Photoblog Twan Sevriens - » Daily life

Interesting to shoot with 100mm prime

Twan — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:04:14 +0000

Some snapshots:

Tempie1 – Battery powered wireless temperature sensor

Twan — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 06:58:58 +0000

Yesterday evening I finally put together all the components that I have been gathering and trying and prototyping (loads of reading, trying, reading again).

So it’s born, Tempie1. A first version (I’m sure that I will find ways to improve it) of a battery powered wireless temperature sensor. For now it sends back the temperature and a voltage reading of the Xbee (so I can see when I need to replace batteries) when I send a request for a reading. If this is really the way to go in my home automation system (to be developed) I don’t know yet.

Next step, prototyping HumiTee1 (battery powered wireless humidity and temperature sensor).

Panorama at Niesen

Twan — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:47:13 +0000

Snapshot-Twann

Twan — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:49:59 +0000

First graphical representation of temperature

Twan — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 13:21:07 +0000

This morning I installed the JpGraph lib for PHP to create some nice graphs of the readings. Yesterday I managed to create a script which records the readings of the 3 temperature sensors in a database. I first had an interval of 5 minutes but realized that hourly readings should be enough.

[my home-server is a bit slow at the moment so took this graph offline]

Logging temperature

Twan — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 12:10:01 +0000

The first step in my home automation project is logging the temperature on different places in my appartment. The goal is to have small wireless battery powered temperature sensors in every room. These sensors send their data to a base receiver where the data is processed in stored in a database.

I bought some DS18B20 digital temperature sensors and connected them to my arduino board for a test/prototype setup. At the moment I have three of these sensors on the same board, which ofcourse doesn’t make that much sense. But it’s just to play around a bit. The board is still on USB, connected to my Ubuntu server. Every hour, the arduino sends the readings from the sensors to the server.

I now write the readings from the sensors to a log file, but this weekend I want to write the data to a MySQL database.

New hobby project: Home automation

Twan — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 10:55:31 +0000

ai ai ai (as they sometimes say here in swiss german), last post was in June 2010. I think I already opened a lot of posts here with ‘time for an update’. It’s pretty difficult to come up with something interesting every time. But since I have a new hobby project, I think I can update this blog on a more regular basis.

So what’s new? Well, I already had the idea for a long time that when I have a house/appartment it should be stuffed technological gadgets that make the house/appartment into a smart home. Home automation is not so futuristic anymore as it was when I visited the house of the future in the early ninetees. Now 20 years laters, I have my own appartment (well, rental) and I’m very interested in developing my own home automation system.

I’m ofcourse not the only one that has this idea. You can find home automation hobby projects all over te world. There are also a number of commercial systems available. However, I don’t want an off the shelf system, but play around with sensors, microcontrollers and write my own interface.

Rocoto Red flower

Twan — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:02:17 +0000

Again, long time no post..

Just very busy busy with work and thesis. But still going ok here. And to make it up, a nice purple flower from the Rocoto Red. I grow this plant for the first year and it’s a very beautiful plant. The fruit from this plant is also supposed to be very tasty so.. hopfully this flower will become a juicy chilli

Finally Chile pictures online

Twan — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:59:16 +0000

Last week I was browsing through my picture book which I made from my trip to Chile in 2007 and realized that I didn’t put the pictures online yet.

So, here they are (click on them to go to the album page):

Blurry night view at the Rhine in Basel

Twan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:58:28 +0000

About 2 weeks ago I went for a quick walk along the Rhine, I took my camera with with the 50mm prime and tried to make some pictures. On the camera screen they looked promising however the big versions are a bit blurry. Anyway, I think they give a nice impression of the Rhine close to where I live.

See the gallery for all the pictures