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Around here some of the new smart meters are using LTE-M and NB-iot networks for communication. NBIot especially seems like a promising candinate to eventually replace 2G - it supposedly has excellent signal reach paired with low power consumption, drawback being low-ish data rates. Modules...

Old thread but I thought I'll post a reply for anyone else searching into this. I needed to have a remote sms alarm from my boiler, and I had quite a bunch of old siemens MC35i modems around. It turned out sending sms messages from the modems internal storage was quite straightforward, basically...

Looks pretty nice. Did you consider going full synchronous buck? I've been pondering about that with a similar project of my own (wind mppt), seems like in addition to a normal half bridge driver it might need a reverse current cutout when dealing with a battery output. At least with standard...

That got me thingking, if the programming actually is half duplex it might even work over an RS.485 connection and would just need 2 wires =)

https://www.kode24.no/guider/smart-meter-part-1-getting-the-meter-data/71287300 With new meters this HAN port is supposed to became more common.. If your meter has one it's quite an easy interface for getting data off the meter.

2 words, bitwise OR :) (and for clearing bits, bitwise AND with negate)

If you were here, you could actually get paid by the national grid operator for offering to shed load on your kettle :) .. In principle they offer money for agreeing to shed power loads in case of power shortage, with shortage being frequency dropping under 49.5Hz. Not sure how much they are...

That is pretty impressive.. I'm tempted to give a go at 64-bit floating point division math just to see how long it takes to run :)

Hi, if it's recent enought to have an alternator, one and perhaps easier option would be to sense the engine's running state from the charging light.

Well you can even use the terminal on the picaxe editor if you want. The cheap RS-485 dongles have an USB to UART bridge built in, so once you've installed the driver you can open the COM port on any terminal you like.

Why do you need to put a picaxe in the middle if you just need to decode the protocol? USB-RS485 adapters are available for a few bucks on ebay. Once you've figured it out then implement what you want to achieve with a picaxe.

Too dim on contrast usually means too low contrast voltage, so It's likely the LCD you're having would require a negative contrast voltage to work in 5V system. If you had a spare PWM pin (looks like you don't on that design) you could use it to generate a negative voltage with a charge pump...

Hi, Not sure how to do it in linux, I used a windows computer to do the PID change.. as per the instructions Technical posted in post #2.

Hi, from my experience the best method is to program the Picaxe usb lead with a PID of 6001, after that it's plug and play every time. Even if you manage to get it to work now, chances are the next version of ubuntu will have it work in a different way.. So far going up from 12.04, 14.04 broke...

Thanks for the info, I'll look into it. A word of caution about using the UART on PI, at least on some PI 3 B boards with bluetooth by default the UART pins on the 40-pin IO header are being run by the software uart, and the baudrate will go haywire if the CPU goes into reduced speed mode. Not...

Hi, Are you using some sort of x86 emulator to program picaxe from the raspberry? I'd be interested to hear your solution as I could use a raspberry-programmable picaxe myself. Or do you mean just collecting data from the picaxe to the raspberry using the serial interface?

µAL-FAT board might be the answer to this problem. Not sure about the current offerings, but the old boards they had could use spi or uart to access the file system on an SD card or USB memory.

I bought a cheap Tenma's hot air station way back when I wasn't yet sure how much I'd need one. https://uk.farnell.com/tenma/21-10125-uk/hot-air-station-550w-220v-uk-plug/dp/2064551 It has turned out to be a surprisingly nice unit, and I haven't bothered getting anything better even though I...

Wonder if the UK grid aims to keep the time deviation of the grid (ec. a clock running off the mains frequency) close to real time in the long run as here on the nordic coutries? If so, it might be interesting to try and calibrate the picaxe's internal oscillator based on the long - long time...

The RPi serial problems might be caused by the soft uart. The bluetooth-enabled raspis default to having the hardware uart toggled to serve the bluetooth module, while the uart pins are driven by software implementation which quite frankly sucks. You can disable the BT and use the hw uart for...