piBot – bot for monitoring temperature
This is a long due project using a raspberry Pi to monitor the temperature of a cabin I’ve been building for a very long time. I’ve bought the hardware almost 4 years ago and only arrived to the point where I could use it.
Motivation
Beside the geek motivation the main practical motivation is to measure inside and outside temperature in order to estimate:
- degree of insulation and week points
- min temperature in order to calculate needed anti-freeze mix for heating pipes
- temperature monitoring for pump automation (TODO)
- min temperature in order to start some electric heating (TODO)
- accuracy of weather predictions for the location
Architecture
The architecture of the system is quite simple and has the following components:
-
- the raspberry PI, model B which uses several DS18B20 sensors to monitor temperature
- the piBot (this project) which is basicaly a main loop with sensors and output plugins
- the vpn client over 3G in order to ensure connectivity in the lack of a fixed ip
- the vpn server and db where data is stored
- the visualisation which uses Grafana with a pgsql backend
piBot
PiBot is a python main loop which has a plugin mechanism for sensors and outputs (check it on gitHub). Currently I implemented:
- sensor: ds18b20 which reads /sys/bus/w1/devices/%s/w1_slave data (sensor integration is present in the raspbian)
- sensor: /sys/class/thermal/*/temp temperature for CPU temperature
- output: csv plain output
- pgsql: postgresql output in grafana friendly format
Grafana output

piBot grafana output
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