Category: Felix

pH Monitoring I would like to automate pH control of my swimming pool, but it has proven to be a much more complex task than I had imagined. My pool has an electrolytic chlorine generator. The pool contains salt, and the chlorinator generates Chlorine by electrolysis. In many ways this is an ideal way to…

Pool Temperature Sensor My pool temperature sensor has been working reliably for almost five years now, so I thought it was worth showing how I made it. It’s a DS18S20 on the end of a piece of cat-5 cable. The sensor is fed down a length of ¼” transparent plastic tube. This type of tube…

System This is a rough schematic of some of a system. Felix runs on an ancient Dell laptop running Windows 2000. It is connected to a CM11 X10 interface and a DS9490R USB 1-Wire interface. There are several DS1820 temperature sensors around the house. A cable runs out to the poolshed, where a 1-Wire hub connects…

Hardware Felix currently supports 1-Wire and X10 hardware. There are many excellent websites describing 1-wire and X10 hardware, and there seems little point in replicating much of that information here. However, in case you are a complete novice, here is a basic introduction. 1-Wire The really cool thing about the 1-wire network is that you…

WAP (Mobile Phone) Felix works on mobile phones too! Only Panels are supported on WAP, but you can make them do exactly what you need. For example:  

Scripts Felix has a powerful Scripts language, enabling it to do almost anything.

Data Export Data can be exported in several different formats:  

Graphs Felix 1.44 allows you to configure graphs and tables showing data from the internal SQL database.  

Panels Panels allow you to break a large system into separate sub-systems, and they provide a simpler, safer user interface for non-technical users. You can configure panels to include your own selection of Devices and other controls: Here’s our pool control panel:   And our outdoor lighting panel. This time we’re logged on in user…