It seems our service provider needs replacing, sorry everyone for the outage (which still appears to be ongoing)

Seems that a keyboard and some thoughts are enough these days for an accolade. How bizarre, but there you have it, I'm apparently in the top 5% of viewed linked in profiles. It's a strange old world.

Miles aka http://www.linkedin.com/pub/profile/6/07b/a31

It's been a long time coming but the road to certification begins. Thankfully the rather geeky day out (how many people does it take to look at a graph, hehehehe) confirms that our existing products (when set to the appropriate settings for the locale) do on first pass meet the requirements for FCC and ETSI. There's more paperwork, more intensive and time consuming comparative tests between known emitters to complete (this is to prove that what is seen is what is measured "on the day"). We are seeing this process with news eyes and can now see whyit takes days and so much money to acheive.

We often get asked this question. And we always say: “it depends”. As you can see on our forum (http://openmicros.org/), different people obtain very different results.

This afternoon, we spent a very informative afternoon with db Technology in Cottenham (http://www.dbtechnology.co.uk/), who have labs for testing radio equipment. As we were testing our radio modules (and obtaining some excellent results), we talked about the key factors that influence range. To these I added a bit more background, to give a fuller picture.

The most important thing to understand about low power radio is that there are a huge number of factors that influence the way in which radio waves propagate from a transmitter to a receiver. And how both are matched Here are some of the most important:

 The frequency of the radio wave. Low frequency radio waves tend to travel further than high, very high or ultra-high frequencies. One medium wave transmitter (500 – 1500 kHz) can serve a whole country, where several VHF (FM) transmitters (87 – 108 MHz) would be needed to cover the same area. Short wave radio signals (3-30MHz) travel right round the world as the signals can be reflected by the stratosphere. A UHF TV transmitter (470 – 862 MHz) covers an area of around 50 miles around it. WiFi, at 2.4GHz has a limited range, just around your house. Ciseco radio units operate in the UHF band, at 868MHz in Europe and 915MHz outside.

 The power of the transmission: obviously the more powerful the signal, the further it will travel. Ciseco radios maximum power is 10 mW.

 The polarity of the radio wave. Radio waves are electro-magnetic waves. The electrical component of the wave is at 90 degrees with respect to the magnetic component. A transmitting aerial has a polarity in the sense that it places the electrical component either horizontally (horizontal polarisation) or vertically (vertical polarisation). For best results, the receiving aerial should adopt the same polarisation as the transmitting aerial.

If you use whip aerials on Ciseco XRFs for instance, you want to arrange for them to be both either vertical or horizontal to improve signal strength at the receiver.

And by virtue of the radiation pattern of each whip antenna and if they are both horizontal align them in the same direction, e.g. both north-south or both east-west; not one north-south and the other east-west (the worst combination). When they are vertical they are already aligned correctly (up-down).

 The height of the transmitter. The higher the transmitter, the further it can “see” over the curvature of the earth. This is especially important for transmitters at the higher end of the frequency spectrum, as higher frequencies tend to travel in more of a straight line than lower frequencies.

 Obstructions between transmitter and receiver. These can be of different type. Some, such as the foil lining on the walls in modern buildings, simply stop UHF radio waves dead (Faraday cage). Others, such as trees absorb some of the energy of the radio wave. Line of sight is short hand for the absence of obstructions between transmitter and receiver.

 Reflections. Radio waves can be reflected off different surfaces. Short wave radio (3 – 30MHz) can even bounce off layers in the atmosphere, allowing signals to travel right round the world. UHF signals however, tend to travel straight through such layers, but can bounce off other, more solid objects, thus providing an alternative path between transmitting and receiving aerial. The most important surface in this respect is the ground plane. Some emitted radio waves will hit the ground and some of these can bounce up to reach the receiving aerial. The ground conditions play an important part too. In wet conditions, where the ground tends to be more conductive, more radio waves are reflected and fewer absorbed, thus resulting in a better range. Some of the signals that hit a building or similar structure could also bounce off and reach a receiving aerial.

In addition tot he above, there are many many more factors, including the type of aerial in use, the way the aerial is directed, the way it is matched to the transmitter and receiver circuitry, and so on. But that may be a subject for another time.

 Claire Crouchley has written an article about making a lamp that turns on automatically when it becomes dark and then turns off after a set amount of time – it can be found here.

I have been running an XRF Thermistor sensor in my shed at the bottom of my garden for over a year now. The battery used is a cheap (ebay) generic 2032.

The XRF is configured with the LLAP Thermistor firmware and setup for cyclic sleep sending the temperature once ever 5 minutes.

The battery is still going strong - the chart below shows the discharge - I note that every night (when it is colder) the voltage is lower than during the day - this gives the width of the line.

The data is logged on Cosm, and I used Curl against the API to retrieve the data for this chart. The chart is based on 6 hourly readings.

The sensor will keep going until the battery is about 1.9V - so as you can see there is quite a lot of life still in it.

If you wish to get the data for yourself:

Insert the following into "cosm.txt" - inserting your API key and adjust the start date:

--request GET
--header "X-PachubeApiKey: your key here"
--output "response.csv"
--url "http://api.cosm.com/v2/feeds/22343/datastreams/11.csv?start=2012-12-15T00:01:00Z&duration=4month&interval=21600&per_page=999"

then run the following command line

curl --config "cosm.txt"

http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2013/03/raspberry-pi-gets-big-ideas.cfm

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/cwdn/2013/03/its-a-small-m2m-world-after-all.html#.UT3AZ-two74.twitter

It's a little quick but i have now put up the instructions on using a RFM12B with the v1.1 RFµ-328-BARE

Take a look here. Adding a RFM12B to the R013 - RFµ-328-BARE

Not the whole of the internet just our building. It's made getting anything done this morning close to impossible. It's affecting email and the phones. Lost count of how many times it's been up and down but as an example I didn't even get chance to finish this post before it went again......Time to do some hoovering or other off line activity. What did we do before the net I just don't know.

New people to the forum will have noticed they have to wait for an account to be activated, this we had to do on Sunday because we were being spammed from the Eastern block every few minutes. Seems they didn't like us shutting down their advertising and we suffered a DOS attack. This is now consuming hours of effort to put right that we should be spending on customers. I'm really really unhappy as are some of the new users.We are doing all we can to find ways to sort this out.

A really interesting article.

http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2250341/-internet-of-things-promises-nine-billion-tons-of-carbon-savings

The start of trying to improve our documentation has begun (try clicking documentation in the top menu). There's a new index which will, I hope, make finding documents quicker and easier.

Why now?

There have been many comments about our documentation either being hard to find or hard to understand. This is us trying to react to that need now that we have a few more hands to do the work. I feel some explaination is appropriate at this time. To us our docs make perfect sense and are easy to find (but then it would, we designed the product/them). What we need is feedback on how to actually improve the experience from YOUR perspective, just saying that they are bad doesn't help us understand anything.

What happens if I don't help?

We'll have to take on more staff to do it, that will mean prices rise.

Forum user creation has had to go manual because of the amount of spam. If you now create an account an Admin will need to activate the account. This is a pain for everyone.....sorry, hopefully an interim measure. Since turning it on and writing this we have had loads of requests for spammers to join the forums, drives you mad!

Having been asked the question I can happily confirm that all Ciseco products are free from horse meat

So I thought things could be made nicer, so here's my code

http://openmicros.org/index.php/articles/79-computer-projects/265-processing-and-llap

Many people dont realise our hardware was born out of an ambition to say "wireless is easier than wires". We came up with a simple way to send messages between nodes, it was called aProtocol. This over the years matured into LLAP (local lightweight application protocol). Sounds complex, it really isnt, if you can send a tweet or a text you can send a LLAP. To show how easy it can be I thought I'd pick up a language I'd never used before and see how I got on................

First hurdle, don't bother with 64 bit processing, threw errors everywhere with the bits of code I tried so chose 1.51 stable, which got me up and running. I like the fact all I had to do was download a zi, unpack it somewhere and run the app (no installation procedure) that get's a thumbs up. Second was it looks like the Arduino IDE (as you would expect) second set of thumbs up.

The device I was talking to was an old aProtocol device not a LLAP one, the syntax is almost identical. With this simple script it sends the command once a second and displays the recieved electricity readings. Job done. Kinda cool for less than half an hours tinker time.

import processing.serial.*;
Serial Serial1;

void setup() {
  Serial1 = new Serial(this, "COM3", 9600);
}
 
void draw() {
  Serial1.write("aC00KW------");
  while (Serial1.available() > 0) {
    int inByte = Serial1.read();
    print(char(inByte));
  }
   delay (1000);
}

So I thought rather than just log to the debug, lets get something in a window......took me about an hour (not a fan of the syntax or IDE at his point)

A personal bit of blogging. Having joined Ciseco just 6 months ago, (though it wasn't completely my original job description) I have taken over product design and really enjoy it.

I spend about 60% of my time knee deep in EagleCad working on new design ideas for prototype, touching up prototypes for order and updating existing product designs for reorder.

As some of you may know we like to move fast at Ciseco, the internal company motto is actually a pun on Facebook’s, it’s “…..move fast and make things”

In the last 6 months we have brought 12 new products to market. That's an average of a new product every two weeks! And there’s every sign of it getting faster.

On my desk I currently have prototypes for 8 new product design that need the finishing touches before we order production boards from China.

We hope most of these will hit the shop around mid march (Chinese new year hold up the delivery of new PCB's)

I've started working on designs for another 5 products and 1 redesign, which along with some of the other product ideas we have, will go on next weeks prototype panel.

The following are just some of the areas the other 60% of my time goes :)

• Customer Support
• Programming and testing radios
• New placement program's for the Pick and Place
• SMT build schedule for the Pick and Place
• Prototype testing
• Documentation

Peter Balfe at Birmingham University built a low cost freezer alarm. We have known about this project for some time, but did not know about the great documentation that was produced. Take a look here: http://hcvpi.bham.ac.uk/Publications/PDFs/Freezer.pdf

Please note that we do not guarantee the XRF working at such low temperatures, but it is great to know that it is possible.

Great news, Maplin Electronics now stock the Pi boards, here's the product page links to buy them

http://www.maplin.co.uk/humble-pi-pcb-for-raspberry-pi-682468

http://www.maplin.co.uk/slice-of-pi-pcb-for-raspberry-pi-682462

http://www.maplin.co.uk/slice-of-pi-o-pcb-kit-for-raspberry-pi-682470