And now for something different. This will be a multi part series of how I designed and constructed a small scale solar setup with LiFePO4 batteries, all-in-one charge controller/inverter, and 8 solar panels to run some small circuits in the house without needing the grid. This is an experiment to determine just how autonomous I can be with a small scale setup before moving to a new house in a few months and installing a larger system. We use a pretty small amount of electricity in general and I’m hoping this small system will take about 1/4 or more off our electricity bill as well as provide some resiliency in the case of a grid outage.

I am going to discuss my parts list and the choices I made, capacity testing and matching the battery cells to make a well-balanced pack, safety, and wiring it all up. Then if I can figure it out, I will be writing and releasing light weight data logging and control software for the inverter/charge controller to run on a Raspberry Pi, since everything I read says the Windows software is buggy and does not data log well.

And now – on to the parts list!

Powershell v2 lacks many of the commandlets that we have come to know and love on more modern versions. Every now and then, you just have to do something on Windows 7 and you can’t update Powershell.

Below is an example script to PUT a file to an Amazon S3 bucket using Powershell v2. The missing functionality is the ability to set the “Date” HTTP header when using [System.Net.HttpWebRequest]. Even though the docs state that it should be settable, it is not. The Date header is required for AWS to validate the client generated signature. Continue reading Upload to Amazon S3 from Powershell v2 →

I’ve been using OpenIndiana io_151a2 for over a year now as my home storage solution. It has been rock solid and gives me better IO over iSCSI for VMware than I get in the production Netapp environment at work. It also lets me have some nice big pools with commodity drives for media, backup, VMs, and pretty much everything else I do on the computer.

Continue reading Page fault in module “zfs” due to a NULL pointer dereference →