Featured Articles
Announcing Pi
Technical Specifications
Raspberry Pi FAQs
Win a Pi
Raspberry Pi Wishlist
Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • State Suggested Answer
  • Replies 9 replies
  • Answers 2 answers
  • Subscribers 682 subscribers
  • Views 1137 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

Designing and building an environmental monitoring system.

Former Member

Hi there,

 

I have been approached to build an "cloud based" environmental monitoring system for a small architecture firm which uploads measurements to a web server. I don't have a huge amount (read basic secondary school) of experience with electronics, I have a much stronger background with programming and higher level software applications.

 

The people that I'm going to be working for have picked out a number of sensor boards from sparkfun that monitor some of the things they want to measure, most of which either output a DC voltage or via an I2C bus. I have looked around and decided to base the design off of a Raspberry Pi based off the fact it runs Linux and that the GPIO header has analogue pins and an I2C bus. I start in 2 weeks when hardware is delivered and I was wondering if anyone could offer any words of advice that I should stick to when developing the board and system.

 

I have a rough plan of how to approach the project and I will be trying to keep a blog of how development goes.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

// Skutov

Parents
  • 0

    I think it's going to be hard building something reliable with secondary school electronics experience (they should be paying an Engineer for this) without further studying, but a proof-of-concept is simpler.

    I don't think the RPI has any analog pins from memory, so some adaptation (i.e. ADC) is required if some of the chosen sensors have a voltage output. Without knowing much more about them, it may be easier to avoid such sensors and just use the I2C ones.

    You might want to look at this blog post, where RPI and Python was used for uploading temperature data, for some ideas.

Reply
  • 0

    I think it's going to be hard building something reliable with secondary school electronics experience (they should be paying an Engineer for this) without further studying, but a proof-of-concept is simpler.

    I don't think the RPI has any analog pins from memory, so some adaptation (i.e. ADC) is required if some of the chosen sensors have a voltage output. Without knowing much more about them, it may be easier to avoid such sensors and just use the I2C ones.

    You might want to look at this blog post, where RPI and Python was used for uploading temperature data, for some ideas.

Children
No Data