Monthly Archives: May 2014

Link

Just a super-quick post here.

If you’re looking for addons or plugins for Microsoft Outlook to help you organize your emails and extend the functionality of Outlook

(note Outlook is very extensible, as with all Microsoft Office applications you can write Visual Basic code for Applications to hook into it’s functions. Absaloutely fantastic for hacking excel as I have been doing for the last few weeks – my work needs to invest in a proper database program for sure *sigh*)

You’d do no better than looking here

Snapfiles Outlook Add-ons

http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/comm/fwoutlook.html

 

They have addons that are useful – and unlike most of the sites on i’ve found so far – up to date and compatible with recent versions (2003+) of Outlook.

Hope this helps folks!

 

Rfduino Chip vs Thermometer

Well, I’ve now debugged a few issues with my scripts from my last post.
(made them a bit more fault tolerant and actually take notice of $? exit statuses) .
Recap: Temperhum (USB) -> Raspberry Pi -> Xively chart, now also
RFDuino (bluetooth wireless) -> Raspberry Pi -> Xively chart

Tip:  If you’re struggling with the bluetooth on linux giving rx timeout errors (check the syslog if it’s not in the console),
update the software with the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

The Rfduino has been sitting next to my usb Temperature and Humidity sensor for a few weeks collecting data.

IMG_20140514_223244041r

RFDuino and Temperhum

Since it had been both collecting data for a few weeks and sending them to Xively / Pachube / Cosm, I had a quick look to see how closely the readings match.

Rfduino vs thermometerr

The graphs do show correlation, thank goodness, but it looks like the RFDuino’s temperature scale isn’t right. The RFDuino is only updating the graph once a minute whereas the Temperhum is 2x a minute.

I didn’t really expect great accuracy for the RFduino thermometer seeing as it’s measuring from the chip. But this would still be useful in some more basic cases.

I think next on the roadmap for the RFduino is connecting sensors/remote controls (it would be cool to attach my RelaySockets to this and control the 2 connected relays via bluetooth from my Pi and Android smartphone!

 

My Humidity and Temperature sensor

A Temperhum from PCSensor.

A great little bit of kit – once you work out the conversion values for the C++ USB/i2c/HID code that lets linux talk to the thing!