I recently reorganized my garage in order to make a little workshop for me to tinker with my electronics and my ham radio gear. With that, I put my computer and a managed switch (HP Procurve 2650) at my workstation in the garage. With the garage door open I get a good breeze, but when the door it closed, there is no moving air. I felt the output of the fan on the switch and the air was really hot. So I decided to whip up a temperature sensor with my Arduino.

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This arduino has two separate functions. The first function is displaying information on the 16x2 LCD screen. I send messages to the screen over HTTP. The second function is updating my control server with the temperature every 10 seconds. The Arduino it self does not take the temperature and then display it on the screen.

Every 10 seconds the Arduino sends the temperature to the control server over HTTP. The server then saves it in the database with the device ID, temperature and timestamp. Then the control server tells the Arduino what to display on the screen, in this case its "Temperature" and "00.00F HH:MM:SS".

You may think this is overkill sending the temperature to the server then having the server tell the arduino to display it. But the reason I chose this method was because temperature sensing is not the main function of this device. The main function of this device is to display what ever my server tells it to display.

I am currently working on a design to put this project in a permanent enclosure.