My brother is taking a break from his career at the moment. He works in finance – I’m not sure of the actual details but I know it involves targets, bonuses etc. It’s a job a the heart of our capitalist society. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with capitalism per se. However it does lead to another question “Why do people “do” open source”. When I talk to people about open source, probably the most common question I get asked is “why do people write this software if they’re not being paid?”. I can see understand that thinking. So what really motivates us, not just to be involved with open source, but motivates us in general? I think this clip sums it up rather well. It’s 10mins long, but I’d urge you to watch it to the end, but skip to about 8 mins in if you’re inpatient.
OMG! The electricity bill!
The quarterly bill tumbled through the letter plate. Normally I just leave in the heap of unopened mail nearby but I decided to open it. Quarterly electricity bill – £430!! After uttering some choice expletives at high volume, I decided something needed to be done. A hour or two on a few money saving websites (mostly moneysavingexpert.com), I found a better tarrif, and more interestingly for the geek inside, a tarrif that included a free currentcost envi energy meter! These normally retail at about £45 and consist of two units 1) a current clamp which you clip around the cable going into your fuse box and 2) a receiving unit that can be placed within 100ft (it’s wireless). It displays current watt usage, local temperature. More importantly it has a serial port on the back which spits out XML data every 6 seconds.
A serial port to usb adapter is available from the manufacturers for about £10, but a quick trip to google revealed that many mobile phones shipped with a USB cable that was in fact a USB – serial converter. I never throw anything away – to my wife it’s my deepest character flaw. Needless to say a quick rummage in my man drawer yielded 6 mobile phone USB cables. A win for the man drawer! (If the portuguese escudos ever gets reintroduced, I’m quids in by the way). Plugging them into the laptop and checking dmesg showed that 2 were indeed usb-serial cables. 10 mins with a soldering iron and an rj45 plug, I had a rather ugly, but free, usb-currentcost adapter. It’s now plugged into my revo running ubuntu 10.04. Continue reading
Garden Automation Post 2
Wow. This weekend it felt like the long and depressing winter we’ve had in the UK has finally come to an end. This has given added impetus to my automation project. I’m still testing stuff out at the moment, but I’ve found an arduino clone with inbuilt wireless that’s nice and cheap – the jeenode. I ordered a pair of the jeenode v4′s last Wednesday and they were delivered on Friday. Some self assembly is required and rudimentary soldering iron skills needed, but the instructions on the website are excellent. I did make a slight error – unlike the arduino mega which has an on board usb-ftdi combo, the jeenodes need a separate usb-ftdi lead….which I didn’t have. That’s on order and I look forwards to putting them through their paces.