The W1FY freezer was designed to keep the equipment warm in the winter, despite residing in an unheated location. It does a great job!
The next challenge was to find a way for the remote sysops to monitor the inside temperature. Our concern now became the summer.
Peter, KA1AXY, found a circuit board that contains a thermal sensor which can be read from the parallel port of a computer. Peter worked with Charlie, NC1N, to develop an interface that would allow PacketCluster to read the temperature. Peter implemented the sensor interrogation in a C program. Charlie wrote several more programs and scripts to allow the node to trigger interrogation at the appropriate times, to save or post the output, and to manage the SHOW/THERM file area.
The sensor is protected by a plastic box chosen for cheapness and good air flow. It ain't pretty, but nobody can see it in the cabinet, anyway! The circuit board is actually 1/2 the length of the box.
General users can access the thermal data by typing SHOW/THERM. This lists a set of daily temperature files, named after the date. Each file contains 23 hourly readings. It is posted to the file area at approximately 2302 UTC each day. A specific file can be downloaded with the command TYPE/THERM <filename>.
Sysops also receive automatic hourly readings on their consoles, and can interrogate the sensor on demand.
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