HVAC temp sensor

Using a makeshift breadboard to wire up the resistor and temp sensor (aka: cut out a piece of plastic from HDD tray inserts)



The unmarked wire is for ground, the one with one line goes to the DQ pin of the sensor and will go to the channel pin of the control module. The wire with 2 markings is the VDD pin of the sensor and will go to the +5v line of the control module. I will be using cat6 to wire this to the module, so probably one pair for DQ and VDD and a single wire for ground. I can probably technically use the common wire of the thermostat as ground, but I rather use the one fed from the control module to be on the safe side.

I will try to shove this behind the existing thermostat which will save me from figuring how to put this on the wall and hide it.

There is also another sensor that will go outside, but not sure how I want to do that yet, and considering it's like -30 out there, I rather wait till spring to do any type of outside work. Chances are what I'll do is mount it on the house in some kind of small plastic box. Might even put it inside the phone nid.

The outside sensor will be used to help the system better calculate start times and run times to increase efficiency. For example, on a -30 day I might want the furnace to start earlier than a -5 day. the current indoor temp will also play a role in that calculation. The program will learn the heat gain/loss and then based on these values should be rather accurate in knowing when to start the heat.

There will also be other features such as over running past the set temp to avoid short cycling. So on a -30 day it may be better off to run the heat 2 degrees past what it's set to, and let it drop 3 degrees before starting again. The less short cycling, the more efficient things will be. Still lot of things to think about. At first the program will simply be an advanced temp scheduling program and I'll add more features over time. Being able to set the temp or change schedules from the office, or my playbook will be pretty cool.

21st century HVAC control

I just got this in the mail today:



It's a 4 port relay controller with 6 input sensors. I also got 2 temp sensors, but really I should have got 6 from the get go and be done. Might put in another order once I confirm it works as I want.

My goal is to hook this up to my mini atom server which I will dedicate as a environmental control system. The relays will be used to control the heat and the temp sensors as a thermostat. I will code a web based app to control it. I plan to add lot of intelligence to it such as know how early to start the furnace based on the outside temperature. Once this is done I'll be able to control the furnace from work. I will be starting shiftwork soon, too, so being able to setup more complex schedules than the typical weekly/weekend settings will be great. I will also have a function to quickly override a schedule for a single day. Sometimes I go for lunch at 12:00 other times I go for lunch at 1:00 etc we just kinda play it by ear. So when I determined when I go for lunch then I'll set it to start so it's warm when I get home. Should be a fun toy to play with, and it will be practical.

I now need to decide how to physically set it up. How I wire it, etc... to make it as clean as possible. I might mount the board right into the server somehow, then have a terminal strip on the back of the server to make the thermostat and sensor connections. For now I'll have one sensor where my current thermostat is (I'll just shove it right in it basically) and the current thermostat will be used simply as a backup. It will be wired in parallel.

Later on I might add more sensors, like one on the upper floor, one in the basement, one in what will be the server room, maybe one in the garage.

I will only need 3 relays, so the 4th will probably be used for some misc purpose. Maybe the hvac for the server room itself once I build that room.

Now if I could add voice recognition to that server and have sensors around the house, that would be awesome. The server is called HAL9000. :D

Finally Started my new job!

Today is day 2 of my new job working at the Network Opoerations Center (NOC). I am still getting setup, there are quite a lot of apps and lot to know, so it will be a while till I'm comfortable, but so far so good. I think I will really enjoy it, and working at the central Office is pretty cool. I'm actually starting to somewhat understand the equipment there and how it talks to each other. It's pretty cool.

No more crazy IT manager to deal with. All the problems of that other place are now behind me! Like any other job, I'm sure this new one wont be perfect, but nothing can be worse than dealing with that other place and the crazy IT manager. Also the pay is better, and once I'm trained and able to work alone, I will be able to start shift work which will be a lot of fun. More time off! I will probably find a hobby of some sort to make more money on the side, or just expand on existing projects.

So I bought a playbook

It may not be the leading edge tablet, but at $300 off, making it $199, I could not resist for such a deal.

The only thing I'm kinda bumbed out about is that there are not many apps available yet, but I'm hoping more will be coded over time. I can always look at coding my own too, but for the meantime I'll wait and see what the app world will have to offer.

One thing I would love to see is an email client, especially one that can do imap. But with a web browser, anything is possible. I can always code a web client front end and put it on my server. A SSH and RDP client would be nice to see too. Though it does have VNC.

Also, Angry Birds would be nice to have on there. :P

But all and all, I don't regret the purchase. It's been a while since I've bought myself a toy. I've had to support these as well as other tablets at work, now I actually have one of my own to mess around with.

Learn from my fail ...and FML

When restoring a SQL database to a temp database so you can manually extract data, ensure that the backup job does not generate a database file that includes the original database name in it, causing it to restore to live instead.

Hopefully nobody got any uber rare artifacts today, because they are now gone.

What to do with an old power supply and ethernet cables?

The answer is: magnetize screwdrivers! Oh, and you'll want a piece of PVC pipe or something.







Remind me not to store my screwdrivers and hard drives in the same box. I kinda went overboard with this, and I have more Ethernet wire left. My goal is to reach around 5 ohms or so. Right now it's about 1.5 ohms, so without measuring I'm guessing that's pulling about 8 amps off the 12 volt rail. It gets hot enough if I leave it on too long it burns out. (this is coil #2!) It only takes about 10 seconds to charge a screwdriver to the point of being able to pickup a bunch of screws at once. As long as it can pickup one, it's usually good enough.


As a side note, they sure don't make stuff like they used to. This is what happened when I went to unplug a new Christmas light set:




Oops. Definitely a good idea that I'm installing a GFCI outlet for that.

Hammer time!

This slab laughs at my pity attempts. I'm hoping to have weakened it enough to do the rest with the sledge hammer once I have energy again. There's a huge footing which will probably require some more serious equipment to take out.

The plan is to have this all gone by next year since I am getting the weeping does redone.

Before starting:



During:


Day 2, done for now:

Gimme my new job!

I got accepted for a new position April 14 2011... it's now almost September 1st. The IT manager here is being more and more of an asshole with me latetly. Get me out of this place! The beauty of the new job is it wont be customer facing. Sooooo looking forward to it.

Today he starts freaking out because a user could not login to their mail, so I check into it, turns out they were part of a list to be deleted, so I restored it. He starts flipping out that I did not contact him, well... if he had used the proper process of putting in a ticket instead of just barging in here like a mental, then maybe I would of had a call back number. Then he starts flipping out at me for not putting the contact information in the account. woah woah there asshole, I'm not even the one that created that account, and it's not my fault HR does not provide the information half the time. DIAF. I so wish I could tell him off sometimes. He can be an asshole towards us, and we just have to take it up the ass. Sick of this. It's sad how people like him can have enough power to get away with this verbal abuse.

More on Hedge Clearing

This was done a while back, but thought I'd post. The stumps have been removed:



A bigger job than it seems, to do without machinery. Used an axe and shovel to rip em right out. Grass will eventually be grown there, but that will wait till next year after the weeping tiles are done.

Power outages: A server's worse nightmare

So you have a bunch of servers humming away, then suddenly, the power goes out. No problem, the UPS takes over, and when the battery starts getting low, the VMs are sent a ACPI shutdown, and once they are all shut down, the host is then sent an ACPI shutdown, and everything is gracefully shut down.

Later, the power comes back up. I personally like setting my machines to stay off, and I will manually turn them on. This prevents fast on/off if the power is repeatedly coming on and off and the battery is depleted. This is common when the cause of the power is a loose fuse in a pole as it may take a couple tries for the linemen to get it to click in properly... that long pole can't be easy to maneuver! Anyway, I come home once the power is fully restored, and I turn everything on.

This is where the problems begin. When electronic equipment is always on, at some point it's almost like it gets "used to it" and does not like to be shut down then turned on again. Guess the cooling of the components causes issues with the solder or what not. So the server boots up fine, I then start all the VMs. Not 5 minutes into booting up, BANG, one drive falls out of the raid 5 array. I check the serial number and my documentation to check which bay that drive in so I can go swap it with a replacement (I don't have a fancy setup where a light goes on when a drive fails). BANG! Another drive drops out. Game over, the raid array is toast.

After hours of playing around, I actually manage to get the raid array going again. Some data got corrupted and had to be restored from backups, but I did get it back without going 100% to backups. BANG a drive drops again. This time, for fun, I decide to insert it into another slot and let it rebuild. So far so good, but I can't trust this. My suspicion is the backplane, cable, or sata controller. I don't have time to do micro troubleshooting like this... I just want it to work, period. So I order two new backplanes (one is still backordered...) and 4 new drives (2 in there were already less than a week old). I can manage to get everything to work with just one backplane, and just one loose drive, so I go with that for now. So I slowly start removing the Hitachi drives and replace them with the new WD blacks letting it rebuild in between. No issues. I suspect maybe there is something up with those Hitachis so this is just a shot in the dark. Ironicly I had just finished RMAing 5 of them, which came in the mail the same day as the backplanes. But these particular drives were not showing any signs of issues so it was precautionary.

So that's done. Brand new backplane and drives. So far so good... then I start getting errors like this:

INFO: task pdflush:14763 blocked for more than 120 seconds.

"echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.

pdflush       D ffff8801dac8fa80     0 14763      2

 ffff8800048c9da0 0000000000000046 ffff8800048c9d00 ffffffff8101686f

 ffffffff8162a500 ffffffff8162a500 ffff88020f12adc0 ffff8801ff4496e0

 ffff88020f12b108 000000020dc05dc6 ffff880028062570 ffff88020f12b108

Call Trace:

 [] ? read_tsc+0xe/0x24

 [] ? __dequeue_entity+0x61/0x6a

 [] ? __switch_to+0x1b0/0x3e0

 [] __down_read+0xa3/0xbd

 [] down_read+0x2a/0x2e

 [] sync_supers+0x4a/0xc4

 [] wb_kupdate+0x35/0x119

 [] pdflush+0x16e/0x231

 [] ? wb_kupdate+0x0/0x119

 [] ? pdflush+0x0/0x231

 [] ? pdflush+0x0/0x231

 [] kthread+0x49/0x76

 [] child_rip+0xa/0x11

 [] ? restore_args+0x0/0x30

 [] ? kthread+0x0/0x76

 [] ? child_rip+0x0/0x11

VERY bad. At least, it looks pretty bad. The task that hangs is random each time, and these errors can go on for pages. When it happens, all the VMs crash with IO errors.

Today I ordered a new controller, as that's the only thing that has not been changed short of the motherboard... with sockets changing every couple weeks it seems if I get a new mobo I'll need a new CPU as well, and may as well go with DDR3 and go from 8GB to 16GB. This server is really getting expensive.

Reproducing this error is near impossible as well, as I can give the hard drives a run for their money and they still perform fine, and it wont happen, and let it idle, and it may, or may not happen, for days. What a pain! It seems to always happen overnight, though there's a few instances where it's happened right in front of my eyes. Basically when it does, everything just locks up for a good minute or so.

This is why my next server will be prebuilt. Looking at a Supermicro or even Dell. Then again, even prebuilts can have their fair share of problems and parts are even harder to get. So it's a battle between building a whole new server, or getting a prebuilt, but either way, I think this thing is on it's last legs and in dire need of replacement. I am hoping the new controller will do the trick, however.