Now I have the time, I thought I would create what essentially is a home Operation and Maintenance, locally hosted webserved interactive manual.
The advantage of this is that all information relating to the house, individual rooms or equipment is held in one place, locally accessible on my home network either on my Desktop or mobile/ipad.
The starting block is my Synology Diskstation DS220+ Network Attached Storage (NAS) device;
Web Page
The DS220+ has an inbuild webserver, so it was fairly easy to upload web pages created using the free version of Microsoft Expression Web 4, this is great software as it allows for the creation of image hotspot links to be embedded in pages.
The main landing page is shown at the top of this blog, I can either click on the general description headings or click on the house image and an interactive view of the house will open:
On the webserved image, as the mouse hovers over an area, this becomes ‘clickable’, on clicking, this takes you to the specific area of interest, as an example, hovering and clicking on the Lounge take me to:
This gives me access to room finishes, equipment manuals, serial number records and user guides, TV wiring, room electrical schematics and further links to specific, more detailed information of broader areas, such as the security system and central heating for example.
QR Code Labels
To enable quick access to information held on the webserver, I’ve used a number of QR code labels, to illustrate this, the pump for my irrigation system has a QR Code attached which will take you to the pumps manual:
For more integrated projects, QR Codes are attached to the equipment linking to detailed, multi linked page/s:
Irrigation system is used in this example –
The controllers QR Code links directly to the Garden Irrigation page –
This linking to detailed information is incredibly useful to document on how things are configured, interconnected or interdependencies from a technical perspective, or more simply to store data sheets and supplier details.
Producing QR Code Labels
Small asset linking QR code labels are used:
The Brother P-Touch E550W printer has the ability to print a huge array of different labels, for asset labeling I use 18mm White Tape connecting the E550W printer to my PC using P-Touch free editing software.
The printer can connect via Wi-Fi or Direct USB cable to the software.
In P-Touch Editor software, select ‘Insert’ > ‘Bar Code’ with protocol ‘QR Code’ selected.
Within the QR Code software window, you simply paste the link in the ‘Input’ window and press save and print.
Viewing the QR code with a phone camera, a yellow box will appear with a partial link description, clicking in the yellow box will take you to the site originally entered in the ‘Input’ box.
Conclusion – The use of a quick and easy way to access information makes life very easy, generating and maintaining the data does take time, but the information is available to anyone at anytime who needs it, (given they have the appropriate access rights to the Wi-Fi password).
