Wiki Freelay

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 use it for his own ideas and projects. Anyway I wish you will find it interesting and usefull, I welcome you to my freetime work !!!

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

1. Be connected everywhere and have complete access to all my resources wherever I am
2. Have control of daily life opeartions and automate them
3. Try to make payments to companies such energy & telecomunication less painfull (if possible)
4. Try to use opensource / freeware tools
5. Enjoy it!!! ;)

Home Personal Network

Just a matter of organization, everybody has somehow devices here and there, notebooks, pcs, hardisks, smartphones, etc... spread all around the house roaming from one place to another, workplace, university, etc... So mine is not an exception, its just a mesh.

Firstable I am going to set up a home network and centralize all services on it. An old 386 looks the perfect device for it, I never thought it would survived longer than 2005, but here it is "up and running" as network engineers say. Roaming music, movies, pictures, downloads, etc..

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

Important thing: a good organization of the network. I should 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 I tend to forget it I will write it down, nothing less painfull than realizing I need to redo something from zero becuase I forgot that damn number or password!!

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

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

VOIP

VOIP what to say, just amazing stuff... very powerfull and plenty of possibilities for people willing to avoid call costs. For my surprise its a quite new technology, back in 1995 a small company called Vocaltec released what its believed to be the first internet phone software, as we can imagine at that time internet bandwith were bad enough to make it difficult to spread as quality was poor. However in 2000 decade voip has widespread reaching impresive percentages in voice internet traffic, nowadays many companies are definetly turning into voip systems to decrease costs. For us common humans skype, voipbuster, fring, etc... is just all what we need to avoid GSM, GPRS, PSTN and costly clasical systems.

As I am continuously roaming having a VOIP server has many advantages. Calling my family through skype is fine, but unless you pay to skype for it you can not call landland telephones. Another solutions are available like voipbuster, voipfree, freecall, etc... but as everything you turn to pay sooner or later something for it and it works only in one way (pc-pstn) not the other way around (pstn-pc). Recently I discovered a service called ring2skype so my parents can call me directly from their telephone to my skype, sipbroker also offers this service with many providers linking your sip DID through a landline telephone number and code. Anyway all these services turn to be a bit anoying to use and doesnt fullfil the simplicity in the same way you use your landline or mobile phone when calling through classical providers.

So a VOIP server is a better solution, linking the local PSTN to internet in my own way. An easy-to-use Asterisk PBX is now running in a virtual machine 24h in the new server, Three different devices are used to connect 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!!!

Having a PC power on 24 * 7 * 365 could be very expensive and an energy monster in the long term point of view. To make some calculations, thinking about a standard 150 W desktop computer, if we want to keep it online all day long it could turn to has (considering the actual electricity price in Spain per KW) 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 isnt for professional purposes, just for a hobby. If we add then the rest of electronic devices, screen standbyes, players and rest of stuff we consider computer related, energy comsumption at home increases proportionally.

So in conclusion, as I need a new server for the home network I need to select the components in a energy consumption basis, considering also price and performance. Long time ago I have been wondering why didnt I make my own pcs and instead bye them from the nearest shop, so it was good time to start doing so. It probably wont win any modding competition but I must say I am really happy about my carpenter work despite its crapy looking, the result is a home-made server woden structure 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 the 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 there are only working few of them as energy controllers for the electric devices, and another one to control the automatic irrigation.

The idea when I leave home is the following: using a remote control plugged near the exit door some specific areas are switched off, ensuring standbyes wont consume, it also allows to supervise some devices by an application reacheable through internet. A virtual machine on the server delivers the service, wifi cameras at home could be also streamed through it if needed, some other applications like sms notification and stuff like that are also available.

Typical domotic services as light brightness and blind rolling are also desireable but unfortunatelly expensive (especially blind domotic motors) so I have left it for better times...

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

Automatic irrigation

I like plants, are green and make a great contrast with cold laptops and electronic devices. I also like them because they look alive, maybe they dont speak (they dont), but there is something from their natural behaviour that makes me feel relax and good. So wherever I am I try to surround myself with plants. Nothing bad against them but to irrigate them, it wont be a big problem if I stay, but they tend to dye when I dont, so automatic control will take care of it.

What I have done is to implement an automatic irrigation system controlled by four X10 domotic modules programmed to water four different areas of plants periodically. Two home made receptacles contain two aquarium water pumps each for the purpose, an extra powerfull water pump fill one of the receptacles from the other, on this way only refilling one of them ensure water for both. 12 and 6 mmm tubes supply water to the plant areas.

The system is well regulated, it works fine and it can independently irrigate for around two months. As an extra precation there is a system taking care of the pumps, when water levels in the receptacles are low safety-guarding motors disable the power, so no water pump can get burnt.

Sumo Robot

Robots has always fascinated me, so building a robot is a must in the future. Some years ago speaking with a friend about robots we decided to try to build a microrobot for a competition, our idea was firstable to prepare a small one and slowly with the pass of the time keep improving it untill been ready for a big competition like Eurocup or Robocup. Time has passed and definetly there is not robot, this friend is doing something very different right now something like 2000 km away from me and the robot of course is not even planned yet, but the idea is still alive and sooner or later robot`s time will come.

From the original idea of a sumo robot has turned into an "explorer", which combines a micro to control the wheels, different sensors to map and avoid obstacles, IR control, internet control using wifi, camera and some other stuff that will improve the robots possibilities.

At the moment it is on the design stage... still a lot to do

Web server in Atmega88 microcontroller + rele

This idea comes from one company I was working on. My boss had an idea to develop something that theoretically would have been very succesfull within companies, unfortunately the implementation was far from been easy and economically unfeasible, and the project died two weeks later. Using some of its principles it is possible to make something usefull to solve a problem that has occured to me several times when I cant use WOL systems to power on a pc.

The hardware used 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 on internet and other configurations are being solved on the way.

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