Home rack environmental monitoring

F

feffrey

Gawd
Joined
Oct 26, 2010
Messages
585
My rack is going in an unfinished basement soon but I would like to put some sort of environmental monitoring system in. I would like to send email alerts based on temperature, humidity and water detection.
APC has their netbotz line which are neat but too expensive for me atm. Anything else out there that is not too expensive?
 
I have some basic environmental monitoring around my house, but want to add more. Using arduino and a custom application I've been working on and off. Will probably release to the public at some point.

I'm even monitoring mouse traps in my attic. :D

I just wrote a basic arduino program with command line interface to get the values of each port, then I have a python script on my environmental control server that keeps polling the values and writing them to a ram disk. (regular file could work but figured that's more efficient) Then my environmental monitoring app simply monitors the values of the text files. I also have another device for temperature that I had before which also outputs to text file. The monitoring app also monitors agents on the rest of my network for stuff like disk space, memory, services etc... any value that can be achieved with a shell command can be monitored with this system.

Look at getting a DIN rail with DIN terminal connectors to act as the "patch panel" for the sensors. Though if I was to do it over again I'd probably have it all in a separate panel on a wall instead of in my rack. Once my basement is finished I will be adding water sensors all over, and I also want to look at monitoring fire detectors so that's going to take up quite a lot more room so what I'll probably end up doing is getting an arduino Mega for that and some kind of panel with the DIN rail in it. Terminal strips could work too.

The nice thing with arduino is that there are quite a lot of sensors for it, and it works at a rather low logic level so it's actually pretty simple to make your own sensors or rig certain things. For example if you just want a high temp/low temp sensor just get two thermostats, one for AC one for heat, when they trip they can be set to trigger an alarm. Ex: you set the AC one at 25C and set the heat one at 20C. If the temp drops below 20, the heat thermostat will kick in, triggering an alarm. If it gets hotter than 25, the AC one will kick in. You can have this on a single digital pin. This is actually how we monitor temp in lot of our telco COs, but it uses another end device. Netguardian, MXP2, etc...
 
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