Stephen C Phillips (Posts about Raspberry Pi)

Sending Tado Data to Loggly

Stephen C Phillips — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 10:48:34 GMT

I've just had a Tado smart thermostat installed at home: it's a clever device that controls the boiler, central heating and hot water and is linked to the internet. It has a room thermostat and takes account of the external temperature as well. You can control it from your smart phone or from the web app and, if you want, it will track your location so that when you leave the house it turns the temperature down and brings it up again in time for when you get home again.

I expect the web app and the mobile app are both in constant development and right now there are features only available in one or the other. For instance, you can only set the hot water schedule in the web app but can only see the historic temperature data in the mobile app (you have to turn your phone to landscape orientation to make it magically appear).

I wanted to see the historical temperature data on my computer instead of my phone so I had a poke around and have found a way to get hold of the data on one of my Raspberry Pis and send it to Loggly to graph it.

Raspberry Pi System Logging and Loggly

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 31 May 2015 13:15:19 GMT

I've already written about how useful Loggly is to log data from a Raspberry Pi, but like me, you may want to know more about how system logging actually works and what the extra configuration added by the Loggly setup script means.

This post explains how system logging works and how Loggly fits into it. It describes how the log files are rotated to avoid them filling up the disc and it also goes into a lengthy detour regarding how to encrypt the log traffic between your computer and Loggly, how all the encryption actually works and how you know you can trust it.

Monitoring Broadband Speed with Loggly

Stephen C Phillips — Mon, 04 May 2015 22:11:19 GMT

Using Speedtest.net and Loggly to Monitor Broadband Speed

I've been having trouble with the speed of my network at home and needed to check whether the broadband link to the internet was working as fast as it should be. To check this, you really need to make many measurements over time, as at different times of the day the performance will vary depending on how many other people in the area are using the same link. To check the speed, I have plugged a spare Raspberry Pi directly into the my Virgin Media Superhub via an ethernet cable and set it up to measure and report the speed every hour. I'm sending the data to an online logging service called Loggly so that I can access it and graph it easily from any other computer.

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi controlled with a tiny web server

Stephen C Phillips — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 14:32:48 GMT

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi controlled with a tiny web server

Objective

I wanted to be able to tune in to BBC radio stations on my Raspberry Pi and control it through my smart phone with an easy graphical interface.

In fulfilling this objective I got a bit carried away and wrote a small web server from scratch (as you do...) which was good fun, so in the spirit of helping people hack their Raspberry Pis I thought I'd explain how it all works. What follows is mostly an explanation of how web servers and web browsers work: it's actually quite simple and interesting to mess around with. The actual software is useful and works well too!

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi (v2)

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 18 May 2014 19:33:47 GMT

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi (v2)

This is an update to my recent post on this topic.

This page shows how to create a simple radio command to play and stop different BBC radio stations on a Raspberry Pi. Once set up, you can just type e.g. radio BBC4 to get your favourite station playing. This is useful for various reasons, for instance if you have a room with just an amplifier and speakers in then, with a Raspberry Pi, you can listen to the radio (and with other software your music collection). You can also listen to BBC 6 Music which you cannot get on FM.

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 11 May 2014 17:09:30 GMT

BBC Radio on the Raspberry Pi

This page shows how to create a simple radio command to play and stop different BBC radio stations on a Raspberry Pi. Once set up, you can just type radio BBC4 to get your favourite station playing. This is useful for various reasons, for instance if you have a room with just an amplifier and speakers in then, with a Raspberry Pi, you can listen to the radio (and with other software your music collection). You can also listen to BBC 6 Music which you cannot get on FM.

Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (v3)

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 11 May 2014 14:05:00 GMT

Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (v3)

What we are aiming for

A music system with a Raspberry Pi plugged in to an amplifier playing music that you choose with your mobile phone. The music can come from MP3s on your phone, from files on your server, files "in the cloud" or from internet radio stations. If there’s more than one Android phone in your household you can have them all synchronised, showing the same playlist and controlling the same music. If you have multiple Raspberry Pis you can put one in each room and choose which one to play the music with. This is all achieved with free software and open standards. I’ve just written some instructions to show how to do it.

Getting a Python script to run in the background (as a service) on boot

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 13:05:28 GMT

Getting a Python script to run in the background (as a service) on boot

For some of my projects I write a simple service in Python and need it to start running in the background when the Raspberry Pi boots. Different Linux distributions use different ways of starting and stopping services (some now use Upstart, some systemd). I am using the "Wheezy" Debian distribution on my Raspberry Pi, and in this case the proper way to do this is using an "init script". These are stored in the /etc/init.d folder. In there you can find scripts that for instance, start the networking system or a print server. Debian Wheezy uses the old Sys V init system which means that these scripts are run according to symbolic links in the /etc/rc.x directories. The Debian documentation explains this.

Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (revisited)

Stephen C Phillips — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 10:06:48 GMT

Playing music on a Raspberry Pi using UPnP and DLNA (revisited)

What we are aiming for

A music system with a Raspberry Pi plugged in to an amplifier playing music that you choose with your mobile phone. The music can come from MP3s on your phone, from files on your server or from internet radio stations. If there's more than one Android phone in your household you can have them all synchronised, showing the same playlist and controlling the same music. If you have multiple Raspberry Pis you can put one in each room and choose which one to play the music with. This is all achieved with free software and open standards. I've just written some instructions to show how to do it.

Sound configuration on Raspberry Pi with ALSA

Stephen C Phillips — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 14:53:50 GMT

Sound configuration on Raspberry Pi with ALSA

While setting up a Raspberry Pi to play streamed music using UPnP, I have had quite a bit of trouble understanding how to configure the sound on my Raspberry Pi. This is partly because I am running it in headless mode (no graphical desktop) and partly because sound on Linux is fiendishly complicated.

Anyway, I am making progress in understanding what's going on but I am no expert. Here are my findings on how to control the ALSA system from the command line. All I am focussed on here is getting control of the sound output by the 3.5mm stereo socket. If you want to control the output over the HDMI socket or an external USB sound card then you'll need to do some of your own investigation.