It’s been a while since the last update, but a lot has happened in that time.   We now have power, insulation, flooring and even some guttering.

Picking up from where I was last time, the electrician came out and fitted a consumer unit to power the ring main and lighting circuits.  I read in my DIY book that “people usually fit too few sockets and regret it later”.  I don’t think I’ll have that problem, but on reflection I think I might have gone too far the other way — I’ve got 22 sockets. (more…)

Today is erection day! 

The site for the garage was cleared just over a week ago and today - bang on schedule - the new garage turned up on the back of a flatbed truck.  

The company brought a team of five guys to nail it together and by noon they had finished the job…

First impressions are very good.  Everything feels sturdy and it was impressive to see two guys standing on the roof at the same time whilst nailing down the felt.  I wouldn’t like to try leaning heavily against my shed roof, nevermind standing on it!   The windows are good too — all toughened glass rather than the perspex my shed came with.

Next step: The electrical consumer unit is going in tomorrow evening, then it’ll be on to wiring the sockets and lighting.   Then I’ll need to decide what type of insulation and cladding to go for on the inside… decisions, decisions!

I’m hoping to get stuck into some of those jobs over the next few days so it’s ready as a potential venue for the next poker night on July 10.   More to follow…

When we bought our house back in 2003 it had a fairly typical wood & concrete garage.   It was old and shabby, but we put in some shelving and worktop to make it more useful.  Then, in the Winter of 2007/08, it finally started to give in to the elements — the roof was leaking badly and the wooden front started to fall to bits.   It was time for a replacement.  However, we decided to make do until the other work was completed on the garden, driveway and house interior.

Now that the house is pretty much finished, it’s garage time!

I’ve decided to go for a wooden garage this time.  I’m using wood for a number of reasons: flexibily of design, warmth, ease of installing insulation and attractiveness to name just a few.   And since I don’t need the garage to store my car (who could be bothered with the fuss?) I’ve decided to build a garage with an internal partition, giving me a ‘garage’ side for my scooter and a summer house side for hanging out in.  Here’s the design I’ve come up with…

Read on after the jump for more pics and details…

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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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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.

This weekend I put together a wee project I’d been thinking about for a while — a web-enabled weather station in my back garden.

Ever since I moved out of the city a few years ago I’ve taken a greater interest in the weather.  When we moved into our new house in Elderslie I noticed the previous owner had an outdoor temperature sensor installed.  She’d taken it away with her, but the bracket was still there.  I bought the same model and installed it a couple of weeks after moving in.  It’s been really handy, but my inner geek has always wanted more!

Last week I noticed Maplin had reduced the price of their touchscreen USB weather station to £80.  It’s branded Watson W-8681, but I think it’s more commonly called the WH1080PC. It seemed to have everything I was looking for: wind, temperature and rain sensors, RF wireless connection and a USB PC interface.  The only thing that was missing was a reliable way to mount it outdoors.  I bought a suitable 20mm pole and TV aerial bracket from B&Q – total cost about £11.

Installation

Putting the weather station together was dead easy, but finding somewhere to install it outside wasn’t.  I tried lots of options, but everywhere had problems – too low, too sheltered, too close to the neighbour’s dog, etc.  I finally settled on the garage, which I had been trying to avoid on account of the solid concrete walls.  An hour of drilling and two carbide-tipped drill bits later it was in place.

The rest of the installation was dead easy.  The touchscreen receiver has excellent range, and I was able to get a signal from the outdoor station everywhere in the house.  The PC connection was simple too — just run a small EXE file (no installer) and it starts picking up the signal.

Getting it online

I had a browse around for software to allow my weather station to publish directly to the web.  I was really disappointed with what I found — options that people were recommending on forums were quite expensive ($70+) and seemed pretty amateur for the price.   I installed a couple of freeware/trial options, but again these either didn’t work at all, or were really disappointing.

So there was nothing else for it: I had to build my own weather software from scratch.  I set up a MySQL database and wrote a PHP script to extract data directly from the desktop software supplied with the weather station.  It gets updates every 30 mins and writes them to the database.  If the weather station receiver isn’t connected to the PC for any reason, it stores results in its internal memory.  The extraction script automatically catches up when it’s next connected. 

I then wrote a some display scripts to query the database and produce graphs over time.  At the moment the graphs only show the last 24hrs worth of results.  I’ll add more options in the future, but there’s no point at the moment as I only have a couple of days worth of data stored.

See live results from the Elderslie Weather Station