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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.
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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
Am I Geek Or Not
'Nuff said. I claim no affiliation with this site.
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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!
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.
How do you measure the "success" of the control of an automatic horse feeder ?
By the number of horses which don't starve ?
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
more to the point, I lived 18 years with my parents with no AC, no magic temperature sensing house, etc. Who cares? Whats a little tempurature-related adversity in ones life?
All the technology in the world wont bring you back to the womb. Better to be tough and deal with it.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.