Archive → March, 2010
Clock Faces
After spending a bit of time playing with Conky I wondered if there was a Windows option. Turns out there is – it is called Samurize and it comes with a functional GUI editor to make all your system monitors very easily. At the moment I have quite a fascination with the clock style meters. A picture of my configuration is below and you can get the clock meter configuration from here.
The bottom left circles show my hard disk usage (top circles) and my network rx/tx. The ones above that show CPU0 and CPU1 and also RAM usage.
The big one in the middle is a clock that ticks round with seconds, minutes, hours, day, month working from the outside in.
It’s quite a nice funky addition to my desktop. I like it!
Google Powermeter
A post on hackaday alerted me to google power meter and them releasing their new powermeter API. This looks pretty cool- especially for my energy monitoring project!
Taking a look at the more detailed information it looks like Google have some pretty interesting requirements for devices:
- Have to be able to do HTTPS (so need SSL)
- Have to have a webserver on the device (for configuration etc)
SSL is going to be the biggest challenge if we choose to go down this route. Once we have SSL the rest should be pretty easy. The concern with the SSL is the size of the stack and whether one can be implemented and fitted on an XMOS core.
Thankfully Google provide some libraries for the power meter implementation of their API which might go a long way to providing an initial solution – again this is going to need to be ported to whichever TCP/IP stack is used and what SSL stack is used. The current C implementation is specifically tailored for Microchip PIC libraries… so to work I guess!!
Energy Monitor – part 2
So, now I hopefully(!) have my cable which will give me access to the UART RX of the CC128 energy monitor. Time to try it out and begin processing some data with it!
Firstly, I go to the XMOS website and get the UART code and play around with it to create the UART code I want (RX only at the moment), compile it and give it a run.
But it’s never that simple! All I get are null characters. Odd I think – so I recheck the wiring, recheck the code. All seems to be ok.
Continue reading →
Current Cost ‘Envi’ CC128 Teardown
The “Thats the warranty gone…” aka as a ‘teardown’ post!
With the UART TX not working properly I was forced to open it up… so here is a bit of analysis and some photos of what is inside for the curious!
Energy Monitor – Part 1
My energy monitor arrived today! It’s working well – I was slightly worried about how good the reception would be for the transmitter, but I am pleasantly surprised that even with the receiver 3 floors above the transmitter it seems to register a good signal.
But that’s boring – time to start hacking!
So, first thing I need is the interface cable. The back of the unit has a handy RJ45 connector that has serial in it (see my initial energy monitoring post). This needs connecting to my XC-3 kit so that I can begin to get the data out of it. So time to get the soldering iron out!
Hackaday
XMOS Community