Bedrock

Archive for the ‘Galera’ Category

Another fine day yesterday. I spent much of the morning setting up my new 5” LCD for the Raspberry Pi (successfully) and then we headed off to the pool for a swim before our trip to Baza for paint and a rather fine Pizza at Venecia Restaurant Pizzeria (Calle de la Puerta de Lorca, 26, 18800 Baza).

Hardly a soul in the pool and despite the water being quite cool, with 30c outside the whole thing just worked.

We spent maybe an hour in the pool before heading off to Baza as I needed some fasteners for the extension to the watering system here at Bedrock – Maureen has been putting up a heightened extension near the steps to keep out intruders and improve that corner – so we’ll soon have cactus up there – which means more piping for watering. The large Chinese store in Baza had the bits I needed. After that we ending up in the restaurant around teatime.

The pool at Orce is different to most of them in that it is full of fish – mostly they mind their own business and certainly are harmless – indeed, rather relaxing to watch.

Today I’ll finish off the watering setup and Maureen can hopefully get some soil and plants in there.

Very quiet here in our corner of Galera – lovely in fact, haven’t heard a dog bark all day. This morning we went off first thing to see Mrs Sanchez the dentist in Huescar. Very pleasant, the surgery was modern and efficient looking – the service was great considering they generally don’t speak English and I generally don’t speak Spanish. Left there complete with sparkly new smooth filling and headed off to the Huescar market for usual supplies (oranges), a new glue gun and some coffee.

I’ve spent the afternoon working on my timing software, a little glitch somewhere was causing lights to come on at 2am in the morning – hopefully that’s now history. Maureen’s foot is still a bit sore so I have a lonesome trip to the pub coming up – mind you – it’s Thursday so there’s no chance I’ll be on my own for long.

And that really is about it – the weather was cracking – maybe 29-30c at it’s peak – mid-evening it is still very warm, just the job for a walk down the hill.

Tomorrow we have a friend coming over later on and I have to hang around for a delivery but the hope is at the weekend we can get some tourist travel over on the east coast. All down to weather and aching feet.

After a successful morning which saw Aidan and I working together by Skype as he helped me sort out thermostat issues (successfully up to now) at Hollyberry Cottage (Skype and decent broadband are a wonderful combination), a bunch of us headed off to Restaurante El Maño II at the far end of Huescar for lunch which ended up filling the otherwise rather miserable (weather-wise) afternoon  – and I have to say, the service and the food were both excellent.

It’s going to be a couple of days or so before we see the end to this unusually damp weather (hopefully by the time Aidan and Helen get here) and so chatting with friends all afternoon made a great alternative to fretting about lack of sun. We had a nice time. Thanks to all for making it that way.

Tonight I’ve been debugging some silly issues with lighting here in the cave – again successfully (one of my late night experiments I’d forgotten all about and left running). That and the first of several additions to my new camera turned up – a screen protector for the display. I’m hoping to continue my current success record at actually getting post delivered to the house! About the only thing that hasn’t gone well, I left my charger out yesterday in the short-lived sun which as it happens was quickly followed by a downpour – I’m not sure the LCD is ever going to recover.

Working on the hallway water feature to make it all WIFI controlled – this needs a little more care than usual given the fact that it uses water!! 

Finishing off the night with a nice glass of Spanish wine and some blogging. I could see an early night tonight as we have a busy day tomorrow.Hopefully will pick up some material to restore the Pergola to showroom shine after the winter winds have taken their toll.

The summer is well and truly over here in Galera with temperatures plummeting to maybe 8c at night and rarely getting over 20c or so during the day. Still a million times better than back in the UK but I’m sitting here with the heating on in my office.

I’ve been looking back over the summer – which started with my trip to Boston in July – a great adventure marred only slightly by incompetent Iberia Airlines who managed to misplace my baggage, finding it only at the very end of my trip. That started a communications saga via their Facebook page – and only now in November have they finally agreed to cough up for the clothes I had to buy. I’ve not yet figured out a way to punish them for the state of my feet (I took light sandals on the plane and so after walking several miles to restaurants etc. my feet suffered somewhat. They couldn’t have given two hoots of course.

Other than that the summer went very well, it’s amazing how many places, friends we’ve visited and the good times we’ve had. With temperatures as high as 40c and a comfortable 25c in the evening, reasonable general prices and dirt cheap fuel, there is absolutely no comparing life here and in the Northeast of England. Sure, it has it’s downsides, I’ve fought with couriers who should not be delivering crisps never mind packages and as in previous years I’ve struggled to get parts I would easily find in the UK.

But this year more than others we’ve found ways around issues and discovered that materials are indeed widely available here as in Britain – you just have to look harder. Outside of the towns there are a myriad of industrial buildings that look like you really should not be there. In fact many of them are open to the public and are jam-packed with goodies – who knew !!

Meanwhile my home control projects are starting to come together thanks to taking the summer out and away from the FSB – something I’ve never done. Before the FSB it was business keeping me occupied all the time and so I’ve never really stopped and spent the time needed to really get as heavily into interesting projects as I’d like. As they say – there IS more to life.

I’ve finally started to make a break with Skype – I’ve had a Skype telephone number for many years – indeed since Skype first introduced “Skype In” – I started with a London number and migrated (when they screwed things up) to a Newcastle number. Last week they made a major gaff, sending out an email to their subscribers to announce an unfeasible price hike. By the time they announced they’d gotten it wrong, many of us had already told them to shove it. I’ve been researching other operators and those offering standard SIP IP phone lines. I’ve chosen one and now have both English and Spanish incoming numbers – both for less than I was paying Skype for one. I spent the afternoon making sure everyone knows the new numbers.

And there it is – my new modem has just arrived, we’ll be spending a little time in the winter in the UK with a break in the USA in the middle of it…  and when we return, the cottage in the UK will once again be holiday rented – I want to ensure that guests have a totally isolated WIFI setup while leaving me with full access to everything – the new TP-Link router should do that job for me.

As the weather cools off I’m missing the sun already as are my solar panels which now struggle to handle the (bright) outside lighting for more than a couple of hours or so. When we come back I’m bringing batteries as the electricity here is prone to un-announced failure.

I think I should probably have been born in a hot country… Time yet however, according to the ever-inaccurate forecasts we could be looking at clear skies and 23c toward the weekend. Fingers crossed.

Today is turning out to be a good day.

I’ve been having troubles with the broadband here for a couple of weeks – losing connections all over the place. Meanwhile,  my Zopo phone stopped taking and making calls  – and to crown it off, my old S4 ended up back in my lap as that had a SIM issue.

The Broadband: 2 weeks ago my various Internet-connected IOT gadgets started acting up – and we started losing connections on the WIFI. Was it my gadgets? Was it the service provider? Was it the modem. Not a clue and several tests took me no further. Eventually 3 or 4 days ago I reduced the router to factory settings (not a pleasant task as I have dozens of modifications).  I After I gutted the router – all seemed well for a couple of days – and then Maureen pointed out that she could not get her TV on the Now-TV box.

I realised I’d not put the DNS solution back into the router that we use to get British TV in. I put it back in – and – the problem came back.  I tried using DNS on just one outlet and got no-where. I contacted our service provider and got no-where though he did offer a few tips. Then I realised there’s a tick box to force the router to use the chosen DNS. Why would I need that? Oh, well I ticked it anyway. I don’t know why that would affect reliability – but everything is working perfectly and the TV is better than it has ever been – my devices are all talking reliably.

The Phones: Then there was the problem with the phones – my ZOPO top end smartphone stopped talking to the phone networks a couple of weeks ago and Banggood (who I bought it from) proved to be utterly useless – no technical support – just send it back to the factory (only a few months old – maybe 3 months) – only take a few weeks they said. Meanwhile I had a fellow over here griping – I’d sold him my old S4 and he said it intermittently would not work. It was working fine before I shipped it to Spain.  Well, I needed a phone and it was fine when it left me so we took the S4 back – I thought it would do while the Zopo went back to China.

But sure enough – “SIM missing” messages would appear intermittently – then it would work, then it would not. I trawled the XDA forums – hundreds upon hundreds of items about S4 and SIM issues  people putting foam on the SIM connector – some said it worked – some said not – they had all sorts of fixes and by the look of it none of them worked – someone even said that Samsung would fix the phone for £150 – I know what my response to that would have been.

Well I wasn’t buying any of this and so I went on Ebay and for 4 quid got a complete replacement panel with both sockets… orderd it 2 days ago in the UK, turned up here this morning – can’t be bad. I fitted it – took about 2 minutes and – nothing- NO MORE missing SIM but just like the Zopo – no connection.  I was beginning to smell a rat by now.

I went to manual settings in the S4 following a tip from the THREE operator last week – he told me to select an operator manually – and forced a connection to Orange… I did that last week and the S4 worked for about 5 minutes. But now… with a fixed SIM socket – it KEPT on working.  Amazing – S4 back in action.

I put the SIM back in the Zopo and BLOW ME – the Zopo started working – clearly something I’d done in the S4 had left a change in the SIM.

So in 24 hours I’ve got my WIFI network back, in working order, both phones back up and running and meanwhile all the world I’d done on my IOT devices, thinking they were faulty not the network and so they are now pretty much bullet proof…. meanwhile to take my mind off things I’ve been working on a new all-singing Thermostat and as of last night that is working so well I’m going to fit them to both houses.

Add to that – my new 50 degree wooden frame for the solar panels is up – and I’m getting around 10% minimum more juice out of them – more than I was getting when the sun was higher! 11am and the battery is charging at 14.2 volts already.

The Post: So all in all, a good start to the day and it’s warm and sunny  to boot! All that is left to sort out is the mail.  I have the usual “UPS – your address is wrong” nonsense but after applying pressure all around they have PROMISED FAITHFULLY to deliver today – a free sample worth maybe a fiver.  The POST OFFICE issue is another one altogether. A company in the USA with a new computer product offered to send me one for review FOC.  I accepted and told them NO WAY to use UPS – so they used the ordinary post system – and that’s fine – but then I got a letter from the Spanish post – I had to fill something in. I didn’t understand it so went to the local post office – no, you need to go to Huescar they said. Huescar post office looked at it in dismay – you need to fill it in online they said.

So armed with a translator off I went. They want FOUR documents from me – the first is my ID (like my passport but Spanish) – done, dusted. The second was a “proof of delivery” a little difficult as I’ve not received the goods – the third was proof of purchase – difficult for a freebie and the forth-  proof of payment – even more difficult for a freebie.  And all of that would be fine if I was shipping gold or nuclear weapons but it makes you wonder why such a fuss for a simple piece of electronics hardware the likes of which ships by the million all over the world on a daily basis!

Still with the start I’ve had up to now, I’m optimistic!

It’s been a great summer here in Galera, the weather, by and large has been stunning, with temperatures up to 40c in the afternoon and really pleasant evening temperatures, ideal for BBQs. The last couple of weeks have been good – but it’s not summer – still wearing t-shirts but no-one is in a rush to go off to the lake for a swim. Yesterday it rained which was a bit of a novelty but by the look of the forecast we’re going to see sunny conditions, the odd cloud and maybe 21-22c in the afternoons for the next few days at least. Ideal for getting on with projects.

I’m currently working on a number of projects – one of which is my lighting – we’ve simplified the external lighting basically down to one colour – green. The lighting is predominantly LED-based and so I decided to go for 12v – this has the advantage that I can run the lot of a battery. I have a couple of small solar panels here, each able to give out 40w on a good day and they’re currently mounted flat on the pergola.

Well, that was fine until maybe a couple of weeks ago, every day they’d fully charge my 12v deep-discharge battery (basically an average size car battery that doesn’t mind getting heavily discharged) and so the lights would come on at dusk and go off at midnight. That, some Pergola lighting and a WIFI controller of my own design would take the battery down just below 12v in time to be fully recharged the following morning. You can see the last few days in the graph above (the system reads the battery voltage every 15 minutes). from the peak, the voltage drops with the lighting on until midnight where the lights go off, at which point the battery instantly recovers a little – but then continues to drain overnight as the controller itself takes some power – then come dawn it starts to go up again – etc. There’s a general downward slope, halted only by reducing the amount of time the lights are on but we’re only just into October here so it’s going to get worse – I’m hoping by angling the panels I can get that power back up.

Not so now, over the past weeks the hours of sunlight have dropped and this week I had to dramatically alter the timing, keeping the main lights off for an hour after dusk. I’ve been sitting here this morning looking at optimum angles for panels and of course my current flat setup is useless in winter. It turns out the optimum winter angle here is around 50 degrees – and thinking about it, the flat panel would be pretty useless if it snowed – so I need to make a little A-frame to hold the panels, easy to do when you have a B&Q around the corner, here we have a “Carpinteria” – and yesterday I tried the one in our village and the next – both closed all day!! I can see a trip to the big town coming on. It really just isn’t as simple as in the UK – on the other hand it’s probably pouring down back home by now. It’s 8am, the sun is thinking about coming up, a little damp outside but there’s not a cloud in the sky so it might well be a nice day.

All of this just just a project of course – I could just as easily power everything by the mains – but it’s a fun project and lots of knowledge is coming our of it. Between that and years of playing with garden lights I’ve a fair idea of what you can and can’t get out of solar panels.

Meanwhile, Maureen is taking an interest in local Pilates lessons and glasswork and I’m learning all about the operating system Linux – the hard way – by experimenting. Yup, it’s going to be a nice sunny day today.