Engineer & Coder
Engineer
Hey, I've been thinking about setting up a small autonomous monitoring system for our lab. It would use a temperature sensor and a microcontroller to trigger an alert if it goes beyond a threshold, and I want to tie that into a notification system that your code can listen to. Do you have any experience with that?
Coder
Sounds like a solid idea. I’ve built a few projects like that before – usually a cheap MCU like an ESP32, a DS18B20 or LM35 for temperature, and then a small server that listens for a webhook. You can push the data over MQTT or even HTTP POST to a Python listener that fires off an email or Slack message when the threshold’s crossed. Let me know what platform you’re using and I can sketch out the code for you.
Engineer
Great, I’m running the monitoring unit on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian. I’ll use a DS18B20 sensor on a 1‑Wire bus, connect it to the Pi’s GPIO, and write a small Python script that polls the sensor every minute. Once the reading exceeds the set threshold I want the script to send an HTTP POST to my central server’s /alert endpoint. The server will parse the payload and trigger an email. Let me know what library or framework you’d recommend for the Pi side, and I can start putting the code together.
Coder
I’d just use the built‑in w1‑therm kernel support and a tiny Python script. Enable the 1‑wire interface in raspi‑config, then in Python use the w1thermsensor package to read the DS18B20. For the POST just import requests and send a JSON payload. Something like:
```python
from w1thermsensor import W1ThermSensor
import requests, time
sensor = W1ThermSensor()
threshold = 30.0 # degrees C
url = 'https://your‑server/alert'
while True:
temp = sensor.get_temperature()
if temp > threshold:
payload = {'temp': temp, 'time': time.time()}
try:
requests.post(url, json=payload, timeout=5)
except requests.RequestException:
pass # maybe log the failure
time.sleep(60)
```
That’s it—no heavy frameworks needed, just the two libs. If you want more resilience you can add a small retry loop or log to a file. Let me know if you need the server side too.