Remote Monitoring Solution

[MerTech_Wes]

I came across this on the net, I think it was a link from another WISP forum... anyways, wondering if the price is right? or could something like this be put together for Star-OS users at a better price..

See: http://rms.nethop.net/

[lonnie]

We are not considering those features. The specs look pretty good.

[MerTech_Wes]

I wasn't suggesting that the features be integrated into Star-OS.. but rather if any users of this forum have the know-how to build something like this....

[georgew]

I build stuff like this from time to time. Now none of the modular systems I have used were ethernet based, I have one of the linux-on-a-stick devices I had planned to build something with, but I ended up doing something simpler so I never used it.

I've been planning on doing a new search for some modular DA/A-D prototyping system that was ethernet based, but I've been too busy.

My main computer room power is monitored with op-amps calibrated to various voltage levels, feeding the inputs of one of the APC environment monitors... It's a littlee ethernet box that has a web page, and will send email to my cellphone when any events occur. The box monitors two temprature sensors, a smoke detector sensor, and three inputs from my battery monitor.

Now I used to make da/ad boards for PC's. Some were for a particular purpose, like a modem, others were more generic in nature. I stopped doing this work before the PCI bus became popular, just to put a date on my experience. I have built small one-off devices since then, but nothing too fancy. The most complex thing I have built recently was a circuit to start a diesel generator. It used a wall-wart to generate a signal when city power was good, upon a 30 second loss of power it would put the genertor through a starting cycle. The sarting cycle consists of 50 seconds of glow plug followed by 30 seconds of cranking. Cranking is stopped if I see 80 volts or more from the generator. After AC power comes back, the generator is turned off 30 seconds after the load is removed from it.

At $400, the board you found is very pricy. I would shop around before I spent the dollars on it. It looks really good, and has some good features, so it's hard to beat... but I would have included a few more features in the software, like thresholds, events, triggers, actions and scripting.

But I bet you can find a more modular system that has a lower entry price, and fewer functions built into the base device. The $400 is not a bad price for what you get, but most people don't need 8 volt meters... If you had the flexability to use the analog inputs for other things, like temprature sensors, current pickup coils, etc. it might be more generic in it's usefulness... But it looks like those things are possible if you can affort to pay for custom work...

Other things you might use to do this include the basic stamp, a little microcontroller you can program in basic, and at http://www.parallaxinc.com/detail.asp?product_id=30005 there is a web server/ethernet interface kit for it. Now this is going to be a do-it-yourself sort of kit, but with email and web servers built in, and the ability to integrate into large complex systems, this has more flexable capabilities... but less of the work is already done for you. With basic stamp controllers costing $29 to $59 each, and the chips for OEMs to make their own circuits are available as well, it can be less expensive... or much more expensive.

So if you want to build your own solution, you could spend less than the $400. Spending the $400 would save a lot of time, if you can live with the features it has. Other devices are out there that are modular and might do a lot more of what you want...

Here is something similar for $270 http://www.dcf.sk/microweb/index.html, another user on the forum is using this with some degree of success.

Check out :
http://www.javika.com
http://www.akcpinc.net
http://www.microdaq.com
http://www.inotek.com
http://www.dataprobe.com

[tim]

Check out the tini board on www.ibutton.com/TINI

It is $49.95 in units of one, and only draws 1 watt (approx).

It supports all the 1 wire appliances of the ubicom and comes with everything the ubicom & parallaxinc has.

I've been experimenting with these for the last couple of years and although not particularly fast they seem to have the best price/functionality I've seen to date.

I'm planning to use this in sites where power is an issue (remote solar/wind powered).

[georgew]

Yeah, that's a Dallas semiconductor product... Dallas makes an array of interesting modules.

I just read through part of the http://www.ibutton.com/TINI/tinispec.pdf, and I'm impressed!

Now while I'm a natural programer, I avoid programming. But at the same time I do tons of scripting nearly every day. I can do things with scripts that can impress a real programmer, but it's not real programming... So tell me this, Tim, how much work is it to program the tini in java? As far as I can tell, this is real programming, but it is supposed to be very high-level. Can a script hack like myself get up to speed on writing "quick and dirty" apps in a few minutes, or should I expect to have to master Java first?

I would actually rather have a little unix machine... as weird as this is, I am at home with the unix command line and unix scripting.

Scripting is the preferred programming method of the engineer with a short attention span. I write my scripts one line at a time, and debugging is just a matter of running each line of code by hand. You get instant satisfaction, and the project is finished in seconds. Phrases like "class library" and "object oriented" send my mind spinning with visions of mind-numbing layers of complex code to do the most simple thing.

So, tell me I'm wrong... Please tell me that tini developers don't have to become oo gurus.

The basic stamp is very limited, but the programming resembled scripts more than "real code".

How many lines of code does it take to send a "hello world" to a user's computer screen from a tini platform?

[tim]

George to use the Tini you have to be familiar with Java.

This is a blessing and a curse, and the answers to your questions are more about which programming religion you come from.

If by scripting you mean perl or php scripting, Java is much easier/cleaner language to use, but its benefits do not really become apparent until you are are doing something fairly complex. So for large problems I'd use a structured language like java, for quick simple jobs I'd stick with a scripting language you are most comfortable with.

The tini java implementation is fairly easy to work with there are stacks of examples and applications in source code form, so you can write a hello world program very quickly indeed.

What attracts me most to tini is its price and the sort of products it can be used to create.

[georgew]

Yeah, well I read more of the PDF, and it is indeed unix-like enough to where I will feel reasonably at home from the start. The slush program, and the use of telnet and ftp... It even has "ls -l" and you can backgound tasks with a "&".

I feel at home already.

Yes, the java looks l a little c-like... But with a simple web server being 15 lines of code, my hello-world, complete with logging... the whole web server takes less code than a typical httpd.conf file. With most of the work being already done with plentiful class files, it's not quite scripting... but the structure isn't so painful that I want to run away.

[tim]

java is a beautiful language and it was designed that way. the complexity lies in the richness and extensibility of the class files. So yes you can do hello world very easily but Javas value is in developing reusable components.

I spent the frst 15 years of my career programming and teaching C and earned a very good living at it. However IMHO java is more than just a language it is a completely different way of constructing complex systems, C in comparison is an idiosyncratic low level laguage that is very expensive to use.

If you are serious about investing effort in Java, the book to read is Design Patterns, also known as the Gang of Four book the coding examples are in C++ (that does not matter), but this is the book you should read if you want understand how to use Java, or any OO language for that matter.

Now all we have to do is persuade Tony & Lonnie to ship a jre with star-os<g>.