(09-23-2010) New Touchscreen Interface

I created a new touchscreen interface to display weather, radar and news data. The main difference in this interface is that it uses DirectX to make the animation much smoother.

(09-20-2010) GetData program

For my home automation suite I created a page scraping utility to get weather data (temperature, humidity, UV, pollen, astronomical data, etc), movie release information (both theatrical and home releases), news (a wide selection of different news feeds), weather radar (images hard-coded to my location) and TV series information to let me know when my favorite shows are back on and have new episodes. These feeds are designed to feed various displays in the home, but are mainly keyed to my touchscreen interface.

(09-15-2010) House Touchscreen

I've mounted a touchscreen next to the main entry door to my home, and have been writing some software to give a house overview and media interface application for this screen. Currently it only displays the weather radar, but soon it will have a completed weather page and will have an option to view the radar screen for tracking storms. Also, I have used RSS feeds to gather the latest movie releases and news stories and these will be displayed in a scrolly at the bottom of the interface. I will update when the next version of the software is up and running.

(05-29-2010) SPRIME

This looks very cool! SPRIME

(05-06-2010) Chronos continues...

Last week, I worked on converting Chronos to a service (so no pictures of that...) and that went well. I continue to work on the application version, adding in new features all the time and then moving the completed and tested features into the service.

Currently, the application can respond to tweets with current weather and forecasts, using the zip code to identify location, also, it can communicate with other applications via TCP sockets, or get or post via HTTP request, or run an application. Also, I started making each of these actions into a separate thread, so the timer can run independently from the action calls.

Another new feature for the application was the ability to calculate sun rise, sun set and solar noon by using the longitude and latitude entered by the user. Currently, I don't trap events for sunset, sunrise or noon, but it's a simple addition. Next, I may add moon phases, but not sure if I have use for this feature.

So far, I'm very happy with my timer. For testing I set up a few events. It does a good job of reminding me to water my plants every night, as well as give me a quote of the day, as well as get any "tweets" sent to my home account and parse them and send back relevant data. Also, the twitter interface gives me the ability to create simple databases (CSV - comma delimited files) that I can import into various programs. So, when I fuel up my car, I can text a tweet to my home twitter account and my mileage and fuel is saved into a database for that vehicle. Very handy.

In the future I want to create a HTML/XML parser to deal with timed "gets" from HTTP/RSS/XML locations. So, for example, we can use this program to get a web page, parse out the needed information and send it on to the end user. Ideas for this include weather operations (like any warnings, watches or advisories that come along) or if a new episode of your favorite TV show is coming on tonight. I would like to create a simple, script based program, that can do this without reinventing the wheel every time a web page format is changed. I have an idea, but only time will tell if it works.

(04-14-2010) Chronos - Timer system

I wrote a timer application. It's very simple - does daily, monthly and annual timed events. Can do day(s) of week (For example my wake up timer: Every Monday-Friday at 6AM, duration of 15 minutes) , day of month (2nd Tuesday each month or the 15th of each month) or day of year (4th Thursday in November or every December 25th). Each timer has a start time and a duration, so that it can start at a specific time of day and continue on for minutes or hours, as defined by the timer event in a database.

You can assign a holiday flag, or holiday exemption for each timer - for example my wake-up timer is Monday through Friday at 6AM, with a duration of 15 minutes, but if it's a holiday then it is holiday exempt and the alarm will not go off on that day. Also, you can dismiss a timer - so that once I wake up and dismiss the alarm, it won't continue to try to wake me up.

The Chronos system also has OnStart, OnActive and OnEnd events for each timer. In the future I would like to add socket communications as well as Sunset and Sunrise timers.

(04-14-2010) Twitter Unit for Delphi

I created a simple unit for using Twitter through Delphi. It requires the Indy Internet component suite to be installed, but then it allows the user to send and receive tweets very easily. I created a simple example program to show all the functions. If you're interested in the code, please drop me a line and I'll send it to you.

(04-08-2010) New twitter code

Created a new twitter interface. My old system was using CURL (a great little command-line URL utility), but this version is all internal. It works much better and faster than the old version. Also, I've added some new abilities like the ability to create databases via twitter, so that I can keep track of invoices or automotive upkeep with just a tweet back to my server. Would like to give the tweet'er program the ability to send weather warnings and updates, as well as send me my to-do list every day.

I plan to add this into my existing home automation code, so that controlling lights or getting updates from my cameras can be done via twitter, or even changing parameters to the home automation system can be done remotely. The home automation system has twitter support, but it's not very rich at this time.

(03-24-2010) Slow progress...

I have been working some on home automation. The home automation software that I have written seems good, but since the latest upgrade in operating systems to Windows 7 the USB to 4 COM port adapter I have seems to have trouble addressing a single port. Instead, a command sent to COM3, for example, is broadcast to all ports and this causes problems with garbage being sent and received on all ports.

I have been working on a few other small things. I wrote a new TV episode / movie release date scraper that will alert me when my new favorite shows are coming or a movie in a genre I like is being released. Not sure how I want to handle the use of this, maybe I'll tweet myself to let me know...

Anyway, I just wanted to update things here because it had been dormant for so long.