Bedrock

Archive for the ‘Galera’ Category

Friday: One of those afternoons with nothing concrete in mind so we headed off around the back of Huescar to check out Embalse de San Clemente. Turns out that while the way we went was good for taking pictures, short of putting the car across a 3” drop in the road, it was not the best way to get any swimming done – so we ended up spending the afternoon driving around and stopping into Asador La Parra – which I can’t find on Google maps but which is on the way to San Clemente and pretty hard to miss. NICE cup of coffee.

That was the highlight of the afternoon – apart from the pleasant drive. We came back and I made the mistake of deciding to upgrade Maureen’s computer to Windows 10 – that was just before we had 10 power cuts in a row (Thanks, Endessa). The only good thing about the rubbish electricity here in Spain is that it is focussing my attention on getting my various gadgets to handle power cuts gracefully. Got up this morning and thankfully managed to revert her computer back to the previous version and start again. Time will tell.  Meanwhile, here are some photos.

We’ve been here now for a couple of weeks and regular readers may well be wondering why there’s been nothing in here. I referred in my last blog to issues with UPS.. well, that turned into a nightmare, meanwhile my ability to add images to any of my blogs suddenly disappeared.

The UPS affair can only be described as a disaster. They really DO NOT like finishing the job off here and actually delivering to people’s homes – made worse by Google maps which actually points to the wrong place when you try to get to our place (update August 2016 – that has since long been fixed). Many, many emails later, I got my delivery and I got it to my home. However.. the supplier put the wrong amount on the goods, leading UPS to charge too much for the VAT and DUTY on that (despite the inescapable fact that throughout Europe, deliveries of low-value goods from China almost always escape VAT and DUTY when sent through the postal system.  UPS in addition have a range of extras they can charge – handling charges etc. and the long and short of it is – I would recommend STRONGLY against using that company for any kind of overseas purchase.

Meanwhile a supplier in Sweden was shipping some parts to me to take to Boston with me on my forthcoming trip this weekend. He ordered 3 day delivery and…. they let him down – not only that but when he tried to follow this up after they claimed they’d tried to deliver the goods (they had not) the Spanish end of their operation stopped answering phone calls or responding to emails. So all in all not too good on the postal front but at least I proved they’ll deliver to the door.   My normal mail via our friendly postman has been going without a hitch.

And so to the blog – for reasons that foxed me and eventually foxed the service provider, I could not longer send images to any of my blogs. This has been going on for 2 weeks now and only today has it been resolved. I guess in compensation for the time it has taken, they’ve built a managed VPS (virtual Private Server) for me and all my stuff is now in there and up to now, running like a rocket! So up to now we’ve had a good time, done a bit of work on the house, been to the lake, down to Mojacar, Velez Rubio and other places with friend who’ve sadly now gone back to the UK for a while – and we’ve replaced the battery on the car, which it turns out was way over a decade old!!

The weather here has been excellent, rarely dropping below the mid-thirties in the afternoon. Next week I’m off to Boston where it is only marginally cooler, to participate in the Boston FABFEST – if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter you’ll see what I get up to there.  Expect lots of pictures of tech stuff.

A quiet day today… this morning, Maureen went downtown to help at the dog shelter, I stayed at home and worked on my controllers. I decided for once to take a proper holiday and it is paying off – I’m feeling quite relaxed.

This evening we sat outside and enjoyed a nice tapas in the Pergola – despite forecasts of rain the weather has been great. Not stunningly hot, maybe 25c but with the sun blasting I took the opportunity to supplement the tan for a while. This has to be the first trip we’ve done where there are no pressing repairs to attend to – marvellous.

TV is on, she’s watching soaps and I’m just putting the finishing touches on some code that has been months in development and which is now about to get it’s first trivial job – watering the plants.  Thanks to a friendly local policemen we now know what to do with the speeding fines and it turns out we got the early payment discount on one, once we figured out how to use the Spanish website. It appears the back route to Murcia, despite looking innocent is riddled with police with cameras as others have suffered the same fate. Once bitten twice shy (or in my case, twice bitten…).

The plan tomorrow, weather permitting is to leave the car at home and do our jobs for the day in the village on foot. Only thing is.. the weather, right now at 10pm is changing rapidly…

Just doing a spot of experimenting with the currently reliable weather here in Galera. What you see here is a cheap 10 amp solar regulator which has 3 pairs of wires – one goes to the solar panel, another goes to the battery – the third pair go to the “load”.

The “load” in this case is a little 12v-5v convertor sitting on top of the battery – I plan to hook that to my Raspberry Pi at some point…   but then over on the right is a standard 8-battery charger. I realised when looking at the instruction that it’s power supply was a 12v job – and that the unit could handle anywhere from 11v to 14v input – in other words absolutely ideal for powering from a lead-acid battery such as a car battery or alarm battery (the latter is what you see here).

The solar panel shown on the left here is way too small to be a great deal of use – it is able to put out about 400ma which means it will take maybe 16 hours to fully charge that 7aH alarm battery – I have a MUCH bigger panel but that will have to wait for our July trip in the car as I could not fit it into the case. That has a 3 amp output which will charge the little battery in under 3 hours and is better suited to charging a car battery.

The regulator is great, I now have two of these – cheap as chips from Ebay – will allow a maximum 10 amps load and protects the battery from overcharging and over-discharge (simple lead acid batteries do NOT like being fully discharged and rarely recover from this unless they are what are called “deep discharge” types. 

So with the setup above I’m happily charging my little AA and AAA batteries FOC from the sun – soon I’ll find a more practical application for this. I’ve a larger setup on the Pergola and that’s powering a bright hanging lamp without any issue.

While that is going on I have my soil moisture sensor under test.. that’s producing an analog out put which I’m hoping to use to provide sensible watering for Maureen’s plants shortly. The sensor will indirectly control an (already fitted and tested over a year) cheap washing machine valve which controls the cold water feed to the plants.

Just as well as she picked up a boatload of new plants from the garden centre yesterday.

All good fun.

7am here in Bedrock as we start our second full day here in May. It’s been a challenge organising this holiday break,between turmoil in our professional lives and the new cottage extensions, which took a detour last week when the new bathroom plumbing burst, soaking the place and requiring professional de-humidifiers running around the clock to fix.

Thankfully as I sit here the builders are correcting that issue and in a couple of weeks we expect to be able to get on with the job of converting Hollyberry Cottage into not only a fantastically improved holiday rental cottage but also a great place for us to shack up in the winter.

Missed the all important G7 drinking session last night. Between overdoing it when we arrived here on Wednesday and just so much to do, we decided to give the first session a miss – no doubt we’ll make up for it over the weekend.

We arrived mid-Wednesday at Alicante airport and for the first time managed to find our way to Brico-Depot in Crevillent just a short hop on the way here from Alicante. The place is great, all the major stores are there including Carrefour and Aldi etc. When we arrived Wednesday night the weeds had taken over (it’s hot here but it hasn’t been hot for long enough to kill them off yet) so as well as readying the place we’ve been clearing the path. It’s starting to look good already and this morning Maureen is of with some of the women to have fun while I sort out some tech work I have to complete via Skype with my friend Aidan in the UK.

My other jobs for this weekend include getting the watering system back up and tested. I’ve brought much more meaty power supplies with me to Spain this time to handle the rather unpredictable power here – though I suspect I’ve not brought enough.  As an experiment I brought another solar regulator along with an alarm 12v battery and panel –I want to see if I can run the router and new Raspberry Pi controller off the sun entirely. I suspect that’ll have to wait for our June/July run in which we’re bringing the car from the UK as I just could not fit the second large solar panel into the travel case!!

I’ve recently started to work on my tech blog which now regularly achieves around 750 users a day and the new tech Facebook page just tipped 1000 likes – all of which imposes a slight responsibility to keep them up to date but first, we need to get into that lake and enjoy the fine weather Spain is having right now, it’s a little misty but typically sailing past 30c in the afternoon with peaks around 40c which might sound a bit much to Brits starved of sunshine but trust me – you get used to it and it beats the pants off the UK, in particular because that means you can sit outside at night without a jumper on!

Thankfully as you see in the graph (my systems have been logging temperature and humidity for a couple of years now) the humidity is finally dropping rapidly – we picked a good time to arrive.

So looking forward to a couple of weeks at least of fine weather before any more painting. We’re off to Baza this afternoon so that Maureen can pick up some supplies at the garden centre after we’ve had a soak in the lake.

Another fine day in Galera – not that warm I have to say – quite a cold wind but not a cloud in the sky (my solar-charged deep discharge battery will be thinking its summer). Spent the morning wasting time following some guy’s guide to emulating the Raspberry Pi 2 only to find out at the end of the day that it’s physically impossible for it to emulate the full memory of the new unit – timewaster.

Went down to see friends for a while just to chat – and we’re planning a lunch later in the week – that’ll be nice. Meanwhile I’m back in my office late afternoon to catch up with the (work) email mountain (done) and to progress the learning curve I started this morning. I can see an early night coming on. Meanwhile here’s a couple of sunny pictures I took this afternoon to cheer up the folks back home – apparently the weather is not too good back in Blighty.