Acid Pump - Fine, I Give Up.
I've been working on an Acid Pump system to automate the injection of acid into my swimming pool. There are a ton of details on this effort on my Swimming Pool page. Well, it failed again today....
View ArticleCharting Things
I was stumbling around the site where I store my data Cosm.com (it used to be Pachube.com) and noticed that they have updated their charting capabilities considerably. This made the data on my Detail...
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Outdoor Temperature
I've had an outdoor temperature sensor for quite a while now. It's a simple temperature sensor hooked to an Xbee that gets power from a wall wart I picked up on ebay. The description of this little...
View ArticleOutdoor Temperature - Holy Cow
It's 9:30AM here and the temperature outside is 110F. WHAT?? I had no idea it got that hot that early in the day here. Fine, I've lived here for several years now and lived through 120F plus days...
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Acid Pump - Back in Service.....Again
A few posts back I declared that I was done trying to make the Hanna Dosing Pump work. That was a fact, I've just had too many problems with this device and am totally tired of messing with it. I did...
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Battery Charging - Part 3 (Harbor Freight item 42292)
Part 1 of this project is here, and part 2 is here.Yes, I'm still working on a good float charger for maintaining my batteries. See my other posts on this here and here for a recap of the project. I...
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Rain - Finally
Late yesterday afternoon it finally rained here. Oh, there's been slight showers and even a few minutes of real rain, but my area finally got the first real rain since last year. It started a little...
View ArticleSwimming Pool Controller
I have an entire page devoted to my swimming pool controller and other devices related to the pool here. The device works pretty well, but since there are two protocols, (Goldline and my own) and they...
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Power Washer - Frustration in Action
I've talked to my various neighbors and some other folks around my parts about power washers and they all agree, unless you get an expensive commercial or prosumer version, they fall apart too easily....
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Garage Controller - New Device at My House
I have a nice big garage that I use a lot, but I constantly leave the doors open. Seems about half the time I get part way down the dirt road away from home and have to try and remember if I closed the...
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Battery Charging - Part 4 (Harbor Freight item 42292)
Part 1 of this project is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here.I probably will never actually finish this project to my satisfaction. If you have been following this for the last many months, you...
View ArticleHome Automation - Practical Application
It was a nice rainy morning in the desert and I decided to open the doors and air out the house. I had all the doors open and the breeze, laden with the smell of wet earth, was circulating through the...
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I love the desert, but....
Look at the picture below:See the rattlesnake? Here's a closer look:If you look closely enough, you'll see the holes in its head from the 22 caliber snake shot rounds that killed it. This snake was...
View ArticleDogs and Rattlesnakes
After dealing with the second dog I've had bitten by a rattlesnake <link>, I decided people needed more information about snake avoidance. There are a ton of sites out there that all espouse,...
View ArticleAlternatives to Cosm (Pachube)
There are a few alternatives to Cosm for handling devices that report over the web. I'm currently playing with Sen.se (open.sen.se) and it has some really cool features that I haven't seen before. See,...
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More About XBee Broadcast
I discuss the usefulness of XBee broadcast here <link>, but there is a problem with this I didn't foresee. It seems that, if you get enough devices, the network gets flooded and becomes...
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Monitoring My XBee Network
In the previous post <link> I wrote about how I discovered broadcast mode can cause problems as you increase the number of nodes. That led to a method of monitoring each node to see what it was...
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Using the XBee library
Recently Paul Stoffregen created a new software serial library for the Arduino, then he modified Andrew Rapp's XBee library to use it (as well as the older, but really great, SoftwareSerial libray)....
View ArticleUsing the XBee Library Part 2
Previously, I talked about using Andrew Rapp's XBee library on a project and posted an example. This is the second example I've been working on. The objective is to understand the library well enough...
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Tiny Power Supplies for Micro Controller Projects
When you build micro controller projects, eventually you want to do something real that will have to work long term. For this you need a power supply that is small, maybe small enough to put in a...
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