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Saturday, March 24th, 2012

Task-Based JeeNode Communication

Categories: [ DIY/Arduino | IT ]

For my car heater controller I decided to use Alan Burlison's scheduler. I like it, because it leaves the main program file reasonnably short and allows to separate the code into multiple objects. I don't know if it makes the software more or less easy to write/maintain, but I find it fun to do it this way, and that's all that counts.

To implement 2-way communication between the JeeLink (master) and the JeeNode (slave) using Jean-Claude Wippler's RF12 library, I created a Listener object and a Speaker object that deal with receiving data and sending data respectively, while the Protocol object implements the higher-level protocol.

Here' how the slave's .pde file looks like. Notice how it contains only definitions and a bit of initialization, but no big mess of code?

#define NB_ELEMENTS(a) sizeof(a) / sizeof(a[0])
 
Speaker speaker;
Protocol protocol(&speaker);
Listener listener(&protocol);
 
Task * tasks[] = { &listener, &speaker };
TaskScheduler scheduler(tasks, NB_ELEMENTS(tasks));
 
void setup() {
  rf12_initialize(SLAVE_ID, RF12_868MHZ, HEATER_GROUP);
}
 
void loop() {
  scheduler.run(); // infinite loop
}
Here's a sample of the slave's Listener.
class Listener: public Task { // Task from Alan Burlison's scheduler
    public:
    Listener(Protocol * protocol):
      protocol(protocol)
      {};
 
    bool canRun(uint32_t now); // Taks's interface
    void run(uint32_t now);    // Task's interface
 
  private:
    Protocol * protocol;    // higher-level protocol handler
    uint8_t recv_buffer[BUFFER_LEN];
    uint8_t recv_buffer_len;
};
 
bool Listener::canRun(uint32_t now) {
  if (rf12_recvDone())
    return (rf12_crc == 0 &&  rf12_len <= BUFFER_LEN);
  return false;
}
 
void Listener::run(uint32_t now) {
  recv_buffer_len = rf12_len;
  memcpy((void *)recv_buffer, (void *)rf12_data, recv_buffer_len);
  if (rf12_hdr == (RF12_HDR_CTL | (MASTER_ID & RF12_HDR_MASK)))
    protocol->got_ack();
  else {
    if (RF12_WANTS_ACK) {
      rf12_sendStart(RF12_ACK_REPLY, 0, 0);
      rf12_sendWait(0);
    }
    protocol->handle(recv_buffer, recv_buffer_len);
  }
}

And there's the slave's Speaker. Note that the Spaker tries to send data only if its buffer_len is greater than zero. This prevents calling rf12_canSend() when it's not necessary (according to the RF12 driver, you must not call rf12_canSend() only if you intend to send data immediately after calling it). When the Protocol wants to send something, it needs to get the Speaker's buffer with get_buffer(), fill the buffer with data, and then call send(). Also, I implemented a retry mechanism in case no ACK has been received from the master.

class Speaker: public Task { // Task from Alan Burlison's scheduler
  public:
    Speaker();
    uint8_t* get_buffer();
    void send(uint8_t len, bool ack);
    void got_ack(); // called by the Protocol when it gets an ACK
    bool canRun(uint32_t now);  // Task interface
    void run(uint32_t now);     // Task interface
 
  private:
    uint8_t buffer[BUFFER_LEN];
    uint8_t buffer_len;
    bool with_ack;
    uint8_t retry_count;
    unsigned long next_retry_millis;
};
 
bool Speaker::canRun(uint32_t now) {
  if (buffer_len > 0 && retry_count > 0
                     && millis() > next_retry_millis)
    return rf12_canSend();
  return false;
}
 
void Speaker::run(uint32_t now) {
  if (with_ack && retry_count == 1) {
    buffer_len = 0;
  }
  uint8_t header = (with_ack ? RF12_HDR_ACK : 0)
                  | RF12_HDR_DST | MASTER_ID;
  rf12_sendStart(header, buffer, buffer_len);
  rf12_sendWait(0);
  if (with_ack) {
    retry_count  – ;
    next_retry_millis = millis() + SEND_RETRY_TIMEOUT;
  }
  else
    buffer_len = 0;
}
 
void Speaker::send(uint8_t len, bool ack) {
  with_ack = ack;
  buffer_len = len;
  retry_count = SEND_RETRY_COUNT + 1;
  next_retry_millis = millis();
}
 
void Speaker::got_ack() {
  buffer_len = 0;
}

The master's code is very similar, you can check it there.

[ Posted on March 24th, 2012 at 16:17 | no comment | ]

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Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

Car Heater Controller

Categories: [ DIY/Arduino ]

heater_controller_2

Finnish winters are cold, and petrol engines don't like starting when it's very cold. That's why cars are often equipped with an electric heater that preheat's the cooling liquid for some time before starting the engine. The duration of this pre-heating depends on the temperature (in French). Moreover, since I don't leave home every morning at the same time, I don't want to start heating the car at the same time every day, even if the outside temperature doesn't change much from day to day. Hence this project of a remote-controlled switch for the car heater.

The system is composed of two Arduino-compatible parts: one master, connected to the home computer (always on), and one slave, in the garage. The master is a JeeLink and the slave is based on a JeeNode. Master and slave communicate with each other with a radio (868 MHz, a free Low-power_communication_device band in Europe).

The master

Not much to say about the master, the hardware is a standard JeeLink, which for the purpose of this project is really only a radio transceiver on a Serial-over-USB interface.

The slave

heater_controller_1

The electronic is very simple, and only a few components are needed. I paid special attention to selecting components that are specified to work from -40 °C (although I have no idea how well the device works at that temperature).

The slave is organised around a JeeNode (vertical, in the right-hand corner of the picture), and has the following three features.

It controls a relay (the black box above the orange PCB on the picture), which can be open or closed.

It measures the outside temperature with a DS18S20 sensor.

It measures the current flowing out of the relay using a current transformer (the black ring aroung the brown wire on the left side of the picture).

Moreover, it has a power supply (the black box on the lower left corner of the picture).

You can also notice that the mains cable (a 5 m, outdoors prolongation cord) has an earth wire that has not been severed. The live (brown) and neutral (blue) wires have been cut and connected to the relay. Power for the power supply is taken from the plug-side of the cable, before the relay (so it's always connected to the mains).

Power supply

The power comes from a compact switching power supply that converts 230 V AC into 12 V DC (maximum output power: 4 W). In case the power supply fails, the 1 A fuse (in the holder on the big red wire on the lower-left corner of the picture) should blow before the whole thing catches on fire. Also, although the power supply is designed to be placed on a PCB, I decided not to have any 230 VAC on the PCB, so I soldered the wires straight to its input pins, and isolated them with heat-shrink tube and added epoxy for strenght (the pins are not so strong, I don't want to break them once they are connected to the thick and not-so-flexible wires).

The relay requires 12 V, hence the output value for the power supply. The JeeNode requires a 3.3 V supply, and the onboard voltage regulator could take the 12 V, but would ouput only a low current (less than 100 mA). By adding a 5 V regulator (7805) to supply the JeeNode, the latter can get more current from its on-board regulator.

Relay

The relay (specified to switch up to 400 VAC and 30 A) requires 160 mA to be activated. It is therefore controlled via a BC337 transistor, which is strong enough to withstand the current. The base of the transistor is connected to one digital pin of the JeeNode via a 2 kΩ resistor, which allows to open or close the relay by applying a High or Low signal to that pin.

Temperature sensor
heater_controller_temperature_sensor

The DS18S20 transmits the temperture information digitally over a 1-Wire bus, and therefore requires really nothing more than a 4.7 kΩ pull-up resistor. It works quite happily with 3.3 V at the end of a 15 m cable (an old phone extension cord). Note that since I have three wires in the cable, I didn't even try to power the sensor with parasitic power (anyway, I read somewhere that it doesn't work well at 3.3 V). The Arduino OneWire library does all the work for you, all you need is to connect the data pin of the sensor to one digital input of the JeeNode.

Current sensor

Finally, the current transformer is placed around the live wire coming out of the relay. The design is based on a page at OpenEnergyMonitor that does not appear to exist anymore, but this one should give a good start.

Basically, the current transformer produces a current (not a voltage) that is proportional (depending on the number of turns, my transformer has 1012 turns) to the current flowing through the mains wire that goes through the transformer. A burden resistor (68 Ω in my case) across the two wires produces an AC voltage that is proportional to this current and varies between -1.65 and +1.65 V (corresponding to mains current between -23 and +23 A peak-to-peak). Then one wire of the transformer is connected to a voltage divider made of two 20 kΩ resistors (with a filtering 47 μF capacitor) and the other wire goes to one of the analog inputs of the JeeNode. This way, the analog input sees a voltage that varies between 0 and 3.3 V, which is within the tolerance of the device.

After that, the software samples the analog value 3000 times, applies a high-pass filter to remove the DC offset, and simple math computes the RMS current. After a bit of calibration (using a 60 W lamp, and 500 W halogen lamp, a 1400 W flat iron and a 2300 W electric kettle, and comparing my measurments against those of a wattmeter), I noticed that the reported current is quite accurate (to about 0.01 A, which is more than enough for my purposes).

Box
heater_controller_in_box

The PCB and the relay a screwed on a piece of plexiglas, and the whole device is placed in a project box to protect it from dust. Zip ties around the cables near the holes prevent the cables from being accidentally pulled out of the box.

Schematics
heater_controller

The schematics are available as a PNG picture, and in Eagle format. Note that since I used strip board to assemble the circuit, I haven't paid attention to choosing the right component packages, nor the right type of component. The Eagle schematics is therefore provided for information purposes only, generating a board from it is not going to produce correct results.

The Software

It's all available there. You can obtain it with git using the command
git clone http://weber.fi.eu.org/software/arduino/heater_controller/.git/

[ Posted on March 22nd, 2012 at 23:23 | 1 comment | ]

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

Very big, very small

Categories: [ Science ]

Scaling the solar system down to human sizes leads to more interesting comparisons. Let's assume the Earth is the size of a pin head (2 mm in diameter). We then have the following results:

  • A human being living on the surface of the pinhead would be 0.30 nm (the size of two dihydrogen molecules)
  • Mount Everest would be 1.4 μm tall (1/5 of the thickness of a strand of spider's web silk)
  • Geostationary satellites would orbit the pin head at 5 mm from its surface but the International Space Station would be at only 60 μm from the surface (the thickness of a hair)
  • A lightyear would be 1500 km long (the distance between Copenhagen, Denmark and Rome, Italy), so the closest star (Proxima Centauri) would be 6600 km away (distance between Paris, France and New Dehli, India, or between New York, USA and Berlin, Germany)
  • The Oort cloud would be 3000 km in diameter (the distance between Madrid, Spain and Helsinki, Finland, with the volley ball representing the Sun located somewhere near Cologne, Germany)
  • The diameter of the Milky Way (our galaxy) would be equivalent to the distance between the Sun and Earth
  • The whole universe would be 20·1012 km in diameter, that is 2 lightyears (diameter of the Oort cloud, or half the distance to Proxima Centauri)

[ Posted on March 15th, 2012 at 10:06 | no comment | ]

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Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

The Solar system is big!

Categories: [ Science ]

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/astronomy/q0247.shtml

Aerospaceweb.org

The solar system is big, that's well known. But how big, exactly?

Let's assume the Sun is the size of a volleyball (about 21 cm in diameter). We would then have the following relative planet sizes and distances to the ball:

  • Mercury: 1 mm diameter (a small pin head), 9 m from the ball (a bus)
  • Venus: 2 mm diameter (a pin head), 16 m from the ball (a semi-trailer truck)
  • Earth: 2 mm diameter (a pin head), 23 m from the ball
  • Mars: 1 mm diameter (a small pin head), 35 m from the ball (a blue whale)
  • Jupiter: 22 mm diameter (a walnut), 120 m from the ball (maximum length of a football/soccer field)
  • Saturn: 19 mm diameter (a smaller walnut), 220 m from the ball (one TGV train)
  • Uranus: 8 mm diameter (a cherry's kernel), 460 m from the ball (a double TGV train)
  • Neptune: 8 mm diameter (a cherry's kernel), 700 m from the ball (length of the Avenue de l'opéra, Paris, France)

By comparison, the Moon would be 0.5 mm in diameter (a grain of sand) and 6 cm from the pin head (the length of the little finger).

[ Posted on March 14th, 2012 at 23:20 | no comment | ]

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Friday, March 9th, 2012

Large Numbers

Categories: [ Science ]

Googolplex

My daughter asked me yesterday what is the largest number I know. The answer was “a Googolplex”, which is 10googol with googol = 10100.

While you can write a googol on a sheet of paper (it's a one followed by 100 zeros), you cannot write a googolplex on paper. Or can you? how much paper do you need for that?

Let's assume you can write 10 000 digits on one sheet of A4 paper. You therefore need 1096 sheets of paper. One tree can produce 10 000 sheets of paper, and there are about 1012 trees on Earth. You'd need 1080 Earths to provide all the paper. Not going to work.

Now let's see if there's even enough matter in the universe to make all this paper: assuming that all the matter in the universe can be converted to paper, is there enough of it? Paper is made of cellulose, chains of D-glucose, the latter weighing 128 g/mol. So a 5 g sheet of A4 paper contains about 2.5·1022 molecules of linked D-glucose, each of which is made of 128 hadrons (protons and neutrons). A sheet of paper is therefore made of 3·1024 hadrons, which is almos the same thing as an atom of hydrogen. The universe contains roughly 1080 atoms, which translate roughly as 1056 sheets of paper. We'd need 1040 universes to make all the needed paper. Not going to work either.

That was a very big number.

[ Posted on March 9th, 2012 at 11:44 | 2 comments | ]

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

The Quantum Thief

Categories: [ Books ]

ISBN: 9780575088894

© Amazon.fr

The disembodied mind of Jean le Flambeur, a famous thief, is forever prisoner and forced to play the Prisoner's Dilemma until he learns to cooperate. One day he is extracted by Mieli (a Sobornost) from the prison and given a new synthetic body made of another kind of material, which is however under Mieli's control. During the escape, a piece of Archon, the replicating, smart material the prison is made of gets trapped into Jean's body. Mieli then takes him to Mars, where he is supposed to steal something on behalf of Mieli's goddess, the pellegrini. Mars is the home of the Oubliette, a city moving on gigantic legs that eternally flighs before the phoboi, dangerous self-replicating weapons that infestate the surface of the planet, left over of the Mars civil war. In the Oubliette, people have a limited lifetime as Nobles, after which their mind is transfered to mechanical bodies and they start a period as Quiets, working to maintain the city, before stating a new Noble/Quiet cycle; time (to live) is the local currency. There is also a global exomemory used by everyone, where personal memories are controlled by private cryptographic keys. In the Oubliette, Jean finds out he used to live there under the name of Pierre Sernine, but has somehow lost his memory. With the help of the technology available to Mieli, he manages to steal one minute of the life of Christian Unruh, a man who became very rich in time and has never gone through the Quiet stage who had decided on the precise time when he would die. A local detective, Isidore Bautrelet, investigates the theft and starts following le Flambeur's trail. After Unruh's body has been transfered to a machine, Jean and Mieli inspect his mind, and discover that it has been tampered with during the transfer, and conjecture that everybody's mind in the Oubliette has been tampered with by the cryptarchs who secretely rule the city. When the news spreads (along with a protection against the security hole made by the cryptarchs), riots start on the street and between the Quiet who keep the city moving forward, and the city stops progressing, in danger of being caught up by the phoboi. Meanwhile, Jean recovers traces of his past, and discovers that he had split hie memories into nine pieces. When he has to decide whether he should recover his past memory and decides not to, the king of the Oubliette (a copy of Jean's mind from before he went to prison) does it for him. The Oubliette actually used to be a prison (a virtual Panopticon) and Jean le Roi was an inmate who, with the other cryptarchs, managed to hack into the panopticon system and use it for getting power over the other inmates. A catastrophe wiped out all traces of their doings, and in time le Roi wiped out the other cryptarchs. They also got help from Zoku refugees, a warrior collective that lost a war against the Sobornost. Le Flambeur and le Roi eventually fight and the piece of the prison in the former's body starts to build a new prison around the latter's mind, while Mieli saves le Flambeur in the nick of time.

[ Posted on March 8th, 2012 at 21:45 | 1 comment | ]

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Read it again.

Comment #1, Matthieu Weber (Finland), September 6th, 2021 at 08:00

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Little Valley Ginger Pale Ale

Translation: [ Google | Babelfish ]

Categories: [ Beer/Little Valley ]

Little_Valley_Ginger_Pale_Ale

“hint of ginger and citrus”

Not as heavily sweet and gingered as other ginger beers, this one is even slightly bitter. Contains barley malt.

Little Valley Brewery, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England. 4.0% alcohol.

[ Posted on March 6th, 2012 at 18:58 | no comment | ]

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Sunday, March 4th, 2012

Sherlock Holmes

Categories: [ TV/Cinema ]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_%282009_film%29

Wikipedia

Holmes arrests Lord Blackwood, a practitioner of black magic who has killed several persons. He is sentenced to death, hanged, and Watson pronounces him dead. He has however warned Holmes on the day of his execution that something bigger than him was going on. Holmes is then asked by Irene Adler (who is working for a mysterious man) to find a midget with ginger hair. The man is found in the coffin on Lord Blackwood, who has been seen earlier that day coming out of his grave. Holmes is then asked by important members of the government to stop Blackwood. They reveal that they (and Blackwood) are members of a secret society that controls all key areas of the British Empire. Soon after, a few of them are killed in mysterious circumstances that look like sorcery. Holmes then tricks one member of the society, secretly working with Blackwood, into reavealing their plan: killing all the members of the Parliament who don't want to follow Blackwood in his conquest of the world. A wirelessly-triggered machine that will deliver poison to the Parliament's ventilation system is hiddenn in the sewers. With the help of Watson and Irene Adler, Holmes prevents the poison to be released, and eventually gets Blackwood killed. He also learns from Irene that she is working for Moriarty, and her escape with the poison part of the machine was just a diversion allowing Moriarty to steal the wireless component fo the device, which is what he was really after. Holmes finally explains that Blackwood was not a real sorcerer and that all was made with tricks.

[ Posted on March 4th, 2012 at 23:50 | no comment | ]

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Touchez pas au grisbi

Translation: [ Google | Babelfish ]

Categories: [ TV/Cinema ]

http://www.cinemagora.com/film-4715-touchez-pas-au-grisbi.html

© Cinemagora

Max le Menteur a réussi à voler 8 barres d'or pour une valeur de 50 millions. Son complice Riton, qui avait dit à sa fiancée qu'ils n'auraient bientôt plus de soucis d'argent, se fait enlever par Angelo, qui veut le torturer pour savoir où est caché le magot. Max se refuse d'abord d'aider Riton, qui est vraiment trop con pour son propre bien, mais décide finalement de donner l'or à son adversaire en échange de son copain. Juste après l'échange, qui s'effectue de nuit sur une route peu fréquentée, des complices d'Angelo essayent de tuer Max et Riton, et mais ce dernier est mortellement blessé lorsque lui et Max rendent la monnaie de sa pièce à Angelo. Malheureusement, dérangés par un camion qui passait par là, ils ne parviennent pas à récupérer l'or. Le lendemain, Riton meurt de ses blessures.

[ Posted on March 4th, 2012 at 23:45 | no comment | ]

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Chronicle

Categories: [ TV/Cinema ]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicle_%28film%29

Wikipedia

Three high-school boys, Andrew, his cousin Matt, and Steve find a strange artifact in the forest, in a hole in the ground. After that, they start developing telekinetic powers (and the hole where the artifact was has of course caved in). Soon, they discover they can fly, in addition to moving things at a distance. Andrews mother is dying from cancer, and his alcoholic father accuses Andrew to cost too much money so that he cannot afford the medicine for relieving his wife's pain. From this point on, Andrew goes crazy, indirectly causing Steve's death (the latter sensed he was angry, founnd him flying in a thunderstorm and got struck by lightning). Later, Andrew decides to use his powers to steal money so that he can by medicine for his mother. But he is accidentally injured in the robbery and taken to the hospital. There, his father tells him his mother died and accuses Andrew of being the reason why he could not be with her at that time (because he was looking for Andrew). From this point on, Andrew becomes completely crazy and starts destroying the hospital and the buildings around him, while Matt tries and stop him. Matt finally kills Andrew.

[ Posted on March 4th, 2012 at 15:27 | no comment | ]

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