Data Center Temperature Monitor

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This project is a relatively low cost temperature monitoring network for our computer room. The cost was from less than half to a fiftieth of similar systems we could have purchased, and the sensors took two afternoons to assemble and install.

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Gallery of all images


Contents

Sensors

Each 1-wire temperature sensor is in a small one port box attached to an RJ-45 receptacle, allowing the temperature sensors to be chained together. We got 10' patch cables and cut them in half to avoid having to crimp too many cables. The boxes and cables are more expensive than the sensors.

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Controller

The controller is an HA7Net 1-Wire controller from Embedded Data Systems

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Installation

Sensors

We strung the sensors along the ladder tray in the computer room.

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Controller

We bussed together the ports of a junk patch panel a vendor had given to us, patched the sensor buses and controller to it and put it all into the network rack.

Software

A script reads the temperatures from the HA7Net at 10 minute intervals (using wget, sed, awk) and writes them to a mySQL database. A php script generates SVG images of the temperature maps (including interpolation) and JavaScript provides animation and a slider either choose a static time to display or to choose the endpoints of the animation loop.

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