The Solution: Live (well, so long as I have the arduino dedicated to the purpose) view of the current temperature in my home office.

The Technology: This project got my feet wet in the world of Python scripting. There’s a SerialPy class that monitors the USB port on my desktop. The Arduino passes the current temperature from a sensor into the serial bus. The Python script pushed the temperature and date to a web service running that updated a MySQL database. Finally, a PHP script pulled the most recent update and displayed it to the world.

This was more of a proof of concept into finding a way to store the data from the Arduino. Onboard storage is tight and working with external storage on the Arduino gets messy. I like the idea of using a web-based application to store and hopefully control the Arduino which would allow me to track temperature (brewing and fermentation) over a period of time, store procedures to be loaded on demand, etc. I have some pCharts I started tinkering with to get the temp data plotted.