Running your webserver from home gives lots of opportunities to connect the real world to the internet.  I’ve previously connected a webcam with motion detection so I can see people entering and leaving the driveway and, more recently, connected a wireless weather station to give regular Elderslie weather updates.

I decided my next project would be to put my front doorbell online.  As well as being a relatively simple, fun project, it also makes some sense: coupled with the webcam it can be used to give me a decent idea of who’s there when the doorbell goes and I’m out.   It also means I can hear the doorbell when I’m at the bottom of the garden, thanks to SMS or IM alerts on my iPhone.

Here’s the project in it’s rough state, before it gets packaged up into a project case.

If you’re interested in setting up a similar project, read on…

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I’ve always been a fan of developing desktop and kiosk applications in Flash.  Many people see it as a web-only technology, but over the years it has matured into a very capable programming language.  And if you add on a third party extension such as Zinc or mProjector, Flash has all the file/registry/device capabilities of any other language.

My latest kiosk app is a re-working of GSC’s News Editor.   This time the client was the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the subject was the GM debate.   The original plan had been to create a kiosk-only application, but in the end we decided to export a web version too.  Because everything was based on web technologies (Flash, JPEG, PNG, etc) the only thing that had to change was the compression level of the video files.  The web export added just a few hours to the overall project, but resulted in a far wider reach for the application.  

You can try it out here: http://www.scri.ac.uk/knowledge/games/youchoosethenews

s1jobs has been named as a finalist in the 2009 Onrec Awards in the category of Best Technical Innovation. The nomination — which is the first ever technical award nomination for s1 – recognises the huge technical advances made with the new site. 

From a UI point of view, we ripped the site up and started again in 2008.  Making use of the latest web techniques such as image sprites, ajax, streaming video recording and drag & drop personalisation, we developed a site which had far more functionality than the old site, while at the same time being a lot faster and more efficient (there are more details on the original launch post here).

The full list of Onrec finalists is available here: http://www.onrec.com/conferences/250309A/finalists.html

We went a wee hill walk/climb today up Dumgoyne, just behind the Glengoyne distillery in the Campsies.   It was a freezing cold day, but the hill was still popular.  It was also a good opportunity to try the Trailguru app on my iPhone. You can see the results here.

There’s also some geo-tagged photos from the trip on the Trailguru website.

I finally gave in last week and bought an iPhone.   I’d been trying to resist for ages, and bought the LG U990 (supposed iPhone-beater) just at the start of the year.  But the one thing the LG taught me was that tech specs don’t count for anything – it’s the quality of the UI that’s most important, and that’s what Apple have got right.

My first paid-for App Store purchase was Dynolicious, one of the many car speed/performance apps already on the market.  What really appealed about Dynolicious over the competition was that it didn’t use the GPS at all.  Instead, it relies on the built-in accelerometers and some clever physics to work out the acceleration (and therefore speed) of your car.

I was already fimilar with performance meters that work this way, having played with my friends G-Tech Pro a few times over the years.  I’d actually considered buying a G-Tech myself, but couldn’t really justify the £250 or so it cost for the odd occasion I’d use it.  But a £7.95 app for a device I already own?  …much more interesting!

I’ve read a lot about the impressive accuracy of Dynolicious online and have to say it seems pretty damn accurate.  

First I tried the 1/4 mile timing.  You just press the ‘start run’ button and it waits for you to move off.  As soon as it detects a movement of over 0.1G (configurable) it starts the timer.   Again, the results seem really accurate.  Compared to my TomTom GPS the terminal velocity of 83mph was bang on and the 0-60 time of 9.69s felt spot on too (the quoted figure for the IS200 is 9.5s and I expected to be slightly slower given the cold damp road surface at the time of the test).

Next I gave the skidpan feature a go and managed to rack up a Lateral G figure of 0.90 and a Braking G of 0.86 on the local roundabouts.  I have less hard facts to judge these on, but again they felt about right, my braking being less effective than the cornering due to the ABS kicking in.

All in all I’m dead happy with it.  The only thing I’d like to see in a future revision of the software is a way to store and review the dyno graphs it captures during a run.  The graphs — showing BHP, torque and speed — have an impressive level of detail that I’d like to take a look at later.  For example, you can clearly see the length of time you lose on each gear change.

Since I stuck my weather station online back in May I’ve had a number of enquiries about the software I’m using to publish results to the web.   My long term plan is to make my software freely available for anyone to use, but at the moment I’m just too busy to write the tutorials and scripts to support it.

However, I’m happy to supply the raw scripts and database details to anyone who wants it in the meantime.  Please read on for a description of how it all works then, if you think you have a compatible setup and enough basic technical knowledge, contact me and I’ll send over the scripts.

How it works

My weather station base unit is connected to the PC that hosts this site over USB.  That PC is running Windows and runs version 1.0 of EasyWeather, the software that usually ships as version 2.0 with these weather stations.

The EasyWeather software updates a text log file at set intervals, ususally every 30 mins.  My PHP script looks at that file periodically and inserts any new records into a MySQL database.  All script to display results and graphs read from this MySQL database.  

Finally, I’m running Maani Charts to produce the nice graphs that you see… the route to screen is basically MySQL > PHP > XML > SWF. 

Pre-requisites

• The ability to host your site from home on a Windows PC, including any DynamicDNS and port-forwarding requirements you may have.
• A standard Apache, MySQL, PHP setup.  If you don’t have one already, I’d recommend Xampp.
• Optional: The ability to have your weather station permenantly connected to your server PC without it affecting your temperature readings.  For me this meant getting a USB extension cable so that I could have the weather station outside my server cupboard.

Please note that my solution isn’t really compatible with any other setup (except perhaps where you have a Linux web server and a Windows PC both powered on 24×7).   If you have a different hosting arrangement, for example a remote server that you FTP to, then this solution isn’t for you I’m afraid.

If you’ve covered all of these pre-requisites, please feel free to contact me and request a copy of my scripts.  I’d appreciate a link to your home-hosted site in that email, just to confirm that you’ve already completed those steps and are ready to proceed.