Silly Home Experiment #2

This page seems to get a lot of hits, I hope someone is finding it interesting. Use the Comments button on our Home page if you want to send an email or you can send one to spam@nickandRo.com. I will be posting a schematic of the circuit soon and adding a new data source to the selection. The new data source  is a one-wire thermal sensor from Dallas/Maxim. They cost $1.25 each and the controller is about $10.00. Multiple sensors can be dropped from a single pair of wires.

Back Up Next

How it all works (In a really small nutshell):

  1. The LabView PC in our office requests a temperature reading from the thermometer.

  2. The thermometer responds with a reading. (Steps 1 & 2 run continuously at X min intervals)

  3. The LabView PC graphs the data and uploads an HTML file and a JPEG to this server! (Finally!)

  4. Someone requests this page from http://nickandRo.com.

  5. The server responds with this page.

The temperature in Nick and Ro's House is:

Use the refresh button or click here to update the page.

Design Information:

bulletThe source code for the program running on our computer is written (drawn, actually) in LabView
 
bullet The 'C' source code of the program burned into the microcontroller on the thermometer circuit board.
 
bulletThe Schematic Diagram. (Adobe PDF format)

The Thermometer Circuit board.

The development tools used:

bulletNational Instruments LabView V5.1.1
bulletMicrosoft FrontPage 2002
bulletFranklin ProView32 C Compiler/IDE
bulletEZ-51 Device Programmer
bullet"C"
bulletHTML
bulletLabView
bulletJavascript

The protocols and interfaces involved:

bulletRS232
bulletEthernet
bulletI2C
bulletDOCSIS
bulletHTTP
bulletFTP
bulletTCP/IP

LabView FTP to an NT Server:

bullet

NEWS FLASH!:
I finally got the LabView Code to work with the NT webserver. Well, not really. I had to bail from LabView with the following little snippet of "DOS" wizardry.
 

bulletThis calls the "Windows" ftp client. The ftp client opens the file ftp.txt and executes the contents therein. The contents of this file are as follows:
 

open nickandRo.com
NAME
PASSWORD
cd Thermometer
delete tempgraph.jpg
delete current.htm
put c:\temp\tempgraph.jpg
put c:\temp\current.htm
quit

 
   

Saturday, 23 May 2009 14:35:27 -0500