Shop Environmental Monitoring

[jvanick]

I've been playing around with a bunch of micro controller stuff lately and created a temperature and humidity monitoring solution that I now have installed in our screen room and on the shop floor.

It produces graphs like the following:


and can even send email or text alerts if the temperature or humidity gets out of a threshold.

total cost was about $150 or so, plus a few hours of time to get everything talking with each other.

Having a data log with historical data is awesome, and will help a LOT with troubleshooting.

[mimosatexas]

Care to go into detail?  For 150 bucks I would be all over something like this...

[jvanick]

absolutely...

my post was to gauge interest..  I'm more than happy to help anybody who's interested.

temperature monitoring devices:
http://www.amazon.com/USR-USR-HTW-Temperature-Humidity-Transmitter/dp/B00RFA835C/ref=pd_sim_sbs_23_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=06W277Z1A1HJCRC7RKAB

these are polled via a small linux machine (Rasbperry Pi B+) in my case, via the wifi network (the raspberry pi costs about $30 or so)

the data is rolled up into a data packet which is sent to a server that graphs and analyzes the data with a open source package called 'cacti'.

I may be able to be talked into making a 'package' of this.. 2 sensors, and the collector, that I can send out as a package.

-J

[mimosatexas]

I would pay a premium for it to be setup as a package.  I haven't messed with the raspberry pi yet, though I have read all about it.

[Underbase37]

This is really cool!! Nice work. I would be interested in this for sure.

Murphy37

[ZooCity]

Yeah put me down for one of those.  Wouldn't mind having ambient conditions in a few other areas of the shop as well.

[cbjamel]

I would be interested in directions to see if I could build it. Think I could.
Shane

[bulldog]

I'd be interested in either DIY or a package.

[bimmridder]

I'd be in for one, and maybe two.

[jvanick]

I guess I need to start putting this together into a real package.

I'm going to offer it 2 ways...

option 1... I'll do a writeup on my webpage on how to implement it (you buy all the parts and put it together).  (probably won't be for the faint of heart, however no soldering involved lol)

option 2... preconfigured package with everything you need.  All you'll need to do is plug in the tiny computer into a network drop, which will send the data back to my server for graphing and alerting.... I'm thinking about $300 shipped for the small computer, 2 sensors, everything pre-loaded and ready to go, as well as support assistance to get it all running.

[jvanick]

I've been hard at the R&D process on the temperature monitors and I've decided to go a lot more custom, but will ultimately save $$$ on the final project as well as be less hard to implement... however, it's more custom now than it was before.

I've been experimenting with 2 different display options... option 1, an inexpensive lcd that just displays temp and humidity data... option 2, a 5" LCD full color lcd panel that can show the graph over time as well as the current/average/max temps.

Anybody have any thoughts?

the full color lcd option would add about $50 or so to the price, so around $350 for a fully-self contained monitoring unit that can log temperature and humidity data for an entire year.

the lcd panel option would be around the same $300 as before but would only be capable of displaying the current temperature and humidity, you'd have to get the rest of the data from a webpage.

both options hooked up and running (prototype):

[BorisB]

I'm probably missing something. Off the shelf wifi temp/ humidity data logger with software costs 160-200$.
What is this unit/kit doing beside that?

[jvanick]

I've been trying o find something off the shelf to do the historical data graphing as well as alerting for humidity as well as temp... all I've been able to find off the shelf was temperature.

send links please, that way I can play with my toys but not re-invent the wheel
-J