This evening Sibi and I got a shelf installed under the window of our tortoise shed, and I set up a remote temperature and humidity monitoring solution that was built based on the weather station project up on the homepage of windowsondevices.com. I modified the sample code extensively, and it sends temperature and humidity readings out to the cloud every 15 minutes. I've got software running at home that pulls the telemetry down from the cloud, and I'm currently working on making it send SMS alerts if the temperature goes out of bounds (80 - 90 degrees for our Sulcatas).
The whole setup is illustrated in the photo below. I'm using an inexpensive wifi extender for networking, which is a great solution to work around the limited support for wifi dongles on Raspberry Pi / Windows 10 core IoT. In case you're wondering why it's installed by the window, it's to ensure that signal can get out the window to the router in the house. After all, it's a metal shed, so the Faraday cage effect could be a problem otherwise.
In case you're a software developer and don't mind building something yourself (it does require soldering), I'd highly recommend this solution. It was a lot of fun to build and a great learning experience. Most important, we can now rest assured that our torts are comfy cozy in their insulated shed.
The whole setup is illustrated in the photo below. I'm using an inexpensive wifi extender for networking, which is a great solution to work around the limited support for wifi dongles on Raspberry Pi / Windows 10 core IoT. In case you're wondering why it's installed by the window, it's to ensure that signal can get out the window to the router in the house. After all, it's a metal shed, so the Faraday cage effect could be a problem otherwise.
In case you're a software developer and don't mind building something yourself (it does require soldering), I'd highly recommend this solution. It was a lot of fun to build and a great learning experience. Most important, we can now rest assured that our torts are comfy cozy in their insulated shed.