There are several nice cases out there, but few of them are much bigger than the Pi itself, meaning there is no room to mount other items in the case, such as an LCD display and the necessary cabling. Some form of breakout connector for the GPIO pins. Integral PSU or moulding for USB power lead to the socket on the Pi with cable relief gland.
magnetic back plate, plus wall mounting screw holes). 16 x 2 LCD, 16 x 4 LCD, small display screen).Ībility to mount to something ( e.g. PS if anyone is looking for a nice engineering/kickstarter project for the Raspberry Pi, I would love to see the following case:īig enough for a Pi and a display ( e.g. Essentially, I was trying to find a system that had all the functionality I needed but that would also be robust, maintainable, scalable, and usable by people other than me.
More about the choices behind the various hardware/software options will follow in a later posting. So I don’t think I’ll be showing pictures of that bit of the build ! Several of the ribbon wires are separated (torn away…) to connect to the DS18B20s in a rather amateurish way. Inside the case, the LCD is connected to the GPIO using a 26 way ribbon cable and push fit IDC connector. A couple of extra holes for the sensor cables and a hole for the USB power lead complete the hardware. Pi3 is running CACTI for data capture, a pair of DS18B20 temperature sensors (RS: 5402805), a 16 x 2 LCD display (RS: 5326436) and sits inside a slightly too large plastic box (RS: ) which our nice engineering team machined to fit the ethernet and USB sockets of the Pi and a cutout for the LCD screen. It also runs an experiment using Dygraphs to produce a zoomable temperature graph. At the moment, NETTEMP requires a device like this since it relies on Digitemp for its 1-wire interfacing. A single DS18B20 is interfaced using a 1-wire to USB adaptor from Sheepwalk (model: DS9490R).
Pi2 is running a modified version of the code from NETTEMP for data capture, and display.
It interfaces to a pair of DS18B20s via a breadboard and to the same Sparkfun serial interfaced LCD ( PPLCD-09395) that I used on the Arduino. Pi1 is running MRTG and CACTI, for data capture.
I might try another upgrade soon after taking an SD card backup. For some reason, I had issues getting it to accept the main updates via sudo apt-get upgrade – it tended to red-light (the Pi’s version of BSOD) after restarting. That was my first Pi and the one that I crammed with most trials.Īll three Pis are running Raspbian, generally the latest version ( ) but Pi1 is lagging slightly behind on the updates. One logs my router and itself (!) as well. So now three Raspberry Pis are running different versions of my system, two at home and one at work. Having arrived at the optimum software/hardware configuration, I got work to order the various parts from their main electronics supplier (RS) and then built a copy if the optimised system for them, modifying the SD card contents to match the IT systems at work (and getting permission from the IT department to connect the device). This also let me take a Pi away for Xmas leaving the other one running 24/7 to continue logging, as a sort of unattended test.
I bought one to start playing with and then realised that some of the configurations I had set up on the Pi had to be changed to trial alternative software hardware solutions and rather than keep changing the same single Pi, I bought a second one to experiment with.
I decided that the best way forwards with the higher resolution temperature logger/server project was to do it all on a Raspberry Pi. Well, actually three, but the last one is owned by work … Well, now it’s here, or rather they are here, as I ended up buying two. Truth be told, the Uno was really a stopgap whilst I was waiting for my Raspberry Pi to be delivered. I think that probably led me into a false sense of freedom on the Uno with my skills limited to programming in wiring, I just could not cram in all the functions I wanted on this small device. From yesteryear I remembered doing some Z80 assembler programming and writing some BASIC programs on a Sinclair Spectrum with only 32 kB of memory. Where I left the post, I was planning on implementing more functions to the system, basically to serve web pages containing graphics (temperature charts) as well as store data and to implement an email alerting system.īut I ran into a basic problem that is the limited memory on the Uno. I hooked up a serial interfaced LCD display to display information such as IP address, time, date and the temperature readings and sat it running and logging data to a micro SD card. OK, so a while ago I built a little temperature measuring system using an Arduino Uno, an Arduino ethernet Shield, a real time clock module and some digital 1-wire temperature sensors.