About a month ago I built a texting temperature sensor, which had some energy-saving code I learned about. I wanted to see how many days it would last on one charge.
It's still running.
Texting temperature data to Twitter is fun, but more useful is sending that information to a table.
That’s what I did this week, as my wanderings into wireless data collection continue: Post the temperature and humidity from my little experiment to a table at data.sparkfun.com.
Here are the steps as things stand now:
- The sensor reads the data (as in my original post).
- The Ardunio formats a message and texts it with a Fona (wiring details here, updated code here).
- Instead of texting to Twitter, it now texts to a phone number I bought at Twilio for $1/month.
- Twilio then relays that data to my project server in the Amazon cloud as an http “POST” (deets on setting up a cloud server here).
- My project server parses the text message, composes a URL with the data, and hits the Sparkfun open data system with that URL (code for that is here).
This all happens in just a few seconds, every 20 minutes.
I got the temperature sensor working and I got the Arduino texter working, but I had trouble getting them to work together.
Until this week.
After jumping several hurdles, I now have a portable temperature-texter, which has been sensing and texting to Twitter for two days now.
Taking temperature readings with an Arduino seems pretty straightforward — generic thermistors are easy to wire up. But I wanted something a more precise, with actual temperature readings.
So I got this air temperature and humidity sensor, and this week I gave it a whirl.