The Voltbarn Gazette

Well, 2 years seems like a long time for an update. Naturally, an eventful time. I retired from being an exec in the tech industry (yay!). Since building the VoltBarn, have spent time equipping it with a variety of tools, and started learning a bunch of different crafts, in addition

We installed Solar a year ago. After digging through all the manuals and websites, unfortunately the technology inside inverters and battery chargers is still very primitive. At least 20 years behind what we’d consider modern functionality. The battery chargers (from Midnite Solar) speak ModBus over Ethernet. The inverters

With the big move also came a lot of work at my day job, and a lot of commuting. I did get the workshop built, and have built out a few projects: A security/sensor system driven by a Raspberry Pi, moving my weather station data gathering to Pi, and

Made a big move in 2014, moving full-time to Mendocino, CA. I have been working on planning and building a new workshop (the real VoltBarn!) for the past year, which has taken up all my recreational hobbyist time. Have a lot of things in the queue to work on later

This has been sitting in draft mode for about 6 months, figured I’d just publish it in its current state, and improve when I get a chance. I’m now playing with a couple other receivers, one a handheld, battery powered version. Putting together a kit with

I now have the real-time station display working almost perfectly. It can be read on my Android running Nook from across the room, indicates which items changed since the last refresh, along with increase/decrease indicators, and the old value. Only thing missing at this point is wind direction, but

As always, its the magic behind the image that is the cool part here. A constantly updating display screen, inside the basic applications framework. The new bits here are that the screen runs as a separate intention, scrolls between all the loaded weather stations (check out the screen indicator at

Thanks to the code from Ivan Memruk at Mind The Robot, and refinements done by Freddy Martens at atstechlab, I made some additional tweeks to get a reasonable detail gauge for the weather. I still have more work to do on the details, the current code, although very

First step, grabbing data sent to Weather Underground from several of my SensorPacks. You’ll note the humidity sensor went out on one sensor, and the second is tracking a slightly higher than realistic humidity, compared to “03”, which is a reference commercial weather station I have.

Here’s a demo of data from the SensorPacks being displayed on a TFT Touchscreen/shield I picked up from Adafruit. Writing a simple UI via graphics primitives reminded me of building UI’s back in the day, where all you have are lines, circles, and x/y

Wired up an LED light strip I got from Adafruit, and tweaked the example software, here’s the result..

I realized I’d never gotten around to posting a picture or video of the display station actually working. I’ve had this running for nearly a year now, first on a breadboard, and then via the shift register circuit board I had made. I mounted the LED&

After building a display station, based on some really nice 6.5″ LED’s I got from SparkFun, I found that wiring it up was straighforward, but quite messy, using a breadboard. A lot of wires to connect, a lot of resistors. I designed a circuit board to

Using several serial LED displays, I expanded my earlier single-display monitor. This uses an XBee to receive information sent from a computer from one or more SensorPacks, and show the current time (sent from the computer, I didn’t want to add the cost of a real time clock,

Bought these big 6.5″ LEDs from SparkFun, and using these TPIC6B595 shift registers, have it all running via an Arduino, with just 3 wires from the Arduino capable of running as many LEDs as I want. Wiring diagram and sample code coming soon, I want to clean it

To make putting together the sensor breakout boards (for an SHT15 and SCP1000) and Arduino Fio easier, I used Eagle to design a simple circuit board, then used SparkFun’s great service, BatchPCB, to get the boards produced. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, especially

One of the neatest new projects I saw at the faire brought back memories of watching the Apollo missions in the 60’s. The iconic and unique IEE one-plane digital display unit. Had never seen one up close, and didn’t know how they worked. Found out that

Step-by-step of building the first sensor pack protoboard with basic temperature, humidity and pressure sensors, using an Arduino Fio. Parts list: Radio shack perf board – Catalog #: 276-148 Arduino Fio – Arduino board, with XBee socket and built-in battery charger SHT15 – Temperature and humidity sensor, on a break-out board

Here’s the Arduino Fio, plus sensors, mounted on a project board. All ready to go into the solar radiation shield. Here’s the sensor pack with the LiPo battery and solar cell. Note the DTR jumper to pin #4 for putting the XBee to sleep, and the

An Arduino Fio, SHT15, and SCP1000 sensor on a breadboard, along with a LiPo battery and solar cell ]]>

Now that I have the basic sensor pack working moderately well, and know the changes I need to make, I wanted to do something more interesting on the status side. I already have the software updating twitter, my VoltBarn microblog and Weather Underground. Putting up a comprehensive webpage will be

Did a lot of work over the last few days using Processing to communicate via USB to an receiving XBee, and then taking the resulting information from the sensors I’ve got installed so far and publishing it in a bunch of different places. I have the information going

After I’ve got this all working well with the right hardware and software, I’ll be putting together a kit of all the components to build your own in the soon-to-be-opening store! I plan to have several versions of this sensor pack, a basic temperature/pressure unit,