Way back in July I thought I was almost done with the power monitoring box.

Well, it had some software issues and then got set aside for more urgent projects (like the makerbot – oh yeah!).

As a reminder, it’s built around an Arduino Duemilanove with an adafruit ethernet shield and an Xport module.

Tonight I wasn’t sleep-inclined, so I dragged it out and dug in. I ended up having to dig pretty deeply into the Xport configuration and learn more about how it works, which was a good thing in the long run.

The problem turned out to be an error in the Xport configuration that I had copied from an arduino example sketch. The owner of that example’s been notified, and my arduino code works, so it was a good evening of hacking.

The XPort module is a pretty powerful thing. Here are links to product information and the user manual (pdf)

The power monitor now PUTs a request to the web server as it should. There is still a bug on the server side, but it will wait until another day.

It’s been nagging at me that this got set aside, so now I feel better. I think I’ll go get some sleep.