Projects &work 07 Jun 2007 01:13 am

The Weather in the Server Room

Weather1.JPGA couple of weeks ago I had an airconditioner failure in the server room. The consequences could have been catastrophic had I not realised in time. This got me thinking that I should really have a system installed that could give me a warning when the temperature or humidity was not right in there. A quick search on the web brought up quite a few really good products for few hundred dollars at a time. This should be a worthy investment. Then, for a brief moment, I put my hardware hacker hat on and thought that it can’t be that difficult to build something that would provide a similar result for a fraction of the cost. Another search brought up a neat little sensor, the Sensirion SHT11 Humidity/Temperature sensor. This coupled with a Parallax Basic Stamp2 Microcontrollerbs2-ic.gif would definitely do the trick. I should even be able to hook it up to a cellphone to SMS me whenever it gets hot or humid in there, or I can even hook it up to MSN and it can IM me. The Sensiron people were kind enough to send me a sample sensor and tonight I put it all together and it works a like treat. Here’s a screenshot of a little VB app I put together that reports temperature and humidity at regular intervals. Geeky !!

SHT11.jpg S
HT11 Sensor (enlarged 5x)

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed

Leave a Reply

*