WizNet WIZ820io – plug in and go?

A little while back, I was musing upon the desirability of  the new WizNet WIZ820io ethernet breakout board. It’s a magjack and W5200 chip combination that (in theory) allows you to simply add network connectivity to your projects with a few SPI connections and a slightly modified version of the standard Arduino Ethernet library. At…

Assembling the CurrentCost interface

With a CurrentCost energy monitor of any form, there’s a variety of ways that you can track historical data; Option 1 involves simply looking at the stored summary on the unit itself. It’s interesting for about the first seventeen seconds, but you have no context to what you’re seeing and ultimately no ability to compare year-on-year data,…

Will this ever be finished?

I’m keen to get the project to feed data from my CurrentCost CC128 energy monitor up to Cosm via an Arduino out of the way, so that – if nothing else – I can put it in a little box and tuck it out of the way and let it just get on with accumulating…

Xino Basic built and working

Despite some of the shonkiest soldering in living memory, the Xino Basic that arrived the other week is now built up and – rather amazingly – fired up first time. Well, to be fair, the soldering itself wasn’t really the problem; it was more a combination of me simply not putting components in straight/flush before…

An Ethernet shield for a tenner?

Last week I got a hold of a new kit from Ciseco for an Arduino ethernet shield based on the ENC28J60 chip and spent some time today soldering it up. Now, to be brutally honest, the only soldering I’ve done for a long time before now involved a gas-powered iron and a Ford Capri, so…

Yes, I bought them on a whim …

Postman’s just delivered a little box of treats from Ciseco. Having taken them out of their wrappers, I’m a little nervous about ruining their nice clean appearance through my ham-fisted attempts at soldering, but the upside is that these kits are at the bargain basement end of the price spectrum, so if I really trash…