It’s my opinion that if you’re going to fill your home with smart devices, they need to be easy to control and monitor. Having to pull a phone out a pocket just to switch some lights on is annoying. Equally, having to open a browser just to see the state of everything is equally annoying.
In preparation for my next video I’ve been tidying up some cellular automata code I wrote. There’s some good old Conway’s Life, some 1D CAs that make pretty patterns, and one I recently discovered called Wire World.
Hello everyone! Let’s get on with it, shall we? Last year went pretty well, I released 14 videos and towards the end of the year experimented with releasing more than one video a month. I’ll also experiment with some more spontaneous content on here and maybe the odd Short. YouTube seems to like those, and doing what YouTube likes is the secret to growing.
I have a whole house battery solar system with 3kW of roof mounted panels and 9.6kWh of battery storage. I can monitor this using Home Assistant and it’s interesting to see my power usage and generation stats. Interesting, but not that relevant to daily life.
What is relevant is knowing how long the battery has left, especially now we’re in autumn/winter and the typical British weather is in full effect. As I look out my window right now it’s misty, yesterday it rained all day.
Here’s how my solar panels and battery system have been performing this month. I might do this more frequently, it’s hard going back in the historical data in my monitoring software and these posts are easy to find.
The RC2014 is a DIY Z80 based computer that talks to the outside world using serial comms. This means you need a serial interface to another computer in order to control it.