Saturday, January 02, 2016

Bearded Dragons: Geek Out!


This is complete overkill, but it's fun, so I'll do it anyways. I came across www.raspiviv.com, a Web site that shows how to set up humidity and temperature monitoring for a vivarium, along with controlling lights or misters. The author, Nathan Bensing, is into tropical frogs, but the concepts work just as well for a Bearded Dragon terrarium. A Raspberry Pi was quickly organized, Nathan supplied sensors and relay boards, and today -- between working on the terrarium with Pascal -- I went through the tutorial to start setting things up.


Along the way I routed an Ethernet drop into Pascal's bedroom and hooked up the Raspberry Pi. The software install is now done and we're going to try and test the sensors tomorrow.


As an aside ... I knew the Raspberry Pi is tiny, and slow. I wouldn't want to use it as a desktop system regularly, but it's definitely functional, and perfectly fine to run headless. I could have gone the Arduino route as well, but a fully functional Linux felt more natural to me, so there.

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