Category Archives: Computing

A job-hunting I shall go…

Posted on February 12, 2024 by james

The time has come. I really need to sort out getting a new job now. I’ve not done any full-time paid work for ages and whilst I’ve achieved an awful lot with the time I’ve had free, the mortgage has … Continue reading →

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Stacking on Linux, deeply

Posted on February 10, 2024 by james

Pretty much anyone who is into amateur astrophotography will be familiar with Deep Sky Stacker (aka DSS). It’s a great application that takes combinations of light and dark frames (amongst others) and merges them to produce a single stacked output … Continue reading →

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A blast from the long-distant past

Posted on February 3, 2024 by james

Back when I was at school (slates, chalk, that sort of thing, you know…) the BBC Micro was a thing: one of the first home computers, based around the 6502 processor. Quite likely it’s responsible for setting the future direction … Continue reading →

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An unexpected ssh “gotcha”

Posted on December 24, 2021 by james

I have a number of ssh keys used for various different purposes where it makes sense not to share the same key across different environments. Up to now that’s worked just fine. Today I added another. Some time later, I … Continue reading →

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Never mind steps forwards and backwards…

Posted on December 22, 2021 by james

Over the last couple of evenings I think I’ve been all around the houses 🙁 I pushed my new device templates into emoncms, but they just wouldn’t work properly. The various processes didn’t get set up and I kept getting … Continue reading →

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Second take on emoncms device template for RFXmeter

Posted on December 21, 2021 by james

I felt I needed to revisit the template for my RFXmeter devices because what’s really required is kWh consumption figures between readings rather than cumulative values. Also there needs to be a way to handle the count values rolling over. … Continue reading →

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systemd configuration file for RFXcom to MQTT Perl script

Posted on December 21, 2021 by james

First job of the evening (at least, first indoor job of the evening) was to come up with a unit file to start the Perl script that takes power consumption data from my RFXcom unit and publishes it to MQTT. … Continue reading →

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Two steps forward, one step back

Posted on December 21, 2021 by james

This evening I made rather better progress with emoncms than I did a couple of days ago. I decided to go all-in and set up supervisord to control the processes running in the Docker container and that seemed to work … Continue reading →

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One step forward, two steps back

Posted on December 17, 2021 by james

I’ve spent a happy (hah!) evening trying to work out why emoncms wasn’t recording any data from MQTT. The documentation seems to claim it “just works”, but I just couldn’t see anything happening, even when I’d checked that the code … Continue reading →

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Publishing RFXmeter power sensor data to MQTT

Posted on December 16, 2021 by james

More hunting around for helpful modules led me to believe that the easiest way to get data from my RFXmeter sensors into MQTT/mosquitto so it can be read by emoncms was to stick with Perl and use the Device::RFXCOM and … Continue reading →

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