The Software Environment

Before starting this departure into developing my own data collection and control tools I looked around for available products. There was plenty of activity in the energy management field but nothing that quite fitted. I wanted a toolbox not a particular solution and so that's what the work is about. So, the first objective is recording outside temperature in order to produce degree day data to correlate against gas consumption.

Processing

Processing has been chosen because it is Java based and therefore offers portability between platforms. If all goes well this attribute will make the move onto a Raspberry Pi running Linux easier in the future. But for now the development is taking place on Windows.

Processing was chosen for the reason that it attempts to simplify the software development process and is well supported. In particular, with respect to the interfaces between program and sensors, program and user. These tend to be very technical areas and so any simplification is welcomed.

Processing is available at www.processing.org

XBee Libraries

Work of this type is not possible without a great many clever and generous people who make the very technical areas accessible to others. By that I mean Processing and the software libraries that interface to the many and various bits of hardware. Without this software the hardware would be unusable to all but the very expert who program at machine level.

For this project the functionality of the XBee electronics is made accessible through the XBee libraries obtained from  http://code.google.com/p/xbee-api/  

So with those two free downloads development can commence!