Petter Reinholdtsen

Entries from June 2018.

The worlds only stone power plant?
30th June 2018

So far, at least hydro-electric power, coal power, wind power, solar power, and wood power are well known. Until a few days ago, I had never heard of stone power. Then I learn about a quarry in a mountain in Bremanger i Norway, where the Bremanger Quarry company is extracting stone and dumping the stone into a shaft leading to its shipping harbour. This downward movement in this shaft is used to produce electricity. In short, it is using falling rocks instead of falling water to produce electricity, and according to its own statements it is producing more power than it is using, and selling the surplus electricity to the Norwegian power grid. I find the concept truly amazing. Is this the worlds only stone power plant?

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: english.
Add-on to control the projector from within Kodi
26th June 2018

My movie playing setup involve Kodi, OpenELEC (probably soon to be replaced with LibreELEC) and an Infocus IN76 video projector. My projector can be controlled via both a infrared remote controller, and a RS-232 serial line. The vendor of my projector, InFocus, had been sensible enough to document the serial protocol in its user manual, so it is easily available, and I used it some years ago to write a small script to control the projector. For a while now, I longed for a setup where the projector was controlled by Kodi, for example in such a way that when the screen saver went on, the projector was turned off, and when the screen saver exited, the projector was turned on again.

A few days ago, with very good help from parts of my family, I managed to find a Kodi Add-on for controlling a Epson projector, and got in touch with its author to see if we could join forces and make a Add-on with support for several projectors. To my pleasure, he was positive to the idea, and we set out to add InFocus support to his add-on, and make the add-on suitable for the official Kodi add-on repository.

The Add-on is now working (for me, at least), with a few minor adjustments. The most important change I do relative to the master branch in the github repository is embedding the pyserial module in the add-on. The long term solution is to make a "script" type pyserial module for Kodi, that can be pulled in as a dependency in Kodi. But until that in place, I embed it.

The add-on can be configured to turn on the projector when Kodi starts, off when Kodi stops as well as turn the projector off when the screensaver start and on when the screesaver stops. It can also be told to set the projector source when turning on the projector.

If this sound interesting to you, check out the project github repository. Perhaps you can send patches to support your projector too? As soon as we find time to wrap up the latest changes, it should be available for easy installation using any Kodi instance.

For future improvements, I would like to add projector model detection and the ability to adjust the brightness level of the projector from within Kodi. We also need to figure out how to handle the cooling period of the projector. My projector refuses to turn on for 60 seconds after it was turned off. This is not handled well by the add-on at the moment.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Tags: english, kodi, multimedia, video.

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