POE framework. So you can integrate it with your insteon, A/V, etc. It supports nearly all of the Elk commands. http://www.seanadams.com/ha/automogator

Just like your page at http://www.seanadams.com/ (At least there are no graphics or javascript) Unless you just don't support Firefox uses.

Score: -1 flamebait (but who cares, I'm funny)

Back when I admin'd an ISP that billed by usage, we used mrtg and the mrtg 95 percentile scripts. On more than one occasion, we had customers inquire about our billing. Fortunately, most of our customers were technically literate, so I stepped through the code and procedures with them. All of them were happy with the explanitions and were satisfied after they saw the methods. That's not to say mrtg and the 95th percentile scripts are bulletproof, but they held up under our scrutiny.

http://www.seanadams.com/95/

If you're lucky enough to have the kind of electric meter with a blinking LED on it, you could do this much more simply. Also if I had to do this again I would ditch the op-amp circuit and feed the signal from the photo-resistor straight into the sound card and then do the filtering in software (if the photo-resistor is exposed to sunlight it can be a little tricky to tune using this circuit - software could be smarter).

For what it is worth, the Airport also uses a low end 486 processor.

Maybe some models, but this one uses an AMD microcontroller:

dead airport

AMD is a much more interesting company that we geeks often realize. Too often we think, AMD=Athlon/Opteron, but I find their gadgety endeavors really interesting.

Apple's Airport (and maybe extreme/express, dunno) has a tiny AMD processor , and as the parent points out, now their playing with MIPS archs. A friend of mine worked at the fab in Dresden and said that a third of their operations had to do with flash.

Call me a fanboy, but I sure do like the AMD kool aid. They make neato products and deserve mucho respect.

I built one of these years ago... the thing mine had that theirs is missing is some way to flip it over to erase it.

I used a big servo (made for a remote controlled boat) to flip it over. Also a solenoid to lock the screen in the vertical position so that the servo/solenoid only need to be energized while the screen is being shaken.

It's amazing though how many people create these wonderful(or not so wonderful as your opinion may be) websites, then just abandon them.

I think that's a hell of a lot better than the majority of web pages, which move, or even worse, disappear within a couple months of their debut. Personally, I maintain a web site and while I spend almost no time on it lately, I'm happy to pay the hosting bills in the hope that the information might be useful to someone.

I just think it's sad when somebody/somecorp puts in the effort to make a site and then pulls the plug. It's not really expensive to keep it available, so why take it down?

I didn't have a lot of time to stay and see the museum - will go back another day I guess. Here are some photos I took at the afternoon exhibit.

I'm honestly not sure if it was a joke or not, but the first thing that came to mind when I read the article was that it sounded like a problem in the DC-DC power supply. I've heard that sort of audible "static" noise coming from a switching supply when the caps go bad.

I would agree that probably replacing a single inductor or cap would fix this.

My server has been slashdotted a few times and I can tell you it's pretty simple to not get overloaded.

The first time I learned my lesson. The server was on a T1 line that was 2/3 full already, and slashdot linked to a page full of large photos. That'll kill your link pretty quickly. Low-budget solution: sign up for a burstable web hosting account somewhere and just put all your large images there.

Later when we got some actual office space for the business, I moved the main server up to a colo facility in fremont. All slahdottable content is hosted there on a fast server with a 100mbps ethernet link. Other oddball services that need their own machine are hosted from the other end of a point-to-point T1 line going directly back to the office from the colo.

So depending on your budget it's really not hard to set up your site to survive a slashdotting. If you don't have a lot of dough to spend but you want to run your own server for configurability/security reasons, just host the static stuff somewhere else. Or if you're serving enough to make it economical, get a colo account with a burstable link.

There's a widespread misconception here that slashdotting is caused by server overload. In reality this is almost never the case. It's caused by insufficient bandwith. This in turn may cause server overload because of too many slow clients being connected, but that is purely a secondary effect.

Well, if someone was serious about it. The Crystal/Cirrus CS8900A has an 8-bit interface mode. There are a number of projects on the web interfacing it to several 8-bit processors. Someone could conceivably make a cartridge containing an ethernet interface and the Contiki Desktop in ROM (I'm not holding my breath though).

Sean Adams Laser Meter Reader

There are also a couple of other links on that page - basically it is a "meter reader" that counts the pulses coming from the spinning disk in the reader (for some reason, meters in America use spinning disks, even if they are digital - this probably isn't the case everywhere - the link to the British dude, when it was up and I visited - showed what appeared to be a fully digital meter, no mechanical parts). He has it hooked up to a Linux box that reads these pulses via the parallel port.

Such a setup, while not as advanced as what is being offered by Obvious (which seems to allow for monitoring of multiple circuits and other such niceties - which would be cool to do, because then you could get the monitoring down to circuit, and almost device, level), would still be useful for a homeowner and such.

What I am wanting to do, though, is figure out how digital meters work. The meter on my house is one of the digital/mechanical hybrids. I could use Sean's circuit, but there is a "plug" on the front, that looks optical in some regard, that the meter reader guy uses to interface a handheld data logger device to - I would rather be able to use that interface, since it is what should be used, rather than a clunky external laser and detector system (though I wonder what my power company would think - one thing I wonder, is if you can program/reset through that interface - they wouldn't like that).

Here's a similar project I did a couple years ago in case anyone's interested. It's a do-it-yourself backplane for those highly integrated full-length single board computers. I was able to make a pretty cost-effective high density cluser using a single case with nine PCs inside - eight single cpu celerons and a dual PII. There was even some room left over for laptop hard drives between the cards. Total rack space: 6U. You could also fit this in a deep 4U chassis.

Here's something I made a while back in case anyone's interested:

Perltris

OK, I'll bite. I just drove up there.

Here are some hilarious images of this classic f**cked company.

PG&E meter reader: See here - photos & schematics

So I'm sitting here looking at my MRTG graphs and saying WTF - my server's trying to push out 2.5MBps onto my T1. Oops.

Thanks everyone for you interest in the SliMP3. Yes, we *are* building these by hand, at least the first 100, and we plan to ship in about two weeks. No we're not planning to build our next batch this way.

I'll do my best to answer everyone's questions. Again, thanks for the traffic, and sorry my server can't keep up!

Sean Adams
Slim Devices, Inc.

BS. You can write anything in perl.

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