Well, most of you know I’m not complete without a “project” of some sort, so here goes my latest one: Swimbridge WiFi. The big idea is to provide the whole of the village with wireless internet access that’s cheap, fast and reliable. It won’t be for everyone, but I suspect it’ll be more than suitable for anyone who isn’t an afficionado of peer-to-peer downloads 24-hours a day, and should be very handy for visitors just like the RHBMesh was invaluable for a geek like myself during our holiday in Robin Hood’s Bay.

At the moment I’m just getting it set up and trying to find out how much demand there is for it, so there’s nothing to show yet other than the web site at the above link, but hopefully it’ll get started properly soon. I certainly have plenty of encouragement from various folks, including Cliff from RHBMesh / Social Enterprise Europe.

Overview of the server room with metering and FrankenUPS.

I just wrote up a page about my latest project that I’ve just about finished up now: monitoring the electricity usage in our house, and modding my UPS so it runs for longer than it’s designed to.

Since energy prices are constantly on the rise it would be wise to use as little of it as possible, but of course being a computer geek I run a server 24/7 in the house which makes up a large portion of our electricity use. I decided to monitor our electricity use at the server side and at the main fuse board so that, after figuring out what causes what spike and for how long, we can cut down our spending.

The other part of the project was to hack my UPS a bit to extend its battery run-time from 18 minutes to around an hour by adding some more batteries. The electricity board like to cut the power off for extended periods of time so the longer the server can run on batteries the better.