Linking TED-5000 to plotwatt.com

Since the demise of Google PowerMeter on September 16, 2011 I haven't done much with the data from my TED 5000 power meter .

I recently upgraded the TED firmware, and see there is support for several other 3rd party utilities, so I've started pushing data to plotwatt.   They offer commercial services, as well as free analysis for residential users.   Their secret sauce is "advanced machine learning algorithms" to figure out what appliances are drawing power, similar to the Load Profile feature in the TED-5000.  So far, mine is still learning, they warn you that it can take as much as 30 days to learn.

The plotwatt service supports not just The Energy Detective (TED-5000), but also supports WattVision, Blue Line Innovations PowerCost Monitor (with WiFi bridge), Current Cost,and eGauge. as well as an API for rolling your own data source.

I've tried activating and deactivating the 3rd party posting in TED, but it always seems to want to send just one sample every 5 minutes, which is well outside the maximum interval of 100 seconds recommended by plotwatt to get the benefits of their advanced machine learning algorithms...

Pushing TED 5000 data as snapshot graphs with Chart::Clicker

I wanted to make my TED 5000-C power monitoring accessible both for internal clients that didn't have the horsepower to run Footprints, and also publish the data externally for remote clients.

 I put together a simple Perl script which uses the 1-minute-resolution historical data from the TED-5000 to build a simple graph using Chart::Clicker, like this:

TED-5000 by The Energy Detective

Installed my TED-5000 from The Energy Detective.


The little handheld wireless display is sort of flimsy, but is handy to figure out the load from a light or other appliance -- flip the switch, wait a few seconds, compare the reported KW/h consumption. TED was the first consumer-installable measurement tool that integrates with Google powermeter, a driving reason behind choosing it over the competitors.

The only real problem I have with the system is that it is incompatible with old-style X10 signals;  when you connect TED, it causes some X10 devices to go crazy, specifically, they turn on by themselves.   Pretty bad problem for something that is supposed to help *reduce* how much power you use.

NDA expired

I'm no longer under my former employer's Non-Disclosure.

Good things to come.

Soekris troubles (2.5" SATA hard drive mounting kit)

The system arrived with the motherboard mounted in the small (light green) case, and the 2.5" SATA hard drive mounting kit in a separate plastic bag. The drive kit is the problem

I'm using a SanDisk 256MB CF for the OS, and once I got the hang of PXEboot (and gave up on the 4.3 snapshots), installing OpenBSD to flash was easy enough.

The trouble came when I went to mount an extra laptop SATA drive in the case. The mounting kit came without instructions, just an iron bracket, four screws, four brass standoffs:


The standoffs replace the screws that mount the motherboard to the case, but the four screws are too long -- I tried using them to hold the plate (bracket) to the standoffs, and the case top would no longer fit, the screw sticks up to far.

Tried tightening the screw the rest of the way down, and succeeded...

in breaking off the threaded part in the case!

The bottom of the brass standoff can be seen in the socket on the bottom of the case, so now there's nothing holding down that corner of the motherboard:

The screws are too long to use anywhere, they also don't work to hold the drive to the bracket, but at least I managed not to break one off in the drive too.

Soekris arrived!

My Soekris Net5501-70 arrived today.

Oddly, the default serial console is 19200, not 9600. Working on CF boot media now, at least until I pick up a cheap multi-gigabyte card from Fry's.

POST: 012345689bcefghips1234ajklnopqr,,,tvwxy








comBIOS ver. 1.33  20070103  Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.

net5501

0512 Mbyte Memory                        CPU Geode LX 500 Mhz


Slot   Vend Dev  ClassRev Cmd  Stat CL LT HT  Base1    Base2   Int
-------------------------------------------------------------------
0:01:2 1022 2082 10100000 0006 0220 08 00 00 A0000000 00000000 10
0:06:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E101 A0004000 11
0:07:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E201 A0004100 05
0:08:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E301 A0004200 09
0:09:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E401 A0004300 12
0:20:0 1022 2090 06010003 0009 02A0 08 40 80 00006001 00006101
0:20:2 1022 209A 01018001 0005 02A0 08 00 00 00000000 00000000
0:21:0 1022 2094 0C031002 0006 0230 08 00 80 A0005000 00000000 15
0:21:1 1022 2095 0C032002 0006 0230 08 00 00 A0006000 00000000 15

 1 Seconds to automatic boot.   Press Ctrl-P for entering Monitor.

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.0 (build 082)
Copyright (C) 1997,1998,1999  Intel Corporation
VIA Rhine III Management Adapter v2.43 (2005/12/15)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable

PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM.

No Boot device available, enter monitor.


comBIOS Monitor.   Press ? for help.

>

Re: Sunfire V100 reports "dc0: failed to force tx and rx to idle state"?

I'd mentioned dc0 problems quite a while back, and they're still an issue.

Just did a fresh install of 4.0 from the release CD on a Sunfire V100,and as soon as I did "ifconfig dc1 up", I got this message:

dc0: failed to force tx and rx to idle state

This time I hadn't even gotten around to setting up the network orforcing the speed and duplex, so it's not what I'd previously suspected...

I would still like to know what causes this, and whether it's something to worry about.

Why T-Mobile picture messages are resized

Found an explanation for why TMobile messes with your picture messages:



http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1064299&highlight=prepaid



So the problem is that T-Mobile is doing this intentionally in their MMS gateway. There are a couple of hacks to get around this, but they are non-trivial.



There's a slight difference between MMS (multimedia phone messages) and emails, which is why sending a picture as an "email" gives different results.

Cell Tower Mapping

I ran across this about six months ago, forgot where.

http://www.cellreception.com/towers/

Also has an area to post notes on cell phone dead spots.I've also noticed that many carriers are improving their onlinecoverage maps, but these tend to show "signal strength" by broad areaswithout explicitly depicting the location of towers...

Train as gothic atrocity? uh...

http://cowperthwait.livejournal.com/85239.html

Avowed Kink

Alarm Beacon for USB

I'm not aware of anything supported under OpenBSD,but this article could be a good start towards such a project:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7353

(Yes, I know the article is about Linux. But the $59 USB beaconthey used in the article is platform-agnostic.)