Data Logging

Time to unleash a wyleuesque view of data logging at and it's place in the big wide world.

We are all keen to be efficient and we are realising that before you can improve efficiency ou have to, in some way, measure it.
Well before digital electronics that was a pipe dream for anything this side of industry. Well now we have probably as cheap a hardware solution as we could wish for, One-wire. Great one problem solved.
So what do we measure? well nything and everything is probably the answer. And that as we are also discovering is a fair old task. Just the debate about connectors is awash with debate. But for better or worse there are now starting to be several of us with data in some form or other. Each one of these measurements has at minimum a temperature, but without knowing where, when and what it doesn't really tell you too much. And then there's context just cos I've got a reading of 95C that could mean I've done wonders with my solar panel, my tanks too hot, My tea has nearly boiled or I'm duplicitously lying about my reading cos I work for a dodgy flat panel manufacturer.
Now that is the best and worst.
For most of us we simply want to improve our own system, and a few sensors will tell you how well you are doing. Watching tank temperature drop will tell you about it's insulation, watching the bottom temperature of a tank will tell you if your one-way vale is stuck and the system is thermosiphoning at night, whih is the kind of thing you want to know.
So why would you care what someone elses system is doing? In a word comparison. If after careful analysis you get a efficiency ( and I believe this is probably dimensionless) 1.56 and you get 2.12 then your system is better than mine and I can look to discussion to working out where the differences are. There might well be a fair few red faces when there highly beloved self installed masterpiece is demonstrably half as good as someone else's and there is a great deal of questioning of techniques to go on, but in the end consensus will emerge and the good will know they are good and the great will be fairly sure it couldn't be much better. As for me down with the bad it leaves plenty of scope to improve and some good pointers to how we might do this.
Looking at the chocolate teapot debacle, such simple measurement like this would have allowed it to be the fools gold it was, in a fashion that anybody could understand no matter how much they knew about it.
So how do we generate this majic number?, well we don't know that yet, but it's easy to see that unless we can exchange data effectively between differing systems by standardizing as much as we can. But if we recognise it's worthwhile to make every effort to do this then we can encourage easy exchange as an objctive rather than something that can be retrofitted at some future date.

The use of pachube and suh like is that it allows data streams to be established that have standard structures. I'm busy writing display software for our tank, and I can just plug the output from the sensors into my display programme and hey presto flying temperature colours on tanks, however I'm working at getting it so that instead of looking at my sensors I look at the pachube data of our site and write the code so that that is the input. That way It's easy for me to adapt it to read other peoples data and present them with easy display without them having to write the whole lot themselves. the other thing I can and am doing for Navitron is developing elements that can plug into such a system that represent standard products. A solar panel with TDC-e controller becomes a standard part that can be presented beside all the other components existing in a particular dwelling ( and that could be quite a range) and anyone that wants to extract data on TDC-e controlled 30 tube arrays can do this, with nothing more than a slightly educated search.

I won't waffle on about the advantages of interconnected site in times of power cut or internet interruption and the comparison of electrical power consumption will flag up some real good and bad preactise, because the social implications of that are wa beyond the predictions of anyone here.

But if you've got a bit of one-wire and a PC try to make the effort to get this data into anything that might be interested. It's not a time to say that software is better or worse than anything else, We ain't going to prove the MAC is any better or worse than Windows or Linux ( we might be able to say which is more reliable thou') But we if we concentrate on the interconnectedness then the good and the bad idea's in this most beneficial of social networking experiments might make some excellent progress.

We could find out how much of the planet we've saved and how much more there is to do, and that is the tremendous step.

launch rockets, choirs of children, maidens scattering petals and shouts of hurrah from all quarters