Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Time to rebuild some stuff

I've been experimenting with XBees and they seem to work if you try hard enough and follow enough conflicting instructions from various places on the web.  The problem with these little devices seems to be that there are just too darn many models of them with differing firmware to run.  Add to this the intricacies of protocol layers and libraries written by computer science majors that weren't given any usability reviews and you have a mess.

I got mine to work.

So, I'm going to pull the power monitor out of the garage and modify it to use both XBee and wifi communication to push the power readings out.  Then, I'll start implementing other devices based on the ZigBee protocol around the house.  I'm going to avoid the libraries if I can.  Those things may make it easier to code, but they make it infinitely harder to understand for normal people.

The two thermostats that control the heat pumps will remain ethernet, they are wired devices and work quite well so I won't fix what isn't broken.

No wonder I can't pick up girls at a bar.........

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