AC II Telnet Interface..

[Ashlar]

So I have a mini-itx computer hooked up to my AC II..

Every 5 minutes, I poll the AC II via the serial interface and munge the data. That gets inserted into a mysql database, displayed on a LED sign in my office, and turned into an image for inclusion in my sig on the local MAS forum.

 

[DragonZim]

Thats freakin cool!

 

[Ashlar]

Thanks.. I also have a 5" diagonal screen attached to this computer.. I'm eventually going to write an app to fill the screen with a scrolling display of graphs of parameters.

 

[whirley]

Where'd you get a LED sign that queries a database and displays the data?

I'm interested in doing something similar...

whirley (.net developer)

 

[Fluxion]

Dood! Thats Awesome! I'd be interested in a little more detail as to how you did this.

 

[Ashlar]

Sam's club had a 27" LED sign on sale.. for an additional $20-$30, you can get a serial cable and software for it. I ditched the software and wrote my own linux scripts to push data to it.

http://www.betabrite.com/

Looks like they've got better signs these days..

I don't query a database for the status, I actually open up the serial port that the AC II is connected to, and issue a 'c' command. That spits out a current status, including the status of all the x-10 devices. I format that data, insert it into a mysql db, and write it to a file on my web server. A php script turns that into an image on demand.

 

[Ashlar]

Very rudimentary display of the stats..

 

[jdieck]

I did something similar but I poll the info from Aquanotes and upload it to my web pages...
status every 15 minutes, chart every hour.

http://home.comcast.net/~jdieck1/frames.html
http://home.comcast.net/~jdieck1/graph.html

 

[Ashlar]

Very nice! What software did you use to make the graphs?

 

[jdieck]

Once I get the data on a text file I use Excell with macros to convert it to numbers and create the charts which the macros save to an old laptop functioning as a server so the images can be SRC'd directly from the web page html file.
The automation of Windows to poll the data I use Macroscheduler.
Now that I have access to server side processing on a new domain I will be upgrading the program in the following months to use flash charts and upload XML files to handle the data and make it more reliable without having to link to the home server. As you can see there is a straight line for certain period in the charts. When the poll fails after the 10th try the program locks (I'm still trying to debug) and if I do not notice the chart data is not generated.