Thermometer Suggestions please

[max_carpenter]

Good Afternoon All,

I have been asked to make a basic Server Monitoring application to monitor certain aspects of our servers and the environment one of them being room temperature.

I was wondering if anyone is able to recommend a USB Thermometer which comes with an API so I can read from it? I have been doing a bit of searching on the Net had have not found anything solid or reliable. I have come up with Thermer1 but alot of review show that it cannot be relied upon.

So was just wondering anyone done anything with USB Thermometers and can suggest something to me?

Thanks,
Max

[Jenner]

National Instruments makes several products for digital and analog sensing. In fact, looking over their product line, they got this: NI USB-TC01. You buy that and a simple J-type thermocouple (it even looks like they have package deals on their site) and you'll get a highly accurate and reliable temperature reading wherever you place it. National Instruments hardware also uses their NIDAQmx driver package which has full native .NET assemblies for programming.

I use them all the time for doing industrial hardware automation. You don't need any additional software to program for them, just the drivers that come with the unit.

[vb_ftw]

http://www.sustainabilitymeasurement.com/index.html

looks good but expensive

[nbrege]

I did something like this a few years ago. A buddy of mine wanted a way to monitor the temperature of his outdoor woodstove while he was away from home. So I found the TEMPer USB thermometer device on Ebay for about $20. They included a basic software app that used a DLL that I was able to figure out how to use with Reflector. (wasn't obfuscated). I was then able to create a small app, using their DLL, that ran on his PC & posted the temperature to a Twitter account every 15 minutes, which he could then check from his cell phone whenever & where ever he wanted. I works slick & he still uses it to this day.

The TEMPer device plugs into a USB port & has a metal probe attached to it via a 6' wire. We mounted the probe to one of the water lines that circulates the hot water through the system. We had to cut & lengthen the probe wire so as to reach his PC in a different room on a different floor. I think we added about 30' & I added code to calibrate the readings to compensate for the extra probe wire length.

The sad thing is that I lost the code when my hard drive totally died, and then Twitter changed their API so the Twitter posting stopped working. Luckily I included an option to have the temperatures sent as a text message at specified times or intervals, so thats hows he gets the updates now.

[gep13]

Hello max_carpenter,

Since your question is not specific to VB.Net, I am going to move it to the General Developer Forum.

Let me know if you have any questions about this.

Thanks

Gary

[tr333]

It sounds like you want a device that supports SNMP. Any sensor device that supports SNMP should allow you to query the sensor values over the network from SNMP.

I've had good experience with the AKCP sensorProbe2. You just plug it into your network (via ethernet) and configure the automated e-mail/SNMP alerts from the web interface. It supports two different sensor probes that are plugged in to ethernet ports on the device so you can extend the cable range with standard cat5. If you're doing a custom monitoring application, you can use SNMP to get the sensor values from the device into your app.

I've also heard good reviews on the ITWatchDogs climate monitors which are also ethernet based and support all the SNMP/e-mail/etc. that you would expect from a device of this type. Some of them also look like they can be rack mounted.

These devices all run via PoE so you can do away with extra power bricks and the associated power cables.

Other hardware sensors that support SNMP.

[tr333]

The main benefit I see in network/ethernet sensor devices is that you don't have to put them next to any computers. Eg. in a rack full of switches/routers/patch panels.