Finally got around to playing with the Raspberry Pi

[Tony]

Nice little thing!

http://www.biopowered.co.uk:31415/

 

[greasemonkey]

Hi Pi.

[Tony]

Ultimately it would be nice in the shed, reporting process temps and running a webcam to keep an eye on things.

[Julian]

Ultimately it would be nice in the shed, reporting process temps and running a webcam to keep an eye on things.

I could do with one of those pointed at the bottom of my Mono!

But it sounds like a great project to detail on the wiki.  How easy is the interfacing between sensors and the PC.

[therecklessengineer]

I've got mine running as a Ninjablock: https://api.ninja.is/signin?redirect=home

Currently, it's just running RGB LED light strips. Expanding to do temperatures/pressures etc isn't that hard.

[Tony]

Rejuvinating an old thread.

The missus won some 600 Mbps ZyXEL power line adapters - so I thought I'd see how well they work through the SWA cable buried under the garden to the shed.  Surprisingly well as it turns out.

http://pi.cooldark.com/

My only concern is moisture and condensation - I think it would be good to keep the pi in a box with some desiccant.

[therecklessengineer]

Have a look here:

http://ninjablocks.com/

I've set up my pi as a ninja block. With the aid of an Arduino acting as an A/D converter I can grab and display data from the outside world.

There's a widget on this page showing the current temperature in my barn. www.lmbl.co.uk

[Tony]

Nice

The missus has ordered me these as xmas pressies:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USB-8-RELAY-CARD-BOARD-MODULE-OPTOISOLATION-/260928415996



http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/TEMPer1K4-PC-Sensor-USB-Thermocouple-K-Type-Thermometer-Temperature-Meter-/281224585770



Got plenty of SSRs (with snubbers) so will have a crack at immersion and pump motor control with it.  Quite like the idea of dialling in a temperature from the comfort of my living room

To start with it'll just interface with the existing system, I'll just set the manual themostat to max and let the Pi have free reign.  It will still have the liquid level deadlock on the immersion that way too.

[therecklessengineer]

Yes, I saw those too. Look pretty cool. I like that it's all done on the local network. Where Ninjablocks fails for me is that it must connect via the ninja servers on the outside internet. If you loose your net connection then it falls over.

[Tony]

Did you see these too?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USB-to-SPI-I2C-ADC-GPIO-Converter-Analyser-PC-or-Raspberry-Pi-/291022262950
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/12-I-O-USB-Controller-PIC18F14K50-USB-GPIO12-/321269400546

The latter is quite interesting, looks like it has a bootloader so you can cross-compile you own app for it.

I'd quite like some form of opto-isolated GPIO inputs to the Pi for switch based sensors (level, push buttons) but not sure how to implement such a thing.  I guess it would have to raise an interrupt at the Pi end which then scans input GPIO.  I've not really looked to see if the Pi has an interrupt input but it must do on its interface somewhere.

I like the idea of keeping it out on a USB peripheral but then how would an interrupt work?

[therecklessengineer]

They look pretty cool.

I like the Arduino platform as the libraries available are enormous and the development environment is very easy to use.

You'd have to poll the inputs for a state change I'd have thought.

My Arduino-PI interface just pumps JSON encoded data back and forth over a serial interface.

[julianf]

If i get Tony to wire my reactor up to the net, anyone want to make my bio for me?

[Tony]

I've got the Pi serving up web pages generated by a Python script on that address now.  Not yet figured out how to get a handle on the request URL yet though, hence the extra debug.

Plan is to write Python modules to control everything, IE have an object such that Processor.MainPump(1) will start the pump and Processor.GetTemp() will return the oil temperature so it can be integrated into web controls.

[therecklessengineer]

You might like to look at this:

http://www.fritz-hut.com/2012/09/04/arduinopiv1.0-includes-api/

[Bill]

I've semi automated my processor using a Velleman VM110 I/O board and VM132 temperature sensor. All controlled by wifi from an old tablet pc I carry round when its running. Had it running now for over a year. Programmed in VisualBasic.