Time for a geeky post…

Having sold our house in Cleveland, my Raspberry Pi computers have been boxed up for the past year. Partially due to not having time and partially not needing or missing them.

Last week, Olessia asked about the temperature in D’s room. “It’s too cold.” Then later, “it’s too warm.” We’ve monitored the room temperature by seeing how D is doing and if he feels warm or cold. This is easy when he’s awake, but no so when he’s a sleep. “I have a solution!” And out came the Pis.

The Raspberry Pi is a super cheap computer ($25-$35, not including some additional items such as a mouse, keyboard, monitor, power cord, memory, wifi adapter, etc). What’s spiffy is you can plug sensors and stuff into them. At our Cleveland house, I had a bunch of temperature sensor running, mostly for giggles, except for one. One Pi had a temperature sensor setup for my bearded dragon’s home. It would record how warm or cold his home was which would indicate if his lights were working or not. Add some code to a web page and I could see the dragon’s temperature in realtime from anywhere. Rinse and repeat for the other Pis, but for things like indoor and outdoor temperatures (again, just for giggles).

After some digging, I plugged the Pi formerly used in our garage at our Cleveland house and plugged that in D’s room. Then I added the temperature value as an overlay to the crib webcam and we could see in realtime how D was doing and what temperature the room was at. Awesome.

But Olessia also wanted to know how cold it got when the air conditioner ran before shutting off. No problem! The data gets logged and then can be graphed. So at any point in the day, Olessia can check D’s room temperature and the temperature history.

I may have over-engineered this…

The bearded dragon Pi is back online providing terrarium temperature and living room temperature. I just converted the patio Pi into an outdoor temperature sensor and webcam. My cheapo waterproofing is being tested by what is left of the hurricane and so far so good. I would provide a link to the webcam here, but bandwidth at the Pi is a bit limited and it’s not ready for the internet hug of death.

Here’s some pics. I don’t have pics of the dragon Pi or D’s room Pi. They’re similar to the balcony Pi minus the webcam and ziplock bag.