I've recently started brewing my own ale at home, I've had some success, but this has been, somewhat, limited by the summer heat, which, whilst I love the summer, my ale suffers, and becomes too warm. With peek temperatures of 31° Celsius this year, I really struggled to keep the temperature low enough to limit harm to the fermentation process.

I needed a fridge and a controller: step up BrewPi, my only constraint was that it needed to be cheap. The following outlines some of the issues I had building my first BrewPi.

​So, I've been meaning to have a play with Contiki, "The Open Source OS for the Internet of Things", for some time now. The main issue I've had is the cost and availability of suitable modules and a development platform. The problem with some platforms is that the modules they provide are either too expensive, or are not suitable for deployment, either due to price or construction.

I've recently been working on a platform that allows data from sensors to be recorded and displayed to a user. The main idea came when I started accumulating a range of sensors monitoring elements around my home. These sensors included energy consumtion monitors and a weather station, with plans to introduce a number of other monitoring devices. In order to understand the data from these devices I needed it presented in a meaningful and succinct way. 

I always wanted a home based weather station, and so this Christmas (2013) I decided to get one. I purchased the PCE-FWS 20 from Maplin. The kit allows me to measure the following

• Indoor/outdoor temperature (°C or °F)
• Wind speed and direction (mph or kmh)
• Self emptying rain gauge (mm or inches)
• Indoor / outdoor humidity
• Barometer pressure with trends
 

For one of my MSc modules, GPU programming, we are required to use CUDA to program NVIDIA GPUs, I already have a CUDA compatable GPU as follows: