Saturday, February 13, 2016

Cabin Fever Part 6: A Smart Temperature Sensor


I've completed the "Cabin Fever" Smart Temperature Sensor and it's in use!
It's working great!  Here is my previous post (part 5) on this project.

I'm even going to be presenting about it at the IBM InterConnect Conference on Feb. 22nd! I'll post more on that later, but for now my sessions at IBM Interconnect 2016 are:
Monday Feb. 22: IND-2119: A Primer to Programming an Internet of Things Device on IBM Bluemix
and
Wednesday Feb. 24: Dev@ Ask Me Anything Session:  IDA-6963: Connecting Node-RED Flows to the IBM Watson IoT Platform for an IoT Device

What I've learned:
1. Programming on the arduino and how to use libraries for onewire temperature sensor and mqtt pubsub
2. Mqtt publish and subscribe
3. JSON
4. Bluemix and IoT
5. Node-RED
6. Node.js JavaScript
7. circuits on the Arduino and one-wire

Lessons Learned:
  1. IBM IoTF quickstart does not allow publish
  2. in C++ for Arduino, be careful of an if statement doing assignment, for example: If( a=0) instead of what you meant:  if (a==0)
  3. converting C to F, use floating constants
  4. don't use pins that are already used on the arduino ethernet card
  5. trying to save memory by using a char instead of int doesn't work well
  6. strings can be difficult
  7. nodered - trying to use gmail: there are 3 points to follow to establish credentials
  8. bluemix = app runs 24X7
  9. My first reading was 185 degrees when I started up the unit. Why? I don't know, but I added a read at startup and after that all readings were good.
  10. soldering : use a fan to blow away the smoke
  11. I needed to get the updated pub/sub library
  12. questions on DW answers and stackoverflow are a great place to get help
I'll be posting soon another post about my work with an ESP8266 NodeMCU that I'm bringing to the InterConnect conference!

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