It is customary at this time to wish everybody a happy new year. However
it is probably more appropriate to wish you all good luck in the future.
I haven't had a question [n years and now two have popped up at the same
time.
The first is advice on programming. I have programmed everything in C
but would be interested to know if there are any advantages in adopting
another language.
I have a couple of projects to do with household monitoring running on
raspberry pis and I have done enough to get them working but I would now
like to make them more robust.
The first is a central heating monitor. I have a vaillant boiler and
some years ago bought a windows programme plus a hardware dongle which
monitors the communication between boiler and controller (ebus). By
experimentation and research I found the necessary commands so that I
can get information such as room temperature and programmer times and
can change the heating programme details remotely. This wasn't as useful
as I thought because I discovered that I was working from home and
everyday was pretty well the same as any other day.
My system consisted of two parts which communicated by using shared
memory. The first part consisted of the bus monitor which synchronised
with the bus and read every packet. Some data came randomly such as
current room temperature and when that was received the shared memory
was updated. Other data such as programme times were only sent after a
request so the monitor would have to send those as well. Temperature
data was stored on Mariadb. I had hoped at one stage to make it
inteklligent so the boiler was only activated when necessay, not just
follow the timer.
The second part is a webserver and I used PHP to create a web page with
the controls on and communicate with shared memory. When a control is
changed, a flag is set and the monitor sends the commands to the boiler
controller to get the required data.
It all works but is there a better way of organising it.? It runs on
plain Raspbian but is there a better OS more suited to these sort of
apps. should I be looking at Ubuntu core for safety and upgradeabilty?
I have some other monitoring projects which are gathering data. I
monitor my electricity consumption, solar generation and car charging
(modbus) and plan to monitor individual room temperatures (one wire) and
water consumption and rain water harvesting usage pulse (counting). I
am interested in doing more home automation. Would it be worth getting a
home automation package and could they be configured to work with these
disparate functions?
The second major query has arisen because my local community formed a a
whatsapp group during the covid crisis which was very successful. Two
groups are emerging. Those that want to support the natural environment
and those that want to tackle social problems in our area. I know first
hand some people involved in long established groups in both of these
areas but their activities are not well known and I think that we need a
couple of websites that people could refer to. Could anybody recommend a
solution which would involve cheap hosting, ability to register details
and easy administration. It might even be a sort of dating app. Those
offering help and those organisations who may need it.
Thanks for your time, I would be grateful for any comments.
Good luck in the New year.
Regards
Roger
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