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Am I Hot or Not
Sure, it's not the dream system with computer-controlled vents on the furnace and a genetic algorithm to optimize heat-flow, but it is pretty damn cool. This system makes use of Dallas Semiconductor Digital Thermometers to monitor temperature throughout the house. Hopefully the fellow running the project will put up the source to the Linux driver he has running the sensors. This project ties in nicely with the question posed by a recent Ask Slashdot as well.
I've always wondered why thie hasn't existed for a long time already. All you need is a thermostat for each room and a servo controlled baffle for the vents in that room. Upstairs hotter than down? Close downstairs baffles a little...problem solved. This is hardly innovative technology.
Whew... For a moment from the title I thought it might have been a competition amongst developers to determine if they were Hot or Not. I don't think a lot of the egos out there could take that kind of abuse.
The day you will have to debug some code to switch on the central heating in winter, you'll understand why people keep doing it by hand.
theefer
When I saw the title I thought some of the Slashdot editors posted their pics on this site.
Frankie is a Radisys EP-32 with a 33Mhz 486DX, a megs of flash memory, and 16 megs of EDO RAM. Of course he boots Linux directly from the flash disk.
I hope thats not the webserver! Otherwise, I belive the answer is "hot."
this site
(Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! Don't forget the http://!)
You can't have an article entitled "Am I Hot Or Not" without having a link to the real Am I Hot Or Not page! Who wants to look at thermometers when you can look at real people and rate how "hot" they are based on a completely shallow judgement?!
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
I would like to see a system that attaches to the back of your computers and uses the heat energy to heat to house. Why extra furnace bills to keep the room that your thermostat warm with natural gas when a couple P4's running a web server will work?
Just a thought, after all we should be lowering our need of Fossil Fuels
Medevo
The project is a great idea, but I would have rather the post had waited until the designer had actually done the computer controlled vents. I would certainly like to see what vents he chose, and any problems he had hooking them up.
I also wonder about feedback problems in such a design... that is... consider that the house finds some rooms too warm... it closes their vents and other rooms heat up, as this occurs it oscilates between the rooms and vents opening and closing. Obviously this could be tweazed, but what is the electrical overhead. Where I live, electricity is extremely expensive and so it would be questionable if such a design would be cost effective.
It would also be nice to have variable vents, that is, vents that could be selectivly opened a certain amount (which would reduce the feedback problem).
Of course, here on the Island our problem is not heat control, it's dampness and channeling of tradewinds through the house - so I wonder what the possibilities of a computer controlled window screen would be, with moisture and wind sensors (probably motorized louvered windows).
Ah well, nice idea but it seems a bit premature for a solid slashdot discussion.
One of the great ideas to finally come out to the masses. Sure it's been floating around in an unknown amount of people's heads, But for someone to announce and centralise it for those who are interested takes action and will.
I can see this project helping out those more technically minded in business and the home. Imagine your limited mobile who needs to monitor temperatures all over the house, but can't simply because they can't walk or !
Definately a plus.
thought I was gonna get to rate some hotties.
What was your username again? -BOFH
By the way, the interesting thing about these sensors is that they are actually network devices, each with it's own unique ID. You can address each of them separately over the "1-wire network" and get their temperature reading. Also note, that these sensors directly give you a temperature reading, not current or some other reading. So, they do not require any calibration and are a breeze to use.
Brian Lane has made public drivers for these nice Dallas Semiconductors temperature sensors. The software can be loaded from here.
--jarkko
A DoS attack launched at his thermometer server at the right time (when the heater is on) will raise his electric bill and cause serious personal discomfort. This could be the best DoS attack yet.
that I was not the only one doing something like this. Oh well, too late, but here's the link:
DIY Zoning
Am I Geek Or Not
'Nuff said. I claim no affiliation with this site.
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
Free cell phone tracking
A few years back. It was mainly designed to control automatic horse feeders, but it also controlled HVAC, generator, etc. Web Page
Monte Carlo methods like genetic algorithms are usually the last resort for the clueless to get some kind of solution for an optimization problem.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I had envisioned something like this for my family's grocery store. We had three beverage refrigerator cases, one dairy case, one retail freezer case, two walk-in boxes, three 8 foot refridgerated display cases, three air conditioners, tons of flourescent lighting, slicing machines, cheese grater, coffee machine, and much more. The electric cost was over $2000 per month in the summer. Another relative had a retail seafood store, with freezers, ice machines, display cases, etc. His bill was over $10,000 per month in summer. This is in NYC.
If I had some way of regulating temperature with temperature sensors, and monitored by a computer, turning fans on and off by computer regulation, I could easily have run ducting between the three display cases as one zone, the three refridgerated beverage cases as a second zone, the dairy case and one walk-in box as another zone, etc. I could have turned off the smaller beverage cases, and the bigger one at night (we did some of this by extending the defrost cycle at night). During the winter, I would have like to pipe in cold (below 36 or so degrees) air from outside into refridgerators. By shutting down beverage cases that had compressors mounted under case (instead of in basement like other cases), we would need less cooling (3 ton, 1 ton, 1 ton air conditioners), and we could have reduced peak usage.
For those of you who know about demand meters and large electricity users in NYC, you know what I am talking about. For those that don't, I estimate that I could have knocked off about $600-$800 from the electric bill monthly in summer, and a couple hundred per month in winter/spring. My relative with seafood store was able to cut $5,000 off of his electric bill by shutting down one freezer and one ice machine. Had he implemented a system like I'm envisioning, I estimate he could have knocked off $4,000, and still retain use of all his equipment.
The system could be made very simple. For beverage cases, display cases, small walk-in boxes, etc., all that is needed is simple flexible 4" ducting, with small fans placed within ends to push/pull air. The fans can even be powered through the computer, since the sensor wiring would go there anyway. Or powered by the display cases, where electric outlets are normally available, if using wireless to talk to computer.
Common sense and experimentation would show you where/how to place ducting and fans. I know this would work because we've done something similar on multiple occasions when a display case went down, and freon was hard to locate. It always worked, but without the computer and temperature sensors. We had to carefully eyeball thermometers, and manually turn fans on/off as needed.
Someone who writes the code to run a computer/temp sensors/fans with a system described above, and goes into the field and installs something like this can make some good money. Businesses may be skeptical at first, but when you mention saving electricity, watch their eyes open up.
It would take some effort, but hopefully a geek has a grocery store owner in the family that can try this out. Be aware that dairy/cheese/frozen spoils, and you may only be given the go-ahead with beverage cases only.
System should include dial up or beeper or internet notification if the system or a sensor/fan goes down overnight, alarms for overheated cases, etc. Be aware for dial up that burglary alarm will grab line if triggered, etc.
System should also be configurable/managed through dial-up or internet. Forget billing for field visits for downed computer. You'll be thrown out on your ass the first time you present the bill due to low margins/profits in industry and coservative nature of grocery store owners.
Such a system will save considerable money for grocery store (and other heavy refridgeration/HVAC users) owners, and will be something that you can sell if examples are provided, and you LEASE THE SYSTEM, GIVING TIME FOR THE SYSTEM TO PAY FOR ITSELF, or provide financing through monthly payments, while giving the grocery store owner time to see the savings in his electric bills.
And you'll be helping to save the environment through conservation as well. And I suspect you'll be a celebrity geek in short order.
Now build it!
System should also regulate fans by time, to turn off beverage cases at night when store is closes. This would have to be resolved against defrost cycle which also happens at night, and turns off case compressor as well.
My how old news becomes new again...
I have had a Dallas Semiconductor library for Linux available from my FTP site for about 4-5 years now. Completely open source too. Worked just fine with the DS-1820 and DS-1920 temperature sensors. Heck, I still use it to this day to do temperature checks of equipment.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
I can't reach the guy's site so I don't know if he's added custom drivers, but Dalls Semiconductor has Linux development kits and source code for their 1-Wire stuff here.
yeah, slashdot linked a site to this guy's home office ip through dynip.com
and they thought it would stay up?
he's prolly going to get kicked off his isp for running a server, or even a whole house fully wired with censors has to be against the isp's eula somehow.
Runnin' On Empty
But Is Cindy McCaffrey on it?
Jeeze, we've slashdotted the sensor already.
I hope we didnt end up roasting or freezing the guy.
this could end up as the first slashdot induced fatality.
These pages are still a work in progress.. I'm currently designing version four of my PCB. I'll put more details up when it's ready.
n .h tm
http://ipaq.secret.org.uk/HomeAutomation/HA_Mai
I have been monitoring the temperature inside and outside my house for months using these things. I use a quick perl script to read these devices from my gateway box, and run RRDtool to graph it.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
BTW moderators, it meant to be funny.
Peter
www.alphalinux.org
It's fun but nothing new. A company called Spiderplant.com had a pic based 1-wire kit and I ported their stuff to work with Linux 4 or so years ago. I had a script reading temperature sensors (4 of them) placed around the house( and outside ) and based on that data, I'd direct 2 X10 controlled fans to turn on or off. One fan vented the attic and the other vented downstairs into the attic.
:).
This is very easy to do and very inexpensive. Cool too ( I mean that literally
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Cheap "Hot or Not" PHP script: http://destiney.com/prated/
Yes, I agree it was grossly overcomplicated, and if I were doing the same thing today I'd probably have had the TINI post data to the app server instead, so as to cut the perl script out of the loop. But I didn't really trust the TINI as much more than a really smart 1-Wire interface, so in reality I'd probably design with the RS232-based 1-Wire interface card instead, or use a PIC to do all this. :-)
-jhp
[1] It was a bar fridge and the freezer frequently affected the thermostat due to their closeness. In line with programmer virtue #1, I wanted to wait to defrost until the temperature in the fridge put my food at risk.
[2] This was my first experience with surface-mount soldering. The new rev of the sockets board has a lot less cool stuff on it now -- the LCD interface is gone, for one.
[3]The TINI's Java environment wasn't hefty enough to handle PostgreSQL JDBC drivers so something else had to do this.
[4]It was 2001. I was trying to be nice to the electric grid and my own power bill, even though I was living in a district served by a municipal electric utility. Screw the "right to profit", every town should have one of these.
[5]RRDtool is for wimps and looks bad too. I had sub-pixel resolution, PNG output and anti-aliased fonts.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
I've just created #homeautomation on irc.openprojects.net for anyone who's interested in having a chat about maybe pooling some resources from our many different individual systems.
Tangent
My god since back in the Z80 days there has been house automation to do this. My father has had our house security (with voice synthesizer status, zones), fire/sprinkler, house HVAC (zoned and with season response based on averaged outside conditions), separate garage HVAC control, generator control (we have rural electric), and phone system for the past twelve years! All based on a Z80 running Basic. He has tried a few times to migrate to a PC, however the hardware is way too complex/closed for this system.
Heck most commercial large security systems are still based on Z80s! They work well, are cheap as hell and perfect for this limited embedded purpose.
That said, a 33MHz machine might not have the UARTs and the speed to handle 115.2kbps data, which is the 1-Wire high-speed rate.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
no text
Rather than use of something like a genetic algoritm,I would recommend that you look at 3-mode (aka PID) control, possibly with auto-tuning. This algorithm has been used industrially for process control for 50+ years, and nobody has really found anything better. The first hardware implementations were pnuematic based analog computers. One of the biggest early applications was to control the massive banks of gas diffusion separators at Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project. They were critical for this project because it would not have been possible to control this plant using people due to the size of the operation. At the time this was the largest industrial facility ever built. The electrical demands were so large that Oak Ridge could not obtain enough copper for the electrical runs; silver had to be borrowed from the US Treasury.
http://www.jashaw.com/pid/description.htm
It's actually pretty simple as most zoned commercial hvac systems do it. If any of the rooms fall below their preset temp the heating system is turned on and baffles built into the ductwork for those rooms are opened. As each room reaches it's preset temp it's baffle is shut. When all the rooms have reached their individual preset temperatures the main heating unit system turned off. I know sometimes there are problems with the system being overpressurized when too few rooms need heat, a design may need to factor in for this.
I've got a stack that I wrote and have been using for a few years without a problem...well, until 0325 this morning when a battery in one of my thermometer servers caused the machine to fail. It does a lot of cool stuff, including some cool multicast action for plug-n-play data collection and stuff. You can see some good examples here:
. xtp
http://bleu.west.spy.net/~dustin/projects/ibutton
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
monitor my parents chicken shed located a long way frem thier house. I even started a source forge project to write a generic reader and writer of 1 wire devices so I could have multiple apps could read and write to the one wire network. The project stalled due to lack of time, but I think I'll pick it up again some time. The project is called owis, one wire information server, check it out if your interested. Its not real pretty tho, sorta went in the wrong direction, but I learnt abit so it wasn't a complete loss.
Anyway you can get the sorce code to drive these dohickies from Dallas, can't rememberwhat they call it tho.
This is old thing, i made similar temp monitoring system years ago and it supports upto... well not sure but a lot more than needed, i cannot remember how many sensors parallel, tho eventually pc's COM-port couldn't give enough power prolly, even one sensor doesn't cost much, i used Digitemp to fetch temp info and had an online log running sometime ago but threw whole system away as useless...
Never made system to control heating of house but i thought that about also, and threw it to trashbin as useless... for me =D but maybe some others find that usefull...
We did this stuff at a place I worked called AspenTech (http://www.aspentech.com). I think the product is now called "Aspen Plus Online." When I worked on it it was called RT-Opt (Real Time Optimizer). Of course, there we were optimizing entire chemical plants -- say 3000 independant variables in a 250000 equation system. Heating a house would be a pretty trivial optimization problem. Of course Aspen's software cost, say, a quarter million US for an installation (including consulting to customize the plant model). Out of the range of most homeowners, unfortunately. There's tons of chemical engineering literature on these problems, for those interested.
Howd'ya think companies like Honeywell etc make money??? What you suggest ain't a new concept. They (and others) have been doing it for years...
I know this coz what youre talkin bout...I do for a living (energy managment small to large business..)
People can pay for systems with the money they save.... (almost cxost neutral)
Burma?
What a lot of people here don't get is that you dont need a kick ass processor to do this kind of control
Most HVAC CPU's in the real world operate with 2-5 Sec cycle times to allow for temp variations etc
Mind you ....its not as hella cool as a kick ass CPU.......
So get out that old 386 and turn it into your home zone controller.........
Burma?
I'm going to have to say hot!
The only problem is that I've absolutely no idea how to switch 240VAC mains with my PC. I usually do things by the seat-of-my-pants, but I don't think this would be too clever with "BIG" electricity.
So, has anyone got some knowlege and/or experience they could pass along?
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Misterhouse the Perl home automation system has had the ability to talk to a myriad of sensors including the Dallad Semiconductor Ibutton sensors for a really really long time... Now some guy who recently discovers linux thinks of something neat-o and it get's a slashdot front page story?
If you want to do the dampers and other things download misterhouse from misterhouse.net it's ready to go.... with a ton more capabilities.
Home automation is starting to become a mature industry... so someone fooling with a little bit of electronics is not novel, not innovative, and not anything really special except to the braindead sheep that make up the other 50% of the population out there (I actually feel it's more like a 30-70 split.. espically when leaving a concert and the mass-morons cross the street against the light causing traffic to stop.)
If anyone wants to do this, please do a simple search for linux + home automation on google.. you'll find a plethora of information... I also reccomend researching home automation in general.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
News for nerds, stuff that... Nevermind.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Thus, the Dallas SemiconductorSecret Decoder Ring does require a two-contact connection. It would be more convenient if you could just touch metal to metal and go, for door locks and such. There's a round, socket-like arrangement instead.
Except for the deceptive name, it's a good technology.
what a dumb fuck you are. hardly innovative my ass -- you stupid fucking troll.