Thursday, 30 December 2021

How things shrink

Since January 2014 I ran a local server based on a microchip 32MX PIC. It originally connected to a weather station, gave a local read out, controlled remote sockets, uploaded to various logging services such as Thinspeak and Wuinderground, screened phone calls, monitored basic energy use, etc. It was largely ok until this year when the webserver would randomly stop responding.  I'd slowly removed some things like the weather station and the grid tie inverter, which became self contained nodes and did their own logging etc.

I'd planned to replacing it since March 2019, so I finally time to implement it this year. The box with buttons was the RF receiver and display, replaced by a receiver on the blue pcb, bottom left and the display also driven directly. The white board bottom middle is replaced by the blue one too, although its large size was partly driven by needed a hardwired ethernet connection, amd partly due to it being home made and single sided. New board is wifi and double sided with screen printing; I have no idea how them can make 5 of them for around 15€. The board bottom right is caller ID which had both a PIC and a wifi module. This is replaced by a dedicated CID chip and uses serial to communicate the main blue board. Quite a space saving, and the new board also allows me to use modern control methods like MQTT.





Logs

 December 2021. Storing the logs in the small trailer this year, and bringing them into the house in crates. Have 4 crates.

31/12/21 have filled the trailer 4 times, which is about 3 crates each load. 

31/12/21 Trailer pretty full and 2 crates are full.

1/2/22 filled trailer + 3 crates. Used about 1 crate per week since.

About 23 crates, but not clear when winter finished!

Dec 2022 Filled new woodstore (~1.5 stere) with ash. Not quite enough for this winter

Oct 2023 Filled the woodstore with 3.75 trailer load of mostly oak.