My house has significant temperature differences in the winter between my office in the front, sun-facing side of the house and my bedroom in the back. Walking between the two rooms, I can experience more than a 5 degree temperature change! After some reflection, my cooler bedroom is probably attributable to a single HVAC vent and its shared (and likely uninsulated) wall with my unheated garage. That said, let’s not let logic and reason stop us from pursuing an interesting project!
Project Overview
My starting vision is to measure temperatures from different rooms using remote sensors units, collect them using a central server, save them to a database for historical analysis, and display the results in a webpage so I can review current and trending temperatures on my phone while I poop. That’s right – I feel lost in the bathroom without my phone. Send help. When I asked my wife what I should call this system that’s been taking me away from her, she declared without hesitation, “Temp Buddy“. Temp Buddy it is.
Why This?
I learn best when passion intersects with practical effects. Although my passion might flare out later, this project is practical and can be used in many situations. It’s also a fresh opportunity to make a “professional” project as opposed to my old hack-jobs and can incorporate a broad spread of concepts, techniques, and systems I want to learn:
- Version Control
- Configuration files
- Logging to files
- API development
- Multithreading
- Error handling – graceful degredation
- Graphing libraries
- Website development and hosting
- Unit testing
Development Philosophy
I spent a few hours a day for two weeks getting the bones of this system set up and will be dedicating a few hours a weekend to it moving forward. This is a learning project and, as such, may never reach completion as originally envisioned. I’m also in the process of moving to start a new job (negating the need for a temperature sensing system), which will slow me down. Expect periodic posts under the tag #RemoteTempSensors as I complete an aspect of the system, discover a new technique, or find a poorly documented corner of internet knowledge that I can fill. These posts will be written in an instructuctional “you” voice as if you, the reader, planned to follow in my footsteps.
Source Code
My code is publically available on my TempBuddy GitHub repository and will be periodically updated as I complete new aspects of this project.