Installing Solar Panels to Generate Grid-fed Electricity

Not long ago, we took advantage of the various NSW government rebates plus the massive 66c/kWh EnergyAustralia feed-in tariff, and had solar panels installed on the roof of our house by Andrew Hanna Electrical. The specs of our system are as follows:

• Carbon Management Solutions CMS-2000 grid interactive inverter
• 10x Solar Enertech SE185-72M 185W Monocrystalline Silicon PV Modules

During the installation, they’ve kindly put a Cat5 cable through the house for the RS-232 serial connection from the PV inverter to the computer. The CMS-2000 is basically a re-badged Solar Energy Australia “Orion” grid feed inverter, which comes with monitoring software “Pro Control” to log data from the inverter. Armed with this software, we can now pull some interesting data to see how much energy we generate at various times throughout the day.

The only problem is, it doesn’t make sense to have a computer switched on 24×7 just to monitor the inverter box – it’d be a massive waste of energy. So the fun begins when I want to monitor the solar inverter from a low-power, embedded computer which is actually a QNAP TS-109 NAS running my favourite Debian linux. More on this in upcoming posts.

Study notes for ELEC5616 Computer and Network Security

After a bit of distraction, my study notes for ELEC5616 Computer and Network Security is finally finished and have been posted. As usual, it’s up my my Sydney Uni page.

Mini-Project: Command line speech synth tool for Windows

The story behind this mini-project is, a friend of mine mentioned how he would SSH into his Mac at home and use “say” to send a short message to his parents, just like in a past XKCD webcomic:

Mac users, lucky you. You get a Terminal utility called “say” that converts text to speech. Windows doesn’t come with this tool, so I thought, it couldn’t be that difficult to make my own command line speech synth tool for Windows.

Read more »

Study notes and a brief review of ELEC5509 Mobile Networks

Exams for semester 1 this year are finally over. The first set of notes to go up is for ELEC5509 Mobile Networks taught by Abbas Jamalipour. As usual, you’ll be able to find it at my Sydney Uni section of the blog.

I would have to say that this course is one of the least enjoyable and least rewarding courses I’ve done over the years, and would strongly advise those doing Telecommunications Engineering at USYD to not take this course.

Read on for a brief review of the course.

Read more »

COM interop for applications on Windows Phone 7?

So recently an image for the phantom phone “HTC Mondrian” was leaked and spattered across the internet. Catching a chunk  of the spatter, I dug in to see what was inside.

I noticed something rather interesting, while digging through the “HTC Test Tool” package. There is apparently a “normal app” called BatteryTool:

    <App xmlns=""
        ProductID="{ae2781c8-7afb-4e16-a643-c9c0ff33fc15}"
        Title="BatteryTool" RuntimeType="SilverLight" Version="1.0.0.0"
        Genre="NormalApp"  Author="" Description="" Publisher="">
...

But yet when we take a look inside the Silverlight .xap file, there is a dll called “COMInterface.dll”. The guess is that HTC’s using COM interop from within the Silverlight application to get access to lower level OS resources.

So even though apps should be running inside its own tightly sealed container in Windows Phone 7, I think it’s quite possible to break out of it via COM. Unfortunately this (ARM?) dll won’t quite work in the x86 WP7 Emulator…