I have been playing around with building and logging house temperatures for a while now.  Previously I had manually created Excel based graphs, but I knew I wanted to generate some gnuPlot graphs and to possibly have a go at sending the data out onto the internet for graphing as well.  I have used gnuPlot previously to plot other data and found it extremely fast, generating 1600 pixel wide graphs of 160K points of data in way under a s

Early in the month, I managed to read my first DS-18B20 temperature sensor.  Over the intervening few weeks, I have been experimenting with using a Python script to read up to ten sensors at a time, and storing the temperatures in a MySQL DB.  Here is a close up of a bank of 11 x DS-18B20 temperature sensors.

It will also display one of the temperatures onto a Nokia 5110 LCD screen.  You can see the bank of 13 x sensors off to the right hand side:

Back in 2007 or so I wrote a C program to read my TP-200 serial port based GPS unit.  I was supprised to find that in 2012, the same program would compile on a Raspberry Pi Linux environment!  Go POSIX programming.

Attached is the C code file and my Makefile I use to compile it.  Use at your own risk.  It works for me, but maybe not you?  To use it, I just run  ./gps > gps_data_file-20121121.txt  and a number of lines will be written to the file each second.

After weeks of frustrating work trying to figure out the Northlight Systems Servo Controller and the base channel address, and the serial cabling issues (turned out there where none).  There where also issues with 'minicom' and how it stores some 0x00 values.