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41

Electronics / Re: AD7705 16-Bit Analog to Digital (ADC) Converter Hanging After Seconds-To-Minutes

« Last post by Cube on April 14, 2016, 12:55:43 PM »

I've been working on this project with renewed vigor of late, trying to get it to workable status in time for this year's outdoor watering season. I really want to monitor my water consumption patterns, particularly since we've also had a few leaky toilets that sometimes don't shut off the water inside the tank after a flush. Totally different problem, but one that can be easily resolved with some monitoring of the tank and/or the water consumption of the house.

Looking back over these posts dated quite a few months ago, I was shocked to realize how much I'd forgotten about the headaches I had with it since that time. Recently I've been experiencing much of the same problems, thinking they were new, and come to several pseudo-conclusions:

• I'm still using the same laptop, which could be faulty.
• Mark has pointed out that he's had similar "ghost-like" issues solved by re-flashing the bootloader.
• Not many people on the Internet report having similar problems to the ones I've been reporting.
• The environment and build of the prototype could be suspect.

The reason I suspect the laptop of ill is that often, even when just trying to flash the device, the process fails. This could be due to Virtualbox, since I am technically operating the serial port from inside a vbox virtual machine. On times where it failed to flash the first prototype, it only failed during the read (verification) stage - write always succeeded. However, I since tried using a different board and hot-wired the prototype over to it only to find that it would more readily fail on the write cycle, never even making it to the read stage. When it did succeed on a successive attempt, it worked flawlessly, making me think that much of the headaches and hassles I'd been experiencing were directly related to the physical layout and design of the first prototype. I've started working on a PCB design in KiCad, to produce a "proper" prototype of this product. In the mean time, I'm going to try connecting it to a standalone IP to Serial converter, physically separating it from the laptop, to see if that doesn't help as well.

42

V_DAC / VDAC Firmware V2

« Last post by Cube on March 28, 2016, 01:32:38 PM »

I've been working on a new firmware / communication protocol for VDAC devices that will both bring new functionality and simplify communications between VDAC devices and the Venturii Module VDAC. As Mark has pointed out, this ambiguity is sub-optimal, since it is not always clear when talking about VDAC if we are referring to the modules themselves (hardware), the code they run (firmware) or the interface module for talking to downstream devices and interfacing that data with Venturii Decider (software.) VDAC stands for Venturii Data Acquisition & Control, and is an over-arching term that encompasses a lot of different aspects of this project. Mark is correct though, we need some better terms to distinguish between the hardware, firmware and software components of this system. Since creating names for things is not my forte, I'm open to suggestions.

John

43

General Discussion / Automation System's Primary Objective

« Last post by Cube on March 21, 2016, 03:15:54 PM »

Automation systems can serve many purposes, which one would you say you consider your primary objective when designing an automation system?

44

General Discussion / Irrigation Season is Approaching

« Last post by Cube on March 21, 2016, 03:10:24 PM »

Spring seems to be coming early this year after a record-breaking, mild winter. Already a number of my trees are engulfed in buds and several shrubs are almost in leaf. The little boy in me sees all these signs and looks forward to fast-approaching day when I will charge the underground sprinkler system water lines and begin to water all the trees, grass, shrubs and hanging baskets automatically. Actually, I've always loved controlling water with electricity, and my school work from about grade 5 on is doodled often with depictions of underground sprinklers, aerial views and sprinkler layout plans. It should therefore come as no surprise that one of the first things I've done in every house I've owned is installed an underground sprinkler system.

This year I'm starting work on a new module in Decider to allow for more detailed water usage control for my sprinkler system. I came across a product brief from 1988 for Irritrol, Richdel and Hardie controllers & sprinklers. I used to collect such material from a local irrigation contractor (Regency Irrigation Ltd.) and one of the sales ladies there used to know me by name. Over 20 years later, I still remember that her name was Brenda. Of course, I'm sure they didn't have too many 12-year-olds coming in, asking about their latest products and amassing binders full of product guides, spec sheets and flyers. Anyway, reading through some of the features of these controllers got me thinking that it would not be that difficult to implement a number of the ones not already in Decider for better irrigation control. While I already have things like unlimited start times, rain / freeze sensor overrides, pump starts and soil moisture sensor feedback, I do not have an explicit feature that allows separate programs to be called for irrigation. Nor do I have the ability at the present time to dynamically increase or decrease the amount of water received. (Irritrol called this water budgeting.) All that to say, Decider 0.5.2 has a number of new features in the works, hopefully ready just in time to put them into use for this year's watering season.

45

Automation / Extra Heat in the Winter

« Last post by Cube on December 27, 2015, 11:48:42 AM »

I've been collecting a lot of data, studying the way my thermostat makes decisions about when to fire the furnace and when to not. By and large it does a pretty good job of maintaining the desired temperature at the thermostat - in fact, it's got the temperature in that part of the house down to a science. However, therein lies the problem with almost every residential HVAC in North America - a single control makes decisions that affect all parts of the house without any feedback from any of them! This scenario would be similar to having a single light switch that controlled every light in your house, or a single water valve that controlled the flow of every tap, sink and shower in your house. Put in that context, it sounds quite silly, and yet we have a single thermostat, typically centrally mounted, that determines how much heat every room, hallway and space in the house gets.

This is normally where I'd jump into the zoning bandwagon, and I zoned my last house quite successfully with Honeywell ARD-5 Automatic Round Dampers. Venturii monitored temperature sensors around the house, upstairs and down, and even some door contacts & motion sensors, and shut off certain ducts when rooms were either too warm, unoccupied, or both. The result was a much more comfortable living space throughout the house, and we saved on gas and electricity too. The Honeywell dampers were an "all or nothing" valve-like damper though, and short of doing some well-timed pulse magic on the relay controlling each damper, it was virtually impossible to get them to open "half-way" and stay in that position because of their spring-return mechanism. I'm in the process of designing my own dampers which I'll prototype in my own house since I have access to every one of the ducts supplying conditioned air to 18 vents throughout.

Anyway, I'm getting way off (what I had intended this topic to be) which was a change I made to the furnace control system last night. As it is, my thermostat provides an input to Venturii, which for the most part, simply passes that control data to a relay which is connected to the heat call circuit of our forced air furnace. It's a Carrier 80% efficient Induced Draft furnace. One piece of important information my thermostat does not have at it's disposal is the outside air temperature. Therefore, to help it along, I've now implemented some primitive runoff logic that basically evaluates the temperature of the outside air, and adds a number of seconds proportional to that temperature to the end of each heating cycle, causing the furnace to run longer the colder it is outside. So far today, the house feels a lot warmer, though that could just be me who is now hypersensitive to the air temperature given my recent logic change behind the scenes. My wife will be the real barometer of whether or not this change has helped or not.

46

Console-Based User Interfaces / Console Versus Graphic vs Web User Interface

« Last post by Cube on December 26, 2015, 10:40:29 AM »

One of the first challenges I came to while designing Venturii was the form of user interface to use. On the one end of the scale you've got console-based interfaces, which offer practically unlimited access to every feature, parameter, command, and option. But they're not pretty, and can be daunting for the inexperienced or unfamiliar to approach. At the other end of the scale you've got pretty web interfaces, but often that visual appeal comes at the cost of depth - you simply cannot put all the controls on a web page or it quickly becomes unmanageable. Thus, function gives way to form as the most important options rise to the forefront while the more advanced or lesser-used features sink out of sight. The end result was actually a hybrid of the two, where there is a console interface for all modules that allows access to everything, while more data / less configuration has made it's way to the front end web interface. Actually I'm in the process of re-writing Decider so that much more of the configuration can be done from the web interface, but that's topic for another post in another forum. This forum discusses the console interface.

One of the first things on the TODO list for the console is the unification of all the commands - Mark has lamented numerous times how sometimes the same command has a different syntax in different contexts. This is, of course, the inevitable result of writing different components at different times, and perhaps a hint of laziness as the better practices discovered in more recent work was not backwards-applied to older code. However, I've been trying to use the bug tracker (http://venturii.net/bugs) to identify each of these anomalies so that they can by systematically corrected in time.

47

General Discussion / Oh How I Hate Spam!

« Last post by Cube on December 13, 2015, 05:42:42 PM »

It's 2015. Part of me cannot believe that we still have spam. Yet this forum has experienced a rash of new users signing up with the sole and express purpose of posting spam as though it were legitimate content. As such, I've changed the new user registration policy to require E-Mail verification, and if spammers continue to be un-detererred by that measure, I will have to take more drastic measures. Of course, at this point our traffic is pretty much exclusively search engine bots, but I hope that as I write more and more about Venturii and what I'm working on <behind the scenes> that others may pick up some of the topics found through similar searches and begin to contribute to this site.

48

Energy Management & Monitoring / Re: The Downside To Energy Monitoring and Management

« Last post by Cube on December 13, 2015, 05:38:35 PM »

There is definitely something to be said for the bliss of ignorance when it comes to energy usage. The more I peruse my graphs and produce increasingly granular reports on energy usage and commodity consumption, the more I feel a deep-seated urge to try to increase the efficiency of things.

Efficiency can be gained by numerous means, the simplest of which is to simply not use a resource.

Turning things off is probably the easiest goal to achieve with any automation platform, and Venturii is no exception. By using Passive Infrared and other forms of occupancy sensors, it is a trivial matter to have Venturii turn off the lights in a space when that space is unoccupied. I've even taken it a step further, utilizing a recent feature addition called Torx Pegs which allows me to do things at regular intervals. I've implemented a new set of instructions that cause Venturii to turn off every light in the house during the day on an hourly basis, providing it is very bright outside. This becomes a bit of a catch-all, especially for areas of the house that do not have occupancy sensors like the kitchen and dining rooms, areas that are often used and often left lit, unattended. Because the Torx peg restricts this sweep to once per hour, it's generally been received by the family as acceptable; if the lights get turned off when my wife is in the kitchen during the day, she simply turns back on the ones she needs to.

One of the more interesting means of improving efficiency involves more intelligence on the system calling the shots. Many of the appliances in my house have their own control systems built in that are designed to be reliable and robust given an unpredictable deployment environment and unforeseeable usage pattern. Many manufacturers have to build to the lowest common denominator, and while this accommodates the widest demographic of appliance users, it is usually sub-optimal.

For example, I have three refrigeration appliances in my house of six occupants. Two are the "normal" kinds an s with a fridge on the bottom and a freezer on top. Our third is an upright freezer. Two of these have been Venturii'd - with at least a couple of DS18B20 temperature sensors installed within key locations. The third, our main fridge in the kitchen, remains a virgin.

Through my analysis of the temperature data collected from the basement's fridge and freezer, I've discovered a number of interesting things about their usage patterns:

• The basement fridge compressor runs about 50% of the time, quite possibly making it the least efficient of the three refrigerators.
• None of the refrigerators have any means to detect ice buildup in the condenser coils and run a defrost cycle every 24 hours whether it needs to or not.
• Occasionally the doors of said appliances get left open. This has forced me to install door position sensors on the fridge and freezer doors in the basement, with an alarm that sounds if either is left open for more than 60 seconds.

I am fairly confident that if I took over control of the compressor and defrost coil, I could make all three refrigerators operate much more efficiently, taking into account time of day, the number of times the door is opened, the cooling load of its' contents, and the ambient air temperature outside of each appliance. More on that later.
[/list]

49

Energy Management & Monitoring / The Downside To Energy Monitoring and Management

« Last post by Cube on December 05, 2015, 12:54:46 PM »

I've been tracking my utility usage with Venturii for quite a few years now. At first it was merely an amusement to me, but as my budget grew tighter it became an invaluable tool for making effective changes to the way I consume energy. One of the greatest challenges we as consumers face when it comes to our energy consumption is that there are not a lot of convenient ways to monitor this information in a timely manner - most of us have no idea how much energy or water we've used until we get our bill in the mail a month later, and by that time several weeks have already past since that data was collected. This cumulative total every 30 days gives only the broadest glimpse of our utility consumption patterns, and provides almost no information about influences like "How cold was it outside? How many hours of sunshine did I have to compensate with artificial light? How many times and/or how long did I run the stove, dryer, furnace, etc. this month?" Venturii's real-time feedback on your consumption at any given point allows you to walk around your house and turn on or off appliances, lights, or devices and see right then and there how much of a difference it makes to your power consumption.

This kind of feedback can be invaluable for determining where your biggest consumers of electricity, gas and water are around your property, but there is a downside. As we enter the Christmas season, we've set up our Christmas tree. Last year we decided to move away from buying a real tree every year for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fire hazard the tree posed by the time we actually got to Christmas. Not wanting to decrease the appeal, we splurged a bit and got a very nice fake tree that came pre-lit with 1,300 miniature lights. It looks amazing. However, due to Venturii I know that it draws 470 watts of power, and makes a considerable blip on my power consumption graphs. Therefore, illuminating the Christmas tree is a bittersweet event - it looks beautiful, but I know exactly how much it costs to run.

50

Web-Based User Interface / Report Groups

« Last post by Cube on November 13, 2015, 08:48:34 PM »

One of the things I would like to add to the web based user interface in the reports section is the ability to pre-configure multiple reports (graphs) that can all be run concurrently over the same date / time range. For example, every day I review the power, water and gas consumption of the previous day and/or that day up until [now], the temperature readings around the house & garage, salt levels in my water softener, Solar system power collection and discharge rates, etc. Currently I keep these reports all open in different browser tabs and refresh each one every day. It would be great if I could configure a set of reports that all run at the same time in the same window, showing me all the days' activity in a single report.