One of my colleagues in IT is looking for a cheap way to monitor the ambient temps in our company's server room so that if the aircon dies and the ambient temps rise above a fixed limit he will receive an email to warn him. There are lots of options, but do the experts at Bit have any ideas? Cheaper the better.
This is literally SCREAMING for an arduino Arduino with a network shield and a temperature sensor and then some fancy coding.
I AM the IT man who isn't very good at coding Unless it's writing a script, I can write you lots of fancy scripts to do a whole number of things. I'm not sure, appeal to someone who is good at coding. Loads of people have arduino's and are good at coding - make them write it, or steal it from them, or steal them and get them to write it at knife point. Worlds and oysters Shirty
I think the major issue with the Arduino route (which I can see would be by far and away the cheapest) is the warranty and technical support that IT departments seem to like on all their hardware, so that they have something to fall back on when they **** up
I think it's for night time and weekends when nobody is on site. They currently have two separate aircon units keeping the room at 18 degrees so it's complete overkill of course, but the concept is for something to email him when the ambient temperature exceeds say 25 degrees, so that he can come into the office and investigate.
If its mission critical he should get someone in to do it properly. Any industrial controls company should be able to do this but obviously you'll be paying quite a bit even for something as simple as this project. If not do a little research on an arduino. You could use a raspberry pi either and a temperature monitor. Temp goes up monitor turns on an output, pi reads it (through some small interface electronics.) Program on pi signals SMTP server on the pi to send an email to whoever. The programming is not going to be insurmountable and will probably be reasonably simple. When it comes to interfacing to something that will send an email its unlikely that you can avoid programming. Especially if you are trying to do it on the cheap or can't afford an off the shelf solution if it even exists.
I assume theres a temperature sensor somewhere in the room already? On the aircon panel or something similar. Cheap solution stick a webcam pointing at it. Or i just found this http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PC-Laptop...or-Data-Log-Computer-/200685562709#vi-content Or as said an Ardunio or raspberry pi for more features/expandability
Thanks for all your help folks. Professional solutions are available, but they seem to start at around £150. This is probably what he'll go for, was really just wondering if anyone had any specific recommendations based upon experience.
We've got some nice little temp monitors at work, they defiantly do email alerting as we found out on Friday when the heat exchangers iced over and the aircon shut off! They also do nice graphs that look pretty on our stats screens Not sure on the model but I'll check tomorrow when I'm in. I can't imagine they would be that expensive as we don't have massive budgets.
Thanks sas, he hadn't come across that firm in his research and was interested to see this option - so you might well be the winner (of some rep at least ).
We use these: http://www.theclimate.co.uk/product.php?product_id=110&category_id=1&sub_category_id=-1 Bit more expensive than I thought at retail but we bought quite a lot in one got so got a chunky discount.
