[vox-tech] Temperature monitoring (ibutton)

[Bill Broadley <bill@math.ucdavMAPSis.edu>]

I forgot the topic, but I believe ibuttons and/or temperature monitoring
came up recently.  We have been having some heat problems in our server
room, so I setup some monitoring (tonight).

Used 3 "Thermocrons" pretty cool widgets, battery powered when off the
bus, parasitizes power off the serial when on bus.  They can be programmed
to take a sample every N minutes up to 2048 samples (even when off the
serial bus), build a histogram, time sync to serial, timestamp each data
point, etc.  Pretty amazing for a $10.00 sensor the size of a lifesaver
or so.

So I hooked 3 of them to a single serial port in our server room to
measure the temperature behind the rack, ontop of the rack, and in the
AC vent.  I write the temps to a SQL database, and have a second script to 
view the result:

        http://spinor.math.ucdavis.edu/~rt/file.gif

So basically very nice hardware, very flexible, full source, linux
compatible, very easy to interface to.  Oh yeah and $10 each.

--
Bill Broadley