James Sentman

When I learned that there were multimeters out there that had documented serial protocols I added that to my todo list for XTension support. I bought this one from radio shack more than a year ago and never got around to looking at it in any detail. Now with the kids just starting back at school and having just unearthed the protocol docs it was time to do something about it while I refreshed my memory on the code I haven't touched in months while I played with the kids over the summer. This is just first light, it's not quite beta ready yet but it's talking to XTension and updating a unit value in the database for the displayed value. Here is my Radio Shack model 22-812 multimeter with an FTDI usb/serial adaptor sticking out of the top and a View in XTension showing the value.

Still on my to do list is a significant change value that can be set, otherwise you will get a lot of updates at higher resolutions. This is just measuring line voltage here and it's bouncing around a couple of tenths of a volt constantly. So being able to set that will help. Additionally I could do some conversion to handle the auto-ranging... Or just recommend that if you're likely to change ranges while you are reading something to turn off auto ranging. The way the protocol works it just sends the display characters, not an ultimate voltage or reading. So this display might be volts or millivolts or ohms or megaohms or milliohms... This can read out anything that the meter can read so you might use it for temperature or with a clamp on current transformer or something. One thing I have noticed is that the auto-off feature to save the battery seems to be turned off when logging to the serial port. This is good because it means you could power it with a 9v wall wort replacement and it will keep running and not shut itself down.

We shall see how useful it turns out to be for me. In the meantime if you want to play with it before I get around to an official beta please drop me an email and I can send you the new builds that include support for it.

Really nice new house, but the lights under the cabinets are so ancient that the tubes actually have a starter and click click light BZzzzzzz. Totally unacceptable! Good under cabinet fixtures, even of the regular florescent type (and I have no interest in the halogen type, too hot and wasteful not to mention continual bulb changes) are very expensive, upwards of $50 a light and more for the wider ones. Little LED ones are available but they are even more expensive but not nearly as bright. Current limited power supplies for LED's are available now directly from china at pretty decent prices and one watt warm white LED's are not that expensive anymore either so I tried to roll my own to replace the lights here.

The power supply is a 7 to 12 LED driver from dealextreme.com and the LED's are from them too. All you have to do is solder them in series and glue them to a heat sink. But that is not as easy as it sounds...

I decided to reuse the fixture cases already wired in under my sink, the power supply is small and will easily fit in them. I used a piece of u-channel aluminum an inch or so shorter than the length of the bulb that used to be in the fixture and arranged the LED's upon it.

First lesson learned: The wire I used was too thick. It's just a watt of power so thinner wire would have been fine and would have made it much easier to manage during the glue up portion.

Here's the channel with the led's being held down while the epoxy cures with blue tape.

as it turns out, blue tape could not hold them in place with the resistance from the overly heavy wire I used and none of them glued flat. Heat kills LED, they must have good attachments to the bar or they will die and dim early.

So I pried them all off and began again, this time using one of these blue clamps which have cutouts in the face just about the right size to cradle the lens on the LED without breaking it. So now they are glued on right and they are really quite impressively bright even without any lenses.

I just screwed them into the same case as the old lamp, replacing the ballast with the new power supply. They are quite a bit brighter than the old lamps and are a superior color temperature the heat sink gets warm to the touch but never so hot that you couldn't hold it which means that either I"m not making good thermal contact with the LED's and they will shortly self destruct, or that it's working great and well within thermal limits for long life.

Putting the diffusor back over them though reduces the output considerably, so for now I've left it off. You can't see them under the cabinet anyway, but I need to figure out some better ways to make it pretty before I replace the rest of them.

I haven't blogged any more projects since moving as moving and summer with the children home is enough of a monumental task without having to document it for posterity. I did however just solve an ongoing problem with the automation in the new house and it is such a relief that I have to tell somebody about it.

Basic functionality is to manage the outdoor lighting, can be as simple as on and dusk off at dawn or dimmed and brightened in response to movement in the yard or anticipated visitors or whatever. I never quite got to that point. I installed a used UPB switch that I had purchased in a large lot off ebay a year or so ago and used that to control the lights over the garage doors. Sadly I added 2 variables at the same time by doing that and also putting in some fancy cold cathode compact florescent bulbs at the same time. Something there generated huge amounts of powerline noise when they were on. They would turn on just fine, but after a few seconds they would no longer turn off. They taunted me for a month of my waking up only to discover the lights still on. Sometimes other X10 switches would turn on during the night too, mostly just the backyard light on the same circuit so no big deal but also very frustrating.

After weathering this for a while I installed an inline X10 filter between the switch and the lights thinking this would surely fix the issue. I just had done the same thing to the overhead garage lights after I discovered that GE replacement electronic T8 tube ballasts also made enough powerline noise to shut down automation in the whole house. (doesn't some government agency test these things to see if they are any good before letting them put all those stickers on things?) Installing the filter was no easy task either. I actually added another 2 gang box above the switchbox in the garage wall and mounted it there relocating wires. There was no access to the light boxes themselves at all.

After all that the problems remained. Deciding that these mail order CCFL lamps were just too powerfully evil to be saved I broke down and bought replacements of regular CFL bulbs from the hardware store and installed them. The outside lamps make this very difficult as they are very fancy fixtures with totally rusted bolts that do not come apart easily. I still have scrapes and scratches on my hand from squeezing it into them holding the bulbs as far as they would open.

After all that, STILL no change in the amount of noise!

That left only 1 other possibility, well, it might be that the brand of bulbs I bought at HD was defective too but I've used those before without difficulty. I took out the inline filter and spliced an extension cord into the line going up to the lamps and plugged it in. The lights turned on with no noise. I turned on the switch with no load connected to it at all (but with the lines carefully capped for safety of course) and it generated all the noise all by itself! The lights were not implicated at all it was a defective switch!

Replaced it with another switch and there is sanity again with my outdoor lighting. I had been avoiding really going to town installing switches in the house until I was certain things would actually work. Now I think I know why this person was selling a whole house full of UPB switches on ebay. He was tearing them out after tearing his hair out why they just wouldn't work.

So never overlook the obvious, that is the most likely place for the problem to be. Now to move on to other sources of frustration!

First project in the new house worth documenting is the install of some X10 controlled LED nightlights. These got a high level of spousal approval ;)

So I Oooo'ed and Ahhhh'ed along with everybody while reading about Apple's new iPad. But apart from a desire to develop remote control apps for XTension on it I really couldn't see how I might actually use one. When I lug my laptop off with me it's so I can do development and I need REALbasic and XCode and all the ancillary things that go along with them. Those things, while they compile for the iPad (well not RB yet but one can hope) they don't actually run on it... So it would be nothing but a plaything for me if I were to buy one. My plaything budget, while it has increased over the years, has not grown to the point where I can pick up $500 toys without some planning.

So I put the idea out of my head.

Then last night as I was reading teh intertubes in bed, I began to think wistfully about our next family vacation and remembering past family vacations and I have brought my laptop along on all of them. I like to be able to log into the house remotely and make sure the cat lady has come when she said and that sort of thing and add a little extra randomness to the vacation light programs. But I also then tend to do actual work. I like my work so this isn't really a problem for me. If I only brought an iPad along I'd still be able to do all those important things like logging into the house and getting my email and VNC and all the rest, but I would be prevented from actually doing any real work. Since the compilers wouldn't be sitting there taunting me to come and accomplish something I would be able to eschew work with a clear conscience.

I'd have access, I'd have books and the web, I'd just not have to do any work. An enforced vacation without having to leave all my connectivity behind. Now that might just be worth the entry price someday.

Course.. the problem is that I can pretty much do all that with my iPhone now...

Or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace the protractor...

Did I mention cutting crown molding was a black art? Those corner units need a 22.5 degree angle cut, and my miter saw has an indent at that angle, but of course it's a little bit off, just like the 45 degree indents and so you have to measure each time you switch it from one side to the other... But eventually it's all up and done and really looks nice. It's just primed right now but the whole thing is getting a fresh coat of paint and all cleaned up and one more step complete.

I have officially begun the process of updating the kitchen in this house. Last week I took down the wallpaper border that I have been meaning to take down for 6 years. My advice for people starting to take down wallpaper? DONT PUT UP WALLPAPER! But to get it off you'll need one of those scoring things that makes tiny tears in the paper, and then you'll want a steamer. You can rent a real one or if it's small you can do what I did which was to use one of those steam cleaner things. It has an attachment that worked pretty good to go over the paper as I tore it down.

Now that the paste is all cleaned off I begin the next bit which is augmenting the crown molding around the top of the cabinets. If you look at new expensive cabinet jobs they all have fine furniture looking crown molding following around the top. Ours had only a fairly simple single strip of molding. I'm adding another layer of real crown molding to it now. The orphan cabinet is now done apart from putty caulk and painting. There is a much larger grouping of cabinets on the other side to do yet, but I tackled the smaller one first so I could check to see if I still remembered how to cut crown molding which is a bit of a black art.

umm.. mail is not happy with me lately, I can't imagine why.

It may be time to give up on email all together.

weed tech makes some nice interface modules, several of which I already support in XTension. Something I've been meaning to get ahold of is their analog output card so that I might make use of some of these old meters that I've collected. I broke down and bought myself the thing the other day ;) I had to revisit the code anyway to support serial connections over IP/serial adaptors and add support for their new analog input module anyway so I decided to add this to the list of maintenance being performed.

There is still a lot of work to be done before it will be ready for full integration and I've mucked up the queue handling somehow in the process, but as far as a demo of the possibility it works great. More fun coming when it's all cleaned up.

It doesn't look that dangerous on a camera closeup but this caused an electrical fault inside my hot water heater this morning. I'm not sure how you can guarantee that a screw connection on something that thermal cycles as much as the connection to your hot water heater element does never comes loose. I'll bet there is a torque rating on the terminals, but the folks that put this in didn't check for that I guess.

I've replaced the bad wire, the thermostats and elements appear to still be functional so we avoid putting in a more efficient model for a while longer. I wonder if I should check the connections on the other one while I'm still dressed for messing around in the attic...

The quest for really good LED replacement bulbs continues and shows promise but still some shortcomings.

On recommendations from friends on the XTension mailing list I ordered a couple of bulbs from http://www.redbirdled.com/ They show some good construction quality and very usable light color and quality, but still have issues that make it difficult for me to recommend them completely. Though I had no issues that required contacting them I've heard from others that the company is also terrific with customer service.

The furst bulb is this 8 watt array, 60 watt replacement. Normally I've recommended to stay away from bulbs with arrays of small LED's as I've never seen one that was of a high quality, these really do seem to be worth a try.

The construction appears very good, the metal looking parts are actually metal. The light color that I ordered was the warm white and they do compare favorably to a real 60 watt bulb. My problem with them is that they flicker horribly. They are dimmable which is a plus, and they appear to work pretty good with X10 lamp modules. But as with many LED's you can't turn them all the way off with a dimmer. Even some regular, non-x10 dimmers cannot turn them all the way off. I imagined using it in my bedside lamp which is on a manual slide dimmer thing but you can't turn it off and it would have been too bright to sleep next to even with just the leakage voltage of the dimmer. These ballasts need a system where they realize they should actually be off even if a tiny amount of current is still available. But the real deal killer here is the flicker. It is not subtle. I've placed this light into the kids bathroom overhead light which we usually leave on all night and I'll wait to see if they complain, but I could not put it anywhere I spent a lot of time or worked under due to the flicker. Fix the power supply though and the LEDs and construction quality of them really are nice.

The second bulb I ordered was a wide dispersion flood light. I like LED spotlights very much, but flood lighting they just haven't been good at yet because they just dont make enough light. This bulb bucks that trend with a really wide and really bright light.

This is a "warm white" but the specs say 3200k. For a CFL warm white is usually 2700k and 3000k or higher are called "bright white" here is the bulb in front of some 3000k CFLs and you can see it's considerably cooler in temperature, but still very usable. This light uses 15 watts and if you use it to replace a current flood you will not be disappointed with the light output.

It is also very hefty, a pound and a half of solid aluminum in the frame and heat sink! I believe it is a single big emitter under the diffusion cover too which is interesting. This is the only led flood light I've owned that actually put out enough light for a real overhead replacement. I could actually put these in my kitchen and not have a decrease in the light available, though it would cool off the light temp in there which I'm not sure I like, but it's not horrible like some really cool LEDs are. I would get used to these. But again, power supply issues cause me to fail to really recommend it. The light is not dimmable, thats OK, neither are the CFL's I've got in the kitchen here. The problem is that it takes a full 5 seconds to light up after you turn the power on. I understand some power supplies do this, but 5 seconds? There is no visible flicker at all which is nice, but if I were to replace all the kitchen lights with these people would turn it on and stand there blinking in the dark for 5 seconds.

So we continue to make serious progress in LED replacement bulbs. This company has the build quality and the LED's down it would seem (though I haven't tried to do any lumen maintenance tests with these) but some work on the power supplies is still needed.

As if there weren't enough displays and readouts in here already today I completed the VFD "ice tube clock" from Adafruit It's actually not at all a hard kit to put together and it looks really nice on my desk :) The quality of the plastics and board and instructions are just second to none. This was about a 2 hour project for me, I'm sure other folks could do it faster. I have only 2 pieces of advise, use the thin solder, not the thick old radio shack kind and though they say some of the plastics can be installed either way around, it actually will only fit one way, so dont force it, try it the other way around. the tolerances are very close due to the quality of the laser cutting.

So MORE VFD goodness in the lab!

Received the Larson Scanner kits I ordered from evilmadscientist.com. I have so many uses for these I don't even know where to start... Kit only took about 15 minutes to put together and most of that was because Ben was helping me to place the components. He's going to be good at this sort of thing :)

First attempt at an unboxing and setup video. I might do more of this sort of thing. Learned a lot for the next time production wise and the box itself is really fantastic for the features and price. The barix 50 is fully supported by the latest beta's of XTension we're going to do some official announcements before long I think.

Previous to my Airport Extreme I was using a very old airport express model that only did 802.11b/g. This was necessary as there are a bunch of deices around here (namely my iPhone) that wont connect to an n network and I guess I didn't realize just how much faster that was. I had experimented with using both airports to extend my network and get better coverage, but only on b/g. After reading something on the internet that it was better to keep the older model on b/g mode and run the extreme in n 5GHz mode I gave it a try and initially I thought it was fantastic. The speed for file sharing and stuff was really much improved and even the internet speed felt better though in that case the cable modem is the problem not the wireless speed. Unfortunately I shortly began to suffer from the problem of dropping the connection that is all over the apple discussion boards. It would work fine for a short time and then just stop. The airport menu would still show full bars and think it was connected but no network traffic would go through at all. Sometimes turning the airport off and back on again would make it reconnect for a few more minutes, sometimes not. Sometimes it would work for hours before cutting off and sometimes only seconds.

I couldn't find a solution anywhere so just decided to mess with it a bit before giving up and putting the express back into b/g mode. The solution appears to be to set a specific channel and not select "auto". Except that by default you cannot select a channel when in n 5ghz mode. But if you hold down the option key while selecting the popup menu then you can! SInce selecting a single channel I have not had it drop the connection once in the last week or so.

of course you might have to play with the channel selection to make it reliable with other radio sources and other base stations in the area then, but so far that hasn't been a problem here.

I guess the lesson here is that if you want the OSX Server blogging system to keep running, don't make a copy of your blog folder and leave it in the collaboration users folder. This will cause the blogging server to try to open and read the copy of it, which since you made that with an admin user it wont have the clearance to do. Then instead of just skipping the stuff that it can't read properly it will crash instead. Then it will try to relaunch and crash again. Every 10 seconds until somebody realizes your blog is down and tells you about it.

Hopefully that is fixed now and I wont do that again...

I have been watching this back and forth between apple and palm and I just can't figure out what palm thinks they are up to. In case you haven't been paying attention here's the quick history. The Palm Pre has a media sync mode where it pretends to be an iPod to the USB bus thereby fooling iTunes into syncing it as if it was an iPod. Of course it can't play encrypted media content like older music purchases or movies, but will play anything else. But in pretending to be an ipod they had to reverse engineer the communications and hack it all together. This simply cannot be fool proof as anytime Apple updates anything it's likely to break. They definitely did not have apples permission to do this, nor do they have any documentation on the protocol or any ability to keep up with changes except after the fact by continuing to hack out any changes.

So of course with the next iTunes update Apple broke their implementation, and with the next Pre update Palm hacked the new one and got it working again. So they can go back and forth until Apple breaks down and encrypts the whole thing or something that they cannot hack.

Why would they do this? This seems really bone headed to me. Doubly so given how simple it would be to do a separate background sync app that just read iTunes configuration files and copied the files to the device in a way that wasn't hacking the low level protocols. An iPod is not just a mass storage device that you copy files to.

There are API's on the Mac that give you access to all the iTunes information. A separate app could provide you with a list of all the iTunes playlists and media files you could select from in a window exactly the same as the one that iTunes uses to select them. Heck, it wouldn't be hard to do this BETTER than iTunes does in say it's horrible movie selection list for the iPhone where you dont even get to choose playlists but must scroll through all the individual movies. If you dont want to use the API's on the mac then there are apple events. All the data is available for any app that wants to ask it for the links to the files and the ID numbers of every track in the playlists. If you don't want to do that you can directly parse the plist files that it stores it's configuration data in. This is a little more hacky as they will certainly change those over time, but changing how you parse what is basically an XML file is a heck of a lot easier and more reliable to keep up with than changes to a low level USB protocol. Apple events do not exist on windows and I don't know if there is an official API for asking iTunes about it's content for use in other apps, but there are still the xml preferences files that could be loaded.

So those methods would add a single step to the sync process, basically you'd plug in your pre and a separate sync app would launch with all your iTunes data in it. But it would be a proper way of doing it that would be unlikely to make Apple mad at you since these are ways that they endorse for getting access to the iTunes data.

But instead they decide to play a game of chicken with Apple for no gain other than the fun of thumbing their noses at Apple for stealing their market? I can't think of any other reason to do what they have done. I honestly never had much interest in the pre except in learning what they did right and hoping that Apple benefits from a little competition. But given this really stupid move I have less than no interest in the pre. Only their users who expect to be able to sync with iTunes are going to be hurt as this continues to go back and forth and they continue to waste limited resources on fighting a battle that they didn't need to fight to offer exactly the same features. Just stupid palm.

Depending on my Internet connection speed? How on earth could my internet connection speed have anything to do with how clogged up the AT&T server is? It's the difference between transferring my login and password in 100ms or 200ms big deal! This is a disingenuous message and just shows how stupid AT&T thinks their users are. Our site is slow! So instead of fixing it, or just suggesting that we know it's slow, please be patient, (which would actually be OK with me, it's at least honest) they LIE to you and suggest that it's somehow your fault that it's taking them forever to look you up in their overtaxed database. While this message is displaying it's entirely their server which is churning away blowing smoke out it's ears, it has nothing whatsoever to do with you or your internet connection. Over modem or cable modem the difference would be measurable, but meaningless. Blame the user for your stupid, loose the user to another company. As soon as another company gets a contract for the iPhone AT&T will feel the breeze as the air rushes into the james sized hole I'll leave on their ledger books.

Unless, of course, they completely turn around their entire corporate culture before my contract runs out, which is entirely possible however improbable it might be...

PS...

Guess my internet connection is too slow as this is all I can get from their server ;) In all fairness it is another iphone pre-order rush which is causing this to be this bad, I guess they really dont want to sell me one. My original 4gig phone is getting a little long in the tooth and really deserves an upgrade!

cannot seem to get the UPB noise level down around here to the point where it doesn't mimic real UPB Ack's on the powerline. With a low noise level you can get a pulse back from any unit you address letting you know that it heard the command or not. This opens up the possibility of adding features to the program to attempt to resend commands that were not acked to increase reliability. But an Ack pulse is a simple pulse, not a message that can be verified or checksummed. The UPB standard also allows you to ask for such a message, but though I've turned on the flag to request that in ever command I send out I dont seem to get anything back. Perhaps that just isn't implemented in the devices that I have or perhaps I just dont understand something about it. In any case I high noise level will make the PIM think that you've received the ack pulse even when the device has not responded.

Before going to bed last night I checked the noise graph and noticed an interesting drop out after a short power failure we had just after 7 yesterday. Only lasted about 5 seconds, but it make the noise completely disappear for an hour. This makes me wonder about the same simulate preset dim issue I blogged about here Debugging UPB Signals. At 3:30 am or so after laying in bed awake for a while I got up to have a look at the data again. Usually at night there are very few lights on so noise would be lower if it was related to a failing CF ballast but higher if it was related to something dimmed to 0. Notice the dip just before 1am. Checking the XTension logs showed that there was a hit on the porch motion sensor and the deck lights dimmed from 0 to 100 for a while. While the lights were on the noise was low and when it turned them off the noise returned to the higher levels. The thing that makes this particularly weird is that this porch light is just 2 regular 100 watt light bulbs in an outside fixture, no CF no ballast nothing odd or unusual at all. But testing it again manually verifies that when they are on or off or dimmed to any value above 5% there is no noise, but dim them to 0 and they clog the UPB line. These are on a regular X10 wall switch. UPB and X10 are supposed to be able to coexist, but there is something about dimming to 0 that makes UPB unhappy.

This morning now I've checked a bunch of other regular X10 switches that I dim to 0 instead of turning off, so that I can have a gentle startup with them rather than jumping to 100% like they do if you just turn them off and about half of them add to the UPB noise and half do not. I can change a couple to not dim to 0 without too much trouble, but some I will need to debug as I need that functionality. Or just replace with a UPB capable switch that can do ramp rates. The 2 master closet lights are setup this way so that during the night if you walk into them the lights come on dim so as not to disturb a sleeping spouse but come on full during the day. One of the 2 causes this problem, one does not. Replacing the light bulb in the offending one doesn't seem to help so next step will be to replace the switch, or add a filter or something.

Seems very strange indeed that regular bulbs on X10 switches are the culprit here as most of the other problems I've ever had with noise have been due to failing CF ballasts, but nothing like that going on in the house at the moment.

I've been noise hunting for X10 for so long that it's second nature, but now that we're adding new protocols totally different things are going to interfere with them. UPB may be how ever many thousand percent better than X10 and Insteon for reliability, but I just found a way to totally block every UPB signal in the house with noise. And noise that is interesting enough that it passed a lot of the checksums and the interface thought were valid signals, albeit with totally bogus command codes. The unit and network id's were consistent enough that for a while I thought I was receiving valid signals from some other device or from a neighbor or something! My poor interface was sending me packets as fast as it could and I couldn't transmit anything, even to a lamp module plugged into the back of the interface.

What it turns out to be that cause it (after going down the circuit breakers one by one until it stopped) was a CF bulb in the living room. But one that wasn't even on at the time. As I was taking the pictures for my last entry last night I moved around a bunch of the lousy LEd bulbs from one lamp to another to get the comparison photos. I put one of the old candelabra CF bulbs from that lamp into one that previously had a dimmable LED in it. But I failed to reprogram XTension to tell it that was not a dimmable bulb anymore. Using simulate preset dim on a regular X10 appliance module what this is means is that when the light turned itself off last night instead of sending an OFF it dimmed the light to 0. This CF bulb REALLY didn't like that. There is a tiny current flow at dimmed to 0 as opposed to fully off and this was causing the ballast in that bulb to have fits. X10 continued to work fine throughout the house, but UPB was stopped dead.

Sending the lamp a regular OFF stopped the problem. Turning it all the way on and all the way off seems to work fine, but if I dim the lamp to 0 the noise begins again. So we have our first data point in debugging for UPB.