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:
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.
Introduction
A while ago, I’ve designed a home theatre PC build for regular TV viewing and recording. Recently I’ve followed it up with an unceremonious unboxing of various parts involved in that HTPC. So the thing that comes after unboxing is putting it together. So in this article, I’ll share my thoughts and experiences while building this machine.
Several factors are of importance to this build: power efficiency, noise and heat while at the same time it must be capable of high definition recording and playback. These factors are typical for many other home theatre builds.
Read more »
Tags: AM2, AMD, Athlon, Aywun, benchmark, Hardware, heat, HTPC, performance, power, Radeon
Hardware, Mini-Projects, Photos | Edmund Tse | 
13 Sep 2009 17:21 | 
Comments (1)
If you’ve recently accessed Sydney University IT Society’s website, you might have noticed that it loaded rather slowly. About an hour later, I received an HTTP 500 while trying to get to the website, and it won’t even come up.
Later today, our IT guy sent an email with the subject “The death of suitsbetaâ€:
At approximately 1445 today, suitsbeta shut itself down, never to wake up again. Attempts were made to revive it by powering it up, but alas it failed to POST. Our thoughts go out to its family and friends.
Tim
So it turns out that our trusty server that hosted our website has kicked the bucket after its dedicated service to the society. Even though it has graduated from ‘beta’ so that the internal DNS name of ‘suits’ pointed to it, it will always be remembered as ‘suitsbeta’.
It was Pentium 4 1.6 GHz, with only 768MB of memory and less hard disk space than your average laptop.
I was fortunate enough to be with it in its final moments, and watched while it booted into the linux 2.6 kernel. It took minutes upon minutes to check even a few megabytes of the kernel image to see if it is initramfs.
Anyway, we are currently in search of a new server, and let’s look forward to a newer and better machine. Maybe even virtualise the server so disaster recovery is a bit less painful.
I’ve just added a few new items to my “Unboxing Seriesâ€. It’s a simple photo diary that’s designed to give an idea of what a product looks like and what to expect when you open the box.
The parts are a result of the previous article designing a home theatre PC – so stay tuned for more on this little box!
I’m about to build a home theatre PC (HTPC) that’s to be ideally less than a thousand dollars Australian. So here are the requirements:
- Small form factor (i.e. mini-ITX)
- Quiet
- Must play HD videos
- Must be able to record videos such that it can replace the TV Tuner / DVD recorder unit.
- Receives DVB-T
Looking around at what’s available, there doesn’t seem to be too many choices which would obviously make the decisions easier.
But there is one basic question that needs to be answered: The age old question of do I want to go with Intel, or AMD? (And there’s also VIA). So there’s the typical old Socket 775 Intel boards, AMD boards on the 6 series chipset, and VIA’s EPIA. Having had a chat to Richard, he suggested a build based on an AMD 7 series chipset, which sports quite a decent onboard Radeon HD graphics. reviews are OK too. Why not Intel’s Atom? Well it’s a little limited in power – I was hoping for something that’s a bit faster than 1.6(6) GHz. The AMD is a socket based motherboard, and also meant that I could upgrade the CPU if needed (although that never happens).
Why not Intel S775? Because they come with Intel Graphics. Why not the brand new Nvidia Ion chipset? It looks really good, especially that Zotac board. But unfortunately it didn’t come with a PCI Express slot which I would need for the TV card.
The final specs after the break!
Read more »
Subscribe