Victoria's Blog

Arduino Multi-colour LED Tutorial

12/10/2014

Basics of Securing a VPS

So, you’ve taken the plunge and bought yourself a VPS and want to secure it? This little guide is primarily for me as it took me about 8 hours(!) first time to set up the VPS in such a way that I was happy to leave it, knowing it was …

18/03/2014

Home Monitoring (home made) – Results

And finally the results of all work! There isn’t any change on the first graph which shows generation and import (yes, it should be consumption, but I have yet to work out the right values for the addstatus service). The next graph is the result of all the hard work. …

02/03/2014

Home Monitoring (home made) – Java Code

There are only 6 java classes, 1 properties file and the flow (XML) file making up the Mule application. Some of them can be better written and should be unit tested, but they work and do the job :-)) ConsumptionData.java DefaultReadingData.java HotWaterData.java ConsumptionInputDataTransformer.java ExtraDataOutputTransformer.java HotWaterInputDataTransformer.java pvoutputaggregator.properties pvoutputaggregator.mflow Next Part Part …

Home Monitoring (home made) – Aggregation

Aggregation of the data before uploading to PVOutput Why do we need to aggregate the data? The data collected by the meter reading Arduino will be sent to PVOutput on the addstatus service using the standard parameters. The hot water Arduino will be sending the data on the extended parameters …

Home Monitoring (home made) – Wattson

Reading when the hot water is heated by solar from the Wattson plug Since the Wattson plug and the hot water tank are in close proximity, we can reuse the Arduino that reads the temperate to determine when the Wattson plug is on and heating the water. Another light voltage …

01/03/2014

Home Monitoring (home made) – Temperature

Reading the temperature of the hot water tank This one is not as easy as the export meter as the meter cupboard and the hot water tank are not in the same area as one another, so we had to purchase another Arduino. This time instead of a wifi shield …

Home Monitoring (home made) – Export

Reading the export meter Reading the export meter is relatively easy as the Arduino in the meter cupboard can be extended to have another light voltage converter to read the export meter. So we purchased another part from CPC (for those interested in replicating this, you can use one of …

Home Monitoring (home made) – Overview

We have been working towards monitoring more and more items within the house to see the benefits of the solar array. Last time I posted an article about the meter reader which uses an Arduino and a light voltage converter to read the impulses from the import meter (a huge …

Example of a Spring 3.2 and Hibernate 4 repository base

The is a partial example of a spring 3.2 and hibernate 4 project repository base layer. It doesn’t necessarily compile or even do anything, but it’s an example… aCtx-repository.xml aCtx-dao.xml aCtx-base.xml BaseDao.java AccountDaoImpl.java Account.java

23/02/2014

Problem with Motion on my server

I have an HP N40L MicroServer which I’ve had for over a year now (maybe two!). I chose when I got it to install Ubuntu on it as I thought I needed a little experience in using Linux. It’s been quite a learning curve, but my little server runs 24×7 …

20/01/2014

org.hibernate.HibernateException: No Session found for current thread

I’m creating a little project at home to record some data and I’m using Spring & Hibernate. This problem took me a couple of hours to work out, so I thought I’d post my solution as it wasn’t listed in the 20 or so pages I visited to fix the …

29/12/2013

Open APIs

I’ve recently bought a device which lets me see how much electricity is being consumed, produced and the surplus electricity at any point in time. It’s called a Wattson and sits in the kitchen and lets us know when we can switch on the dishwasher for example and maximise the …

15/12/2013

Arduino Meter Reader

I’ll post soon about my latest purchase – an Arduino and Wifi Shield. The reason I purchased this little toy was to read the impulses from our meter and upload the results to PVOutput. Yeah, I know… sad or what… but when you’re in software integration, it’s oddly good fun …

08/10/2013

GTA5 Trailer!

Just watched the GTA5 trailer on wired.com. The map looks like you could lose an entire year of your life playing the game. The video does look amazing, but I’m not sure I can break my no computer games rule* :-/ Maybe when I retire (in the year 2055) I’ll …

09/07/2013