Well, I haven’t written a post in sometime because I was feverishly spending my spare time working on developing a solution to a problem I ran into.  One Monday morning I walked into work, stepped in front of my server room door and noticed a strange noise coming from the room.  It sounded like a high pitch jet engine sound.  I proceeded to open the door and a blast of hot air came barreling out at me.  The A/C had gone out overnight and the server room was approaching 100 degrees.  Not a good way to start the week off.

After I put a fan in the room and started shutting down non essential equipment, I decided it was time to install a temperature monitoring system into the server room.  This wasn’t the first time we had issues with the A/C unit, but it was the highest the temperature had ever gotten, and I know if it gets to hot, things start going south real quick.  I did some googling, and came up with all kinds of results, but most of these systems were very expensive and did a lot more than what I really needed. 

What I wanted was simple (or so I thought it was):

  • USB - Had to be a Plug and Play Sensor that works with any computer.
  • Un-tethered - I didn’t want something that was connected to any one machine, I wanted to be able to get readings away from machine exhaust so I could get the ambient temperature of the room.
  • Paging / Emailing - I wanted a solution that would alert my blackberry and treo of issues in addition to a number of my hundred email accounts.
  • Customizable - I wanted to be able to specify my threshold to monitor and how often to monitor it.
  • Temperature Only - I know there are technically a lot of other factors that sophisticated data centers monitor such as humidity, but I also know that it is temperature that I have the most control over and can do the most damage if it gets out of control.
  • Cheap - Most importantly, it had to be cheap.  I’m at a small trucking company and the economic times right now don’t warrant me the luxury to throw a rack mounted sensor in that does all kinds of fancy stuff.  I was looking for the <$100 solution!

After digging, I decided the solution I was looking for didn’t exist, so I decided to create one.

I went to work designing the basic components and coming up with the requirements and set down the path to create one.  Like all projects that sound simple enough, this one turned out to be tougher than I thought.  I had to learn a little about C++, voltage and some funky math conversions for receiving input from a USB temperature sensor.  Not your typical programming 101 stuff. 

Talking with my other colleagues, I realized that this was a tool that would not only benefit me at Tradewinds, but also many other businesses that have the same need…to be notified before disaster strikes is always something worth knowing.

So I decided I’d create the solution, use it for my needs, and recoup my investment of time and energy offering it to others for a small fee.  I created a web presence over at http://temperaturescan.com/ where you can download a working demo and purchase the solution.

Here’s a screenshot showing what the interface for the program looks like, very simple, but effective…I like things clean and simple, I’m not a fan of over complication:

Temperature Scan

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