Mike's Realm

I was running some cable to an area of the attic I have never been through and it was flipping hot, much hotter then the other areas.  So I went and ordered a bunch of 1-wire temperature sensors to install all over the attic so I can data log and see what areas are the hottest.  I made a base for a heatmap that I’ll write something to create hourly and decided to make a mock up, obviously this is just a mock up and it doesn’t show any sort of resolution but it gets the general idea across.–Powerpoint made a decent mockup image–if only the jpeg compression didn’t suck so hard.

Attic Heatmap Example

I just picked up this PE6650 off fleabay for $154.50!  Picked it up locally–it was 5min from my house so it was quite the steal if I do say so myself.  I’m prepping this for colo in a new data center down the street from where I work.

PE6650

C-19 Plug

20A Edison

Onto the specs!

• Quad 2.2ghz Xeons
• 16GB of ram
• Two Onboard Gigabit NICs
• 900W power consumption–Requires C19 power cords–those 1000W whips that plug into 20amp Edison outlets, this made it a pain to use at the house, my washing machine and my APC SmartUPS 3000 are the only outlets I have to plug this into, the hooking it upto the SmartUPS tripped the breaker about a dozen times until I load balanced equipment between the two UPSs in the rack

I have rails on order and a DRACIII card, thinking about getting four 3.0ghz xeons for it…I’ll update some photos when I get it colo’d.

Finally mounted up my newest bot in the garage, collecting data to see the environmental differences between inside the rack and outside…

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NetBotz WallBot 400

So far it seems to be just around 20 degrees Fahrenheit…thinking about using a bunch of 1-wire tempature sensors wired to create a 72″ long tempature monitor, with 1 sensor every 12″.  That should let me do cool things with monitoring the rack temperature almost per rack unit or something…

Well I finally got some Dallas Semiconductor 1-Wire Tempature Sensors in.  I quickly threw a bunch on the breadboard to see how accurate they are and stuffs, pretty nifty, 2 wires is all it takes, ignore the 3rd leg of the sensors it doesn’t do anything…

Breadboard + 1-Wire Temperature Sensors

I put white blocks in the picture because of the nonsense on the breadboard–it was just some toying of a segment display from awhile back…

I plan to use these sensors (along with many more) to build a weather station, and I’d like to place a few throughout the house to see the difference in tempature between the rooms.  Would be intresting to see the temp difference between the outside, attic and home on a graph.