Posts Tagged "1-wire weather"

Hacking the Weather II

Posted by rizal on Aug 25, 2008 in MyLab | 3 comments

I was in “hacking mood” yesterday so I pulled off some old hardware from my messy rack and follow the instructions here to produce the following graphs of my room temperature.

For those who don’t understand the picture above — it is actually the graph of temperature against time (in Celcius) of my study room at home in Riyadh.
Outside temperature is 40++ Celcius during the day (yes it is summer in Riyadh)  but getting cooler as Ramadhan is approaching .Do you know that the temperature would reach below 10 Celcius during the winter here?

So to recall — the idea of  starting this project goes back ages ago but was delayed due to many undisclosed reasons — you know it’s not easy being a father of 4, living in Riyadh bla bla bla .
How it works? You can build your own 1-wire temperature sensor (search for DS1820 with google and you’ll find many related projects) or you can buy a ready made kit or the one that I am using here is TAI8520 if you are too lazy to  like me.

Build/assemble your own

Or just follow this easy step-by-step instruction by Instructables .

The USB interface that I am using is DS9490R and  connected to my EEEPC which is running Ubuntu with Digitemp and rrdtool applications. The graph was later ftp’ed to my blog every 5 minutes via crontab. Insyaallah I will try to install another sensor outside my house so that we can see the temperature difference in and out of the house!

The blue USB on the right is the DS9490R .

Hacking the Weather I

Posted by rizal on Mar 26, 2006 in MyLab | 0 comments

Received these 2 items on my mailbox last week.

It consists of these 2 items in 1 box.

and

The interest to build a weather station at home, went back to year 1998 when I first read the following article in Linux Journal ( I still have the copy of the magazine) . It was delayed without any progress, even though I visited (many times!) the website (attempted to buy but always click at the CANCEL button of the checkout page!) and also subscribed to the weather mailing-list .
My initial plan was to start small with a basic temperature sensor like DT1A so at 2002, I wrote to Brian Lane the author of the digitemp software asking whether he ship to Malaysia- (yes he did) but back then PayPal was not available to Malaysian so he asked me to pay in US cheque instead somehow I didn’t proceed with it.

Last year, I bought some DS18S20 from RS , hobbyboards temp kit
also this DT1A but the project stuck halfway mainly due to time factor—the tight 3G project schedule + a new baby was on the way (we were raising 3 kids without maid!)—yeahh right.. Rizal with his reasons again

How was the progress ?
Nothing much! I managed to revive the dead Linux PC (recent lightning casualty) and installed Fedora Core 3 on it. Thats it!
I felt a bit guilty spending too much time (hacking) on the project while the kids were awake. Uje will countlessly asking me about a lot of things.. “Abah what is this?” , “Abah, why did you do this” and Sabrina will be busy poking the screwdriver on the PC casing—she already broke my Icute front door casing.
So just wait!