On Kickstarter I found a nice project. The Polyes Q1 3D pen! Polyes is the first 3D printing pen with blue light and real inks. Using this pen you can draw objects in 3D space. The ink is hardened using an UV or Blue led light. They offer all kind of inks, from colored inks […]
Time Machine with Raspberry Pi
Create a Time Machine backup location for you Mac OS X systems using a Raspberry Pi and an USB harddisk. Works like a charm! Setup your Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and connect the USB Harddisk. Login to your RPi and execute the following command: $ sudo fdisk -l Your disk will be one of the /dev/sd* […]
Solar Panels 1 year status!
Exactly 1 year ago we had our solarpanels installed on our roof. Time to check if all the nice expectations are fulfilled. Install date: september 20th, 2012 13 x 240 Wp panels 3120 Wp total Pointed towards the east-south-east Supplier estimate: 2800 kWh / year (they said it was a positive number) My own calculated negative […]
Plugable USB 3.0 UGA Display adapter
Today I’ve received the Plugable USB 3.0 UGA multiple display adapter. Using this device you can add multiple displays to Windows systems and also Apple Mac OS X systems. Mac OS X support is added recently so most of the sites still state that only Windows is supported. It can connect to DVI or HDMI […]
Sensor Box
I’ve been working on replacing the 433Mhz cheap transmitters (send only) by the RFM12b 868 Mhz Transceivers (send & receive) by using the RF12 library from jeelib. Things are working now, but it’s quite a bunch of work to convert all devices ;-). Also I’m very happy with the Attiny84 microcontrollers which allow some low […]
Notification when host unavailable
I needed a solution to check every x-minutes if my IP camera is still online. I use the Pushingbox.com service to send a notification when a certain host is not available. Checkout Pushingbox.com to see which kinds of notification services they offer. At least a notification to email and Prowl! is possible. I’ve combined the […]
Phone notifying doorbell with Pushingbox
The sound of our regular doorbell isn’t heard everywhere in the house. Also, sometimes you know that somebody has been at the door but you don’t know who. I found the article below in which especially Pushingbox.com took my interest. Pushingbox is an online service which you can trigger from an Arduino microcontroller very easy. […]
Energy monitoring with Arduino
Since we’ve bought a bunch of solar panels on our roof, I’m building an electricity monitoring device based on the Arduino microcontroller. It’s running for a while, monitoring solar power generation but now it can also read the Smart energy Meter which we got from the energy company. So currently it reads and/or calculates the […]
Solar panels installed
Since september 20th we are the proud owners of 13 solar cells on our roof with a maximum peak of 3120 watts. This should be sufficient to cover at least 50% of our electricity consumption. The panels ‘look’ towards East-South-East. For who is interested, the brand of the panels is Komaes 240 Wp. The invertor […]