Welcome to Freelay Wiki

link to the blog http://blog.freelay.org

Projects

Welcome to this wiki, I guess there is not a clear goal behind these words and pictures, maybe just my personal satisfaction and hope that someone else can get some ideas or help. Anyway I wish you will find it interesting and welcome to my freetime work !!!

Projects are focus on making life easier, more confortable and more controllable. Key points or ideas that I would like to achieve:

1. Be connected wherever I am and have complete access to all my resources everywhere
2. Have control of daily life (boring) opeartions and automate them
3. Try to avoid worthless payments to multinational companies (if possible)
4. Try to use opensource / freeware tools
5. Enjoy with my hobbies ;)

Home Personal Network

Firstable I am going to set up a home network and centralize all services on it, just a matter of organization. My old 386 looks the perfect device for it, I never thought it would have survived longer than 2005, but here it is "up and running" as network engineers love to say. its going to be my home server. Roaming music, movies, pictures, downloads, etc.. multimedia running 24 hours for the happiness of the family.

Extra stuff to complete the server: NAS, ssh, vnc, squid, vsftp and some other applications can be usefull when accessing from abroad: included in the server´s agenda.

Most important thing: a good organization of the network. That means assign good and LOGIC names to devices and computers, follow a reasonable policy of users and passwords, IP assigment, router ports forwarding, services, etc.. And as a great follower of Murphy´s law, remember "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong", I tend to write down everything before information is deleted from my brain in a proportional importance basis.

After some time I come up with something that looks like this:

(From this configuration some improvements are to be made: LAMP server, hamachi, music streaming (firefly) and some virtual machines to test new things...)

VOIP

Wow voip is really cool!!! if you have never heared about it you MUST NOW search for it in wikipedia. very nice this technology, not all days you have the opportunity to jump over the telecommunication companies haha ;D!!!, well technically sip is the protocol (one of them) and voip all around it (hardware, softphones, freecall, skype, etc... )

As I am standard "roamer" having a VOIP server has many advantages. Calling my family became increasingly anoying until skype was released and popularize, only then I solved half of the problem been able to call my sisters for free. My parents are more difficult than a simple software, I needed to mount a server and link them through a device connected to the local PSTN...

An easy-to-use Asterisk PBX is now in the new server running in a virtual machine 24h waiting for the family calls, I have used three different devices to connect the analog telephones and the local PSTN on the Asterisk server: Sipura 3000, PAP2t and Handtone 386.

Finally connected for 0€ !!!

Extend the home network, priority: Energy consumption!!!

Even if a computer is efficient or low branded, having it power on 24 * 7 * 365 is VERY expensive and an energy monster in the long term point of view. Just think about a standard 150 W desktop computer, if we want to keep it online all day long, a fast calculation considering the actual electricity price (Spain) per KW throughs a monthly consumption of:

0,150 KW * 24 h * 30 days = 108 KW month
108 KW month * 0,11473 €/KWh = 12,39 € month

which is a lot considering it is a hobby. If we add all TV standbyes, players and multiple (probably rarely used) devices energy needs increases exponentially.

So, that means I need to check for a "eco-friendly" new pc (I love this meaningless word, specially when they sell it in a bunch of useless consumerism products by a guy who believes that plastics and electricity grow in the mountains from cowshit and bees)
Components on the pc have to be selected in a energy consumption basis, trying to find low-power parts for it (and cheap). The result is a home-made server (woden structured, I am really happy about my carpenter work despite its crapy looking) which only needs around 40 W (3,3 € per month) and cost less than 250€ whole.

Domotic House

In order to avoid energy waste on my house due to standbyes I also planned an implementation of some domotic devices. The idea of having a complete domotic house is very nice but unfortunately expensive, at the moment I have few devices working as energy controllers for my electric devices, and a control for the automatic irrigation.

The idea is the following: when I leave my house, I can swith off specific areas using a remote control, so then I ensure that standbyes wont consume, also having these devices controlled by an application allow you to supervise them through internet, having it installed on a virtual machine running on the server.

I have used X10 protocol devices and Active Home as the sofware to manage them. In the future I d like to implement the more powerfull Homeseer and LabView software as the interface for further interesting devices.

Automatic irrigation

I love having plants wherever I am, I feel the need of having some alive green mixed with computers and electronic devices to remind me that nature still exist outside of my room. But water the plants and supervise them are not definetly part of my hobby, so here it is when automatic control shows up.

What I have done is to implement an automatic irrigation system controlled by two X10 domotic modules programmed to water plants periodically. I have used aquarium water pumps, 12 and 6 mmm tubes and a home made receptacle to store the water. The system is working fine even though the lack of space in the room made me design the water store not big enough to irrigate more than 3 times without having to refill it.

Thats a problem I ll have to face in future irrigation relocations.

Sumo Robot

Some years ago speaking with a friend about robots we decided to try to do a microrobot for a competition, our idea was firstable to prepare a small robot and slowly with the pass of the years keep improving it untill been ready for Eurocup or Robocup. Had passed more than three years since that, my friend is doing something very different right now and I am something like 3000 Km away from him, the robot of course is not even planned yet, but the idea is still alive and sooner or later I will have to begin with it.

My idea is firstable to build up a microrobot to compete in sumo competitions, after some research I found out which model I want to follow and what I would need for it... so on this stage I am ... we ll see what happens..

Web server in Atmega88 microcontroller + rele

Have you ever had the problem of trying to wake up a PC from Internet and, after some search, suddently discovered that your router brand doesn't allow you to implement a linux-version firmware? This idea comes from one company I was working on. We were implementing something different using this configuration, but changing some parts of it can be usefull also for another uses.

The hardware I am using is an Atmega88 (Atmel family) togheter with a Enc28J60 ethernet controller and a rele. The ethernet programming protocol has been taken from a very interesting open project available and other configurations are being solved on the way.

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