Excellarate encourages employees to learn and grow in order to be on top of new technologies. An Excellarate employee used his time between clients to develop an app to monitor temperature and humidity in an office over wifi.
trackr is an application that helps in measuring and monitoring the temperature and humidity of any location(s) remotely. The temperature is measured with the help of probes, and the collected readings are displayed to the users for analysis, via a web application.
trackr can be used to provide live monitoring of temperature / humidity of any premise remotely, which could help facility administrators in the following:
- Reducing cooling costs at spots which might be cooler than required
- Normalizing temperatures in premises, thus raising employee comfort level
- Keeping eye on crucial areas, such as server rooms, pantries, kitchen etc., for overheating and avoid potential hazard/damage
The probe and web application communicate wirelessly using Wi-Fi and WebSockets.
trackr comprises of two entities: Probe (hardware: main board and child module) and Web Application (software). The main board in the Probe is completely programmable and is fed with JavaScript (Node.Js) programs/ scripts. The main board is responsible for executing the scripts, managing its internals and communicating with add-on modules. The child module has a sensor for reading temperature and humidity.
The sensors can detect temperature in the range of 0 to 70 °C (32 to 160 °F) with ±1° accuracy and humidity in the range of 0% to 80% relative humidity.
The web application collects readings from individual Probes and has a user interface to display the recorded temperature and humidity readings.
Challenges & Solutions
It was a challenge to overcome the built-in WIFI reconnection feature, which was very unreliable. After much R&D, the solution was to disconnect the initial connection and reconnect WIFI programmatically via the script.
Official documentation of Tessel.io was inadequate, so it was difficult to comprehend information.
Creating a useful WIFI utility to monitor the in-house temperature can be used at company level, to improve employee satisfaction and reduce cooling costs.
Results
Trackr’s best feature is its real time monitoring of temperature for multiple locations, in any premise which is WIFI enabled. It has the ability to connect to multiple Probes (devices), which can be placed across multiple locations within a selected area, in a network for increased coverage wirelessly.
