My goal was to attach temperature sensors and have the Pi report back the temperature to me.
So, I went out and bought the Vktech DS18b20 sensors and attached them to a GPIO port. Once, the sensors have been connected, you need to login and run the following 2 commands to have Linux setup and probe them:
sudo modprobe w1-gpio
sudo modprobe w1-therm
Now, once those commands are ran, the temperatures will show up in following files:
/sys/bus/w1/devices/w1_bus_master1/<serial id>/w1_slave
where <serial id> is the serial id of the sensor itself. An example of one of these files is:
4d 01 4b 46 7f ff 03 10 d8 : crc=d8 YES
4d 01 4b 46 7f ff 03 10 d8 t=20812
Now, in that file, the Celsius temperature is actually the last little bit, 20812 - it just needs to be divided by 1000 and you have your Celsius temperature of 20.8.
Great, it's now working. Linux is probing the sensor and reporting it to a file which I can read and see. It works, but not that practical. At this point I wanted to see if I could automate this process so I didn't have to manually read the file each time I want to know the temperature.
Meet pi-temperature, a Java library I wrote to solve this exact problem. It probes all attached sensors for me at a given interval (defaults to 1 min) and can report the temperatures of each sensor back to the user. It utilizes spring boot to startup a local Tomcat instance for a web server and has several REST urls attached:
/sensors/list
/alerts/list
/alerts/setOn/<name>
/alerts/setOff/<name>
/alerts/update/<name>
The /sensors/list is the primary endpoint which reads all of the sensors and reports back the temperatures in both Celsius and Fahrenheit. The /alerts endpoints are currently a work in progress and another post will be coming soon with their features.
Specific instructions on how to build, run, and more thorough instructions can be found on the pi-temperature project's README.
