Using Trendy to track temperature using a Raspberry Pi webserver

November 10, 2013

A good friend works at The Math Works, which is the great company that brings us Matlab and much more.  

He told us about an easy to use web-based tool called Trendy.  It is a simple to use method of collecting website data on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis.  We had to check it out!

Using a Raspberry Pi Model A, we created a webserver that tracks temperature using the DS18B20 temperature sensor.  

Steps to do this easy project:

• Install Apache2
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install apache2
• Configure your WiFi on the Pi unless using Ethernet on a Model B
• Setup your router to forward Port 80 to your Pi
• Proceed with caution, change your Pi default password and only forward Port 80 for HTTP
• Build a temperature sensor 
• Checkout Adafruit's tutorials for ideas
• We prefer the DS18B20 waterproof sensors, check out Adafruit's tutorial
• You can actually hook up several DS18B20's, which we have done...our Pi is monitoring indoor and outdoor temperature.  Each sensor has an address, the Adafruit tutorial explains this pretty well.
• Test out your webserver and modify your Python code to write the temperature to a file, say, temp.html every few minutes
• Create an account on Trendy and point it at your Pi
• This is easier than it sounds!  To find numbers, Trendy just looks for whatever text you specify and the next number.  So in our case, there was text in the HTML file saying "Shop temperature" and "Outdoor Temperature" and the following number was the number that Trendy tracks

Click here to see our indoor and outdoor temperature trends!

 

 

 

Stay tuned for more details and other interesting data tracking!

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