Razberry: lets do temerature logging and a graph...

I've just updated to a recent 1.4 snapshot and added in HABmin to the config without any real difficulties, so time to see if I can persist the temperature data and do a graph I think.

oh yes, balls are the way to do it

or the use of styrofoam balls to evaluate light sources.

After thinking about ways to evaluate softboxes, brollies and the like, I decided to try polystyrene balls as a target to better see what is going on and it works really well.

 Here is a set of balls I got from hobbycraft - middle sized and big ones alternating - hanging in front a bare naked flash (Yongnuo 565), set to 24mm with the diffuser in place.

The balls are all lit with a hard edge around the circumference of each ball, there is a little reflected light showing from the white ceiling and other balls, but not enought to matter really. Below is a zoom in on the centre 3 balls.

CrashPlan on Raspberry pi - not such a good idea?

I continued to try to make Raspberry Pi with CrashPlan a viable backup server, but after running it for a few days and looking for various ways to  make it more robust, I've decided to give up on this and run CrashPlan along with a few other services on a baby server. Explanation follows.....

raspberry pi as a backup machine

Various things recently (not least cryptolocker and a *much* faster internet connection with an upgrade to ftc) made me start thinking about getting better organised at backups. I currently have around 2Tb of photos (on windows), lots of music (mostly recoverable from CDs) on linux and random other stuff.

With Raspberry pi idling at around 2 watts, using a huge disc on a headless pi as a backup point for the whole house seems an attractive option, and could act as a staging point for offsite backup as well (I've now got >10Mb upload speed, so trickling up at say 5Mb would get through a lot of data in a day).

After a bit of digging around, CrashPlan looks like the best option, so below are notes on first steps to getting CrashPlan going.

(note I am continuing to use CrashPlan, but running on an x86 box, rather than pi - see this post for explanation)

Razberry: config cleanup and add temperature sensor

The very simple config last time had silly icons and didn't really do the right things, so the first thing is to clean up the config a bit. After that I'm aiming to get a temperature sensor on a fibaro universal sensor working

Light box - major construction complete

The new lightbox now has all major parts in place, there is just some finishing work to do - painting the outside and a couple of bits of frame, and fitting handles, catches and cable clips.

Here it is packed up, its 180cm X 56cm X 20cm. There's a 1m ruls sitting on top of it

RaZberry: running as a service

Running as a service means openhab will automatically start when rpi starts up and will shut down when rpi shuts down, it can also be shutdown at any time from the console (for example, to run z-way to pick up new or changed device configurations).

This script is based on the one Victor Belov posted here changed thus:

1. directory and user names changed (ECLIPSEHOME, RUN_AS)
2. -Dgnu.io.rxtx.SerialPorts=/dev/ttyAMA0 added to DAEMON_ARGS
3. simple 3 generation log recycler

(Previously:

first steps

stripping down configuration

)