Waiting for my new gadget…

About a year ago I received my Onion Omega board, and it’still here on my shelf, waiting for something cool to do.

But then Onion released Omega2, a more powerful device, which doubles RAM and ROM available at a little cost. So I backed the project on Kickstarter, and my new Omega2 is on track now. I’m waiting it to be here in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime I’ll think about something to do with this new board and with the old one. I have some expansion boards (relays, OLED, Ethernet) that will be divided between the two boards to build some IoT projects.

Stay tuned!

Firsts steps into the IoT world…

Ok, it’s time to enter the IoT world, because IoT is cool.
With my Udoo Neo board I decided to do something usefull  (at least for me): trace down temperature and humidity data from my garage, that is the place in which almost all of my equipment lives (or try to do it).

First of all you have to think how to collect and how to show data. Many options are available, starting from DIY, and finishing to online services. Many of them are available up to now, but one focused my attention: ThingSpeak.

ThingSpeak is a platform for IoT data collection and analysis, driven by Mathworks (yes, that Matworks that publish Matlab). Within certain limits, you can use it for free (see their statements here).

I then opened a channel and wanted to start publishing data. I had to google around a bit to find a way to publish data, just because the most of the work is done for Arduino and other platforms different from Udoo Neo. But basically publishing data is almost a web service connection exercise, so mixing some script (and having to learn some Python coding), let me to create this script:

import httplib, urllib

def getfcontents(filename):
   "retrieve file contents"
   with open(filename, 'r') as myfile:
      data = myfile.read().replace('\n', '')
   return data

temp_raw = getfcontents('/sys/class/i2c-dev/i2c-1/device/1-0060/iio:device0/in_temp_raw')
temp_scale  = getfcontents('/sys/class/i2c-dev/i2c-1/device/1-0060/iio:device0/in_temp_scale')
baro_raw   = getfcontents('/sys/class/i2c-dev/i2c-1/device/1-0060/iio:device0/in_pressure_raw')
baro_scale  = getfcontents('/sys/class/i2c-dev/i2c-1/device/1-0060/iio:device0/in_pressure_scale')

temperature = float(temp_raw) * float(temp_scale)
barometer = float(baro_raw) * float(baro_scale)

params = urllib.urlencode({'field1': temperature, 'field2': barometer,'key':'<strong><em>your_api_key_goes_here</em></strong>'})
headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded","Accept": "text/plain"}
conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("api.thingspeak.com:80")

try:
        conn.request("POST", "/update", params, headers)
        response = conn.getresponse()
        print response.status, response.reason
        data = response.read()
        print data
        conn.close()
except:
        print "connection failed"

On Udoo Neo, temperature can be read from an external device connected to I2C bus, known as “a brick”. For more information about hardware connection you’d better take a look to the official Udoo Neo brick documentation.

My script does the following:

1. reads from the I2C device the values for temperature and pressure (they are shadowed into four files on a virtual file system)
2. calculates the temperature and pressure absolute values
3. connects to ThingSpeak REST API service and post data

and that’s all. To invoke on a timely-based fashion my script, I simply put the invocation into the crontab file, with the following command:

crontab -e

wich will start your favorite editor, allowing to edit the crontab file. I chose to execute my script once per minute, to see what it happened, but I’ll probably switch the time to once every 5 or 10 minutes, just because these data are not suitable to change so fast. My crontab line so will look like this:

*/1 * * * * python /home/udooer/thing.py

just because my script is in /home/udooer/thing.py file.

Feel free to use the script and modify it; you will have to put your private write API key in the correct place (I put your_api_key_goes_here where you have to do it).

There is something more to do… Did you catch it? At the beginning I said I wanted to record humidity of my garage, but in the following I’ve always spoken about pressure. Why? Because the brick sensor provided is an NXP MPL3115A2, that is a barometer with a temperature sensor included. To measure humidity I need a DHT11-like sensor, but it has to be wired and this will require some more time. To check if all it’s working I’ll go with this setup, then I’ll add a DHT11 sensor later.

And again on the MPL3115A2, it’s actually unclear what is actually the pressure readout supposed to be. This device can output an absolute pressure value, but it can also express an elevation measure depending on its configuration.