Debbie, the Data Recorder

Looks like I'm going to write some C for the data recorder functions that I'm putting on Debbie.

The idea is to "ping" the radio transceivers I'll be designing into the data gadgets I wrote about earlier. First ping wakes up the remote radio and the MSP430 8 bit micro attached to it. A second ping will command the gadget to send the readings it has and then it will go back to sleep. Debbie goes on to ping the next radio equipped gadget and the cycle continues. Probably only have to run the cycle once a minute or so.

Turns out the TI MSP430 family is extremely well integrated with the TI radios I was looking at earlier. These TI radios are one chip transceivers operating in the 2.4 personal communications band. The transmit power will be in the 10 to 20 milliwatt range so the gadgets will operate on extremely low current. There is also considerably much more support for the MSP430 family than for the Zilog family of 8 bit micros.

The program to operate the pinger will be fairly simple and will likely spend most of its time just counting seconds to the next bunch of pings. Data will be stored in a flat text file. Date and time stamps will be added to the data readings. Converting the data to ASCII will allow me to do the data analysis with Star/Open Office Calc spreadsheets.

Next trick will be to run a second program to read the file and display the data on a web page served up by Debbie's Apache2 server. This would allow me to look in now and then during the day when I'm running experiments on my alt-power projects or just read the weather at home. Its not unusual to have the sky at work be cloud free and the house to be under a major storm cell, or vice versa. Weather info will also be stored into the data file since wind and solar radiation are the means of generating the power I'm interested in collecting.

I have an extreme adversion to opening up home systems to the Internet and serving up web pages or other Internet services. Although I've been operating in and around the Internet from its beginning I don't claim to be an net security expert or an expert system cracker. When it comes to network security, I believe a bit of paranoia is appropriate! I'll be using DDNS for Debbie's web pages only when I'm running my experiments and leave her closed off from the Internet otherwise.