I don't see this device being all that useful for hibernate wake-up, but it is interesting if the 256MB just acts as a persistent write-cache. Often in linux the hard drive never spins down, because things are constantly being written (log files, atime updates on the FS, etc). This can be reduced by using laptop-mode (and mounting -o noatime ) for the filesystem, but then you run the risk of losing data if the system dies and nothing has been synced with disk for a long time. And the last thing you want to do is spin up the disk every 10-15 mintues(because of the wait, power, and wear from this), but you need to to keep the filesystem consistent. But with 256MB of write space, that doesn't require the disk to be spun up, that is synced with the "real" disk when it *is* spun up (for reading uncached stuff probably) would make for a large power savings on systems that have enough RAM to keep everything in memory. I guess linux can take advantage of that immediately, with no special tweaks, if the drive is doing everything. But I have read other articles that say that you need Vista to take advantage of this drive.
I use a HAI Omnistat RC-80 computer controllable thermostat (available here for about $160, or cheaper on ebay), a serial cable (made from CAT 5 cable), and some software I wrote (available here) for computer control.
The thermostat operates on it's own (no risk of freezing pipes if the software chokes), but you can reprogram it through the serial port, including changing mode (heat/cool/off), temperature set point (seperate for heat and cool), the schedule for automatic setback for weekdays/saturday/sunday (4 times per day), or setting the clock. You can also read all the settings/current temperature from the thermostat. It even keeps track of how long the heater/AC has been on for the past week. I have a cron job that reads this everynight, does a difference based on the last nights reading, and generates graphs using rrdtool. (Example here).
With a little bit of procmail processing, I can send my server at home to get status information, or turn the heat up before I drive home from work.
If you want to do dual zone, you can just get a second thermostat, you can put multiple thermostats on the same serial cable (I haven't tested that though). If you need more complex scheduling, a cron job can take care of that, and just reprogram the thermostat daily, or constantly.
Yea, it sucks bigtime that ADSL went online before the cable modems at GSC, even though they have been saying they will be ready "in a few months" for years now.
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I don't see this device being all that useful for hibernate wake-up, but it is interesting if the 256MB just acts as a persistent write-cache. Often in linux the hard drive never spins down, because things are constantly being written (log files, atime updates on the FS, etc). This can be reduced by using laptop-mode (and mounting -o noatime ) for the filesystem, but then you run the risk of losing data if the system dies and nothing has been synced with disk for a long time. And the last thing you want to do is spin up the disk every 10-15 mintues(because of the wait, power, and wear from this), but you need to to keep the filesystem consistent. But with 256MB of write space, that doesn't require the disk to be spun up, that is synced with the "real" disk when it *is* spun up (for reading uncached stuff probably) would make for a large power savings on systems that have enough RAM to keep everything in memory. I guess linux can take advantage of that immediately, with no special tweaks, if the drive is doing everything. But I have read other articles that say that you need Vista to take advantage of this drive.
I use a HAI Omnistat RC-80 computer controllable thermostat (available here for about $160, or cheaper on ebay), a serial cable (made from CAT 5 cable), and some software I wrote (available here) for computer control.
The thermostat operates on it's own (no risk of freezing pipes if the software chokes), but you can reprogram it through the serial port, including changing mode (heat/cool/off), temperature set point (seperate for heat and cool), the schedule for automatic setback for weekdays/saturday/sunday (4 times per day), or setting the clock. You can also read all the settings/current temperature from the thermostat. It even keeps track of how long the heater/AC has been on for the past week. I have a cron job that reads this everynight, does a difference based on the last nights reading, and generates graphs using rrdtool. (Example here).
With a little bit of procmail processing, I can send my server at home to get status information, or turn the heat up before I drive home from work. If you want to do dual zone, you can just get a second thermostat, you can put multiple thermostats on the same serial cable (I haven't tested that though). If you need more complex scheduling, a cron job can take care of that, and just reprogram the thermostat daily, or constantly.
Yea, it sucks bigtime that ADSL went online before the cable modems at GSC, even though they have been saying they will be ready "in a few months" for years now.