Dual temperature Logger

Oh you poor neglected blog, I really should be paying better attention to you.  Here is a project I have started to work on that I believe belongs on this blog and not really in my homelife.  I have a friend that has a unfinished crawlspace that is easily accessible (read walk in height) that I've mused about placing a barrel for aging weird beers in.  The trouble is it is unregulated temperature, and I want to have an idea of the ranges I can expect from it before I lay my precious beer down there.

I purchased a TI Launchpad a while ago, for the purpose of having a cheap and available development board to play with.  These are great at $4.30+shipping you don't need to worry about ruining them and they have the USB host for programming them built in.  It is quite a nice dev-board for the price and I know Texas Instruments is just trying to buy market share here, but if it drives down the Arduino and Phrallax devboard prices I'm all for it.  I need an experiment and want some long tail results about the temperature inside the crawlspace vs the outdoor temperature to get a feel for how stable the temperature is.  My hope is that it stays above 40°F (his furnace and hot water tank are down there so it should be above freezing) and stays below 70°F in the summer.  Below 60°F would be really ideal, but for free you can only hope for so much.

My general plan was to get two temperature probes and tweet the temps a few times a day, hack-a-day posted this little project that has me thinking that I may use WUnderground for a destination to store the data.  I could I suppose roll my own CGI script to take a post datastream and keep it in a text file, or use a wireless accessory to get things really interesting.  This will probably have to be an ongoing post because I haven't decided how I want to proceed.  I can work on interfacing directly with the network using the Devboard and a Wifi module.  That route has some benefits and runs around $50 for the wifi module.  Another route is to use a bluetooth module and interface with an Android phone to do the heavy lifting for me.  I could just log the data to the phone on an SD card, and using No-IP access a webserver to just check on it from time to time.  The beauty of using the Android device is it has built in WiFi, storage a built-in battery backup and is really pretty compact.  A final option is to use the Open ADK and plug in via the usb port.  The drawback is it was designed for Arduino boards, so I'll be inventing the wheel here to make it work with the TI board.  I'm not opposed to buying something like the IOIO, given the costs fall pretty much in line with the cost of the WiFi module, I had just hoped to pull this off with the TI boards.

Conductive Epoxy is brilliant

Toolmonger is at it again tempting me with crazy products that get my little wheels turning. I don't have a specific project in mind for this, but seems like it would be as useful as something like the Dura fix.

Another thought improving Blekin lapdesk

The hits keep coming from the wellspring of ideas known as the make blog! So in this installment it looks like there are magnetic valves activated by heat. I realize that these have to be purpose built for the application, but it may be helpful for my crazy plan to improve the Belkin Lap Desk.

Improving the Belkin Lap Desk

Ever since I saw the Belkin Lapdesk I thought that it needed improvement. It needed either passive or active cooling of some form, and I was hopping to not add another thing that needed to be plugged into a wall outlet. This mod adds two active fans that are plugged in to a 12v wall wart, and while I definitely it improves the overall usefulness of the stand it doesn't meet my other goal of not wanting another device sucking power.

I saw an article a few days ago about Icyballs that may be closer to what I am hopping to use. It would require electricity as I am fairly sure I need to have a microcontroller to engage the heat element to reverse the natural evaporation process. I have no experience with this type of work though so I think I am going to need to find a chemistry nerd and probably a welding nerd to pull the whole process.

Logitec comfort lapdesk needs to be remixed

I am sure most people have seen these little desks, I think Belkin makes something similar too but I think that this plastic is or leather design that everyone comes up with will only protect my legs not the laptop from the heat that baby is kicking off. I think that the Logitec one could be improved by replacing that plastic fin with an aluminum one. I am not sure how to pull off the rigid base for the fabric to be attached to, but I will post updated shots of a prototype.