Environmental monitoring

Posted Oct 24th 2006 7:08AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks, peripherals hacks

[Daniel Klien] sent me his thermd environmental monitoring project. It's written in perl, but the cool part is the sheer number of supported devices. It's pretty rare when a single developer is given test hardware so he can add support for it.

Sure, this isn't a hardware hack, but temperature logging is one of those irritating problems of hardware hacking. I've got loads of uses for it - coffee roasting, house management, battery charging, monitoring for my EV motorcycle project.

Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. Sweet first comment if you hooked that up right i bet you could control a house.

Posted at 7:54AM on Oct 24th 2006 by drew

2. very, very nice hack - unfortunately I've never been a big fan of perl; I may have to learn because I could put a system like this to good use!

slightly off topic, but I'd also like to say thanks to will for linking your project. I'll be keeping an eye on that. I just hope that when you start the work you'll be giving a detailed write up.

Posted at 8:58AM on Oct 24th 2006 by Pedro

3. His live graphs are labeled incorrectly - English should come up with metric units. "American" is imperial. Soiling "english" with american rubbish.

Posted at 10:37AM on Oct 24th 2006 by Neonkoala

4. neat and tidy... just as I lkie it )

Posted at 1:54PM on Oct 24th 2006 by chap

5. i do similar things with munin (http://munin.projects.linpro.no/) and our weather goose (http://www.itwatchdogs.com/) units.

His script looks more suited to the problem though.

Posted at 8:23PM on Oct 24th 2006 by adam

6. Pretty cool... but total overkill for most hacking applications. A pic, a cheap LM temp sensor and maybe an external memory chip would be much simpler and far more versatile. Of course grabbing the data off of it can be a little more irritating than using one of these and having a whole harddrive to fill up with logs is handy. (hmmm... on my 100 gig HD I can track the temperature once a minute for the next 190 years or so.)

Posted at 11:08PM on Oct 24th 2006 by bp

7. This guy who designed this is growing weed for sure!

Posted at 1:46AM on Oct 25th 2006 by Turkey

8. along the same lines, i have two ds1631 sensors hooked up to my computer to measure indoor and outdoor temperatures, but the outdoor one goes off by about 30 degrees when the sun is shining on it. i've tried constructing a sort of breathable sun protecting shield for it but have had little success.
are there any good (hopefully diy) solutions for this?

Posted at 2:29AM on Oct 25th 2006 by patrick

9. You could mount it in the shade ;)

Posted at 9:25AM on Oct 25th 2006 by ...

10. ^^^^ Wot he says ^^^^

Alternately - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen

Posted at 10:05AM on Oct 25th 2006 by ed3

11. PS - http://weather.overflow.net.au/station/stevenson.html

Posted at 10:11AM on Oct 25th 2006 by ed3

12. this is really neat and useful. as soon as I move back to the U.S. i'll buy some temp sensors and try this out.

Posted at 4:29PM on Oct 25th 2006 by william

13. This is an excellent hack. I've been working on something similar for a cheap Temp controlled RH system to be installed in museum exhibits for my MA...

Posted at 10:34AM on Oct 26th 2006 by And-e-roo

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