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Downsizer Forum Index -> Energy Efficiency and Construction/Major Projects

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dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46249
Location: yes

Posted: Sat Mar 12, 22 1:35 pm Post subject:

in general yes, when there is light there will be driven voltage to harvest

most systems are off grid capable or a few mins with pliers and a screwdriver will sort a useful supply with some wise improvisation

something to consider is every change from harvest to use uses some harvest

direct is ok if the voltage and current of the harvest match the load

mostly indirect(with extra inline kit and energy losses, i.e. thermodynamics are inevitable) is required to get V and A at a suitable level to supply to the load.

a decent battery bank would be useful, it is not essential

an ev car could easily double as a local battery bank

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28239
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Sun Mar 13, 22 12:05 pm Post subject:

I'm still only learning to swim in the land of node-red.

But I seem to have achieved a point where I can make a decision based on what is generated and I have routines that can turn a switch on and off.

But no idea at this precise second as to how to do what in a real language would be a simple function call

It's also notable that in the tutorial I am basing my work on, what would be a global constant ends up typed into several dialogues.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28239
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Fri Mar 18, 22 7:22 am Post subject:
So far I have had to hack or fork 3 github repositories to make things work, but still easier than coding it all myself.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46249
Location: yes

Posted: Fri Mar 18, 22 7:46 am Post subject:
i have no idea what those are but most things get easier after the first few goes if it works it works, are you about to be renamed jema bluetoothson well done so far, making things coordinate is always fun even when they are made to do it

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28239
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Fri Mar 18, 22 8:00 am Post subject:

One of the issues is that the node-red community is basically hackers cobbling together software without any standard and coordination.
They fork things and you end up with name conflicts and not even knowing what code is being called.
I have just gone through one set of code and replaced a myriad of "request failed" outputs with something saying what the request was and for the sake of some sodding sanity what the error was! it's the sort of code which wouldn't get passed a simple code review.
Not helped by manufacturers having no respect for 3rd party software. Some of the Philips Hue code broke yesterday because they put out an up date which changed "status" in a command to "action". Semantically the change makes sense, but obviously it just breaks anything trying to to that thing.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28239
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 22 8:24 am Post subject:
Latest main dash board, there is a glaring bug.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46249
Location: yes

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 22 9:30 am Post subject:
umm , yes most of the recorded used load is not accounted for the total is quite low which may be correct, if it is, a battery unit at reasonable cost is plausible for dull days and nighttimes

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28239
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 22 12:42 pm Post subject:

dpack wrote:

umm , yes
most of the recorded used load is not accounted for

the total is quite low which may be correct, if it is, a battery unit at reasonable cost is plausible for dull days and nighttimes

it's the recorded total which is actually the wrong number, it's meant to be total of the day so far, but got over sampled and so is insanely over.

Ive also got a semaphore working, something can set a hue light to a value and it gets detected and acted on

More practically there is a screen that shows the typical daily cost of measured appliances.

Nicky cigreen

Joined: 25 Jun 2007
Posts: 9887
Location: Devon, uk

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 22 1:25 pm Post subject:
I haven't got a very smart smart meter - it just tells me my daily use. The washing machine is a big user, I find, and of course, get's the most use during good weather. is that daily total - what you are consuming?

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28239
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 22 6:42 am Post subject:

Nicky Colour it green wrote:

I haven't got a very smart smart meter - it just tells me my daily use. The washing machine is a big user, I find, and of course, get's the most use during good weather.

is that daily total - what you are consuming?

As I said the daily total was false in the last image. It's still a work in progress and the total adds everything it sees according to the sampling interval which went from 5 mins to 1 min and hence started thinking we were using 5x as much.
I'm using a system called node-red which leaves a lot to be desired by way things being hard coded and needing changing in multiple places.
The original sample code I used would have seen one of the API keys hardcoded into dozens of bits of code

Nicky cigreen

Joined: 25 Jun 2007
Posts: 9887
Location: Devon, uk

Posted: Thu Mar 31, 22 9:34 am Post subject:

jema wrote:

Nicky Colour it green wrote:

I was thinking that was a stonkingly high figure.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28239
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 22 7:15 am Post subject:

I'm suffering a bad foot at the moment which is rather clamping down on garden plans and so spending more time on automation.

It's very bleeding edge

One of the things you have to do to contact your devices is to encrypt things correctly.

This has been working using code I found on someone's page, but as soon as I tried complicated things it fails miserably

It fails because for anything complicated the code doesn't do the complicated things actually needed if you bother to read the spec

No one seems to have made an open source contribution that actually does things properly. So time to actually make that contribution!

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 16006

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 22 7:22 am Post subject:
Good luck with it. I am sure a lot of people will bless you if you get it to work, even if you won't see the reward. Hope your foot gets better soon.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46249
Location: yes

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 22 8:34 am Post subject:

yes, those things

if i vaguely understand the problem

you need to make a "babel fish" that translates between multiple systems and collates what they are saying to themselves and/or each other

start from a single set of open source protocols would be ideal, the world is not ideal and all the parts have different protocols

back to a babel fish, a registry and analysts to make sense of the data
not easy but plausible

get the babel fish and the rest should be simple

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28239
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Fri Apr 08, 22 11:06 am Post subject:

and I'm a step further.

There's a big problem when the example code that tuya provides is simply riddled with bugs. Plainly no one has ever tested it, it sort of looks like it might try and do the right thing, but it does so with one of the wrong variables having pumped one of the right variables full of garbage as someone has plainly misunderstood a call in the node language

my guess is that it once worked and then some smartypants thought it would be nice to let called split out the path and query parts of the url and let the code put them back together again. But they just changed a few lines of code without ever testing.

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