Turn your Raspberry Pi into a network multimeter

By mvuilleu, in Measures and Tiny PC, april 26,2013.

Measuring devices which you can directly connect to the network are usually very expensive, more than 1'000 Euros. However, numerous applications, such as monitoring an experiment started on a napkin, could benefit from them if they were more affordable. We are going to show you therefore how to very easily transform a Raspberry Pi into a very flexible Ethernet multimeter, with the help of a simple Python script. A simple solution based on standard USB modules, demonstrated in a video.

Comparison of temperature sensors

By mvuilleu, in Measures, february 08,2013.

We often receive questions on the characteristics of our temperature sensors: their sampling rate, their accuracy, their adequacy for a particular scenario. We are going to give you a few hints to identify the sensor best suited for your needs.

Connect your sensors to the cloud

By mvuilleu, in Measures, december 18,2012.

The #1 application for most USB sensors is certainly to record the measures and draw them in a graph. We have already provided examples in previous blog posts on how to draw measure graphs in several programming languages, but so far you always had make a program of some kind to do this. Today, we show you how to leverage a public cloud-style service named Cosm (www.COSM.com) to graph your sensors without writing a single line of code. You will just need to download the latest and greatest version of our VirtualHub, and configure it to upload data to www.cosm.com. Follow the guide...

An USB optical telemeter

By mvuilleu, in Measures, november 11,2012.

While surfing on the Internet, we found a nice little sensor: an optical rangefinder built by Sharp. Robotic specialists know it well, it's the most well known sensor to detect obstacles. In our selection of products, we currently don't offer a rangefinder sensor (telemeter). As an example, we are going to show you today how you could interface analog sensors of this type thanks to a Yoctopuce module.

Cook and Hold with Raspberry Pi (video)

By Sébastien Rinsoz, in Measures and Tiny PC, october 01,2012.

When we geek try to cook a nice chunk of meat, the tricky part is the cooking itself. Instead of sitting idle while the meat cooks, we go read something on the iPad, code some stuff or even to talk with the guests rather than watching a meat in the oven. And at the end, the meat is often overcooked. But this is gonna change. Our new recipe, using a Yocto-Thermocouple and Raspberry Pi, solves the issue. The Raspberry Pi will monitor the meat temperature for us, and send an e-mail as soon as the ideal temperature is reached. And long life to the smartphones !