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.

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