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Temperature Monitoring with Raspberry Pi

FIXME add grafana

FIXME add overview of all important files and services

FIXME Write down account names and passwords somewhere

The monitoring setup was developed by Etiénne Wodey. It is explained in this talk by him. The main aspects on how to set it up are documented in this email.

Short version: the raspberry pi reads out temperature sensors connected via one-wire bus, sends the data via LAN to an InfluxDB database located on the Magnesium Server. There the temperatures are stored and can be visualized in the browser using Grafana, also running on the magnesium server. It can be accessed here

Magnesium Server

hostname thingol, runs Debian 9

Raspbery Pi

Basic principle

rasptemp1.pdf

Hardware setup

FIXME pictures and schematics

Installing Raspbian

Enabling One-Wire-Bus

Edit /boot/config.txt: 

sudo nano /boot/config.txt
and add the line 
dtoverlay=w1-gpio

Edit /etc/modules: 

sudo nano /etc/modules
and add the lines 
w1-gpio
w1-therm

Reboot the System: 

sudo reboot

There should be folders w1_bus_master<N> in /sys/devices: 

ls -l /sys/devices/

Check if there are devices connected: 

ls -l /sys/devices/w1_bus_master1/
Replace w1_bus_master_1 with any of the folders listed previously.

There should be folders named something like 3b-0000001760f8/. These are the devices connected. Make sure there is a file named w1_slave for every device connected. This file is used to read from and write to the connected devices.

In case the folders or the files don't exist, make sure your devices are connected correctly, the steps above were done and/or reboot the system.

collectd

https://collectd.org/index.shtml

collectd is run on the raspberry pi to read out the temperature sensors and send the messages to the influxdb database located on another server.

install collectd: 

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install collectd

check the status of the daemon: 

sudo systemctl status collectd

if the status is running, stop the daemon: 

sudo systemctl stop collectd

to view all systemlog messages by collectd: 

journalctl -u collectd -b

The collectd configuration file is located at /etc/collectd/collectd.conf. Edit it: 

sudo nano /etc/collectd/collectd.conf
Copy the contents of this file into there.

Make sure to adjust the name of the server in the network plugin section to your needs.

Python Plugin

The temperature sensors are read out by a python module using the python plugin for collectd. Place the script w1_therm_monitor.py in the folder /home/pi/ or change the ModulePath option for the python plugin in /etc/collectd/collectd.conf if you want to place it in another folder.

The collectd module reads w1_master_slaves, takes all the serial numbers starting with 28 (DS18B20 family) or 3b (MAX31850 family) and reads the corresponding slave files (i.e. the temperatures).

Starting collectd

Start the collectd service using: 

sudo systemctl start collectd

Check if it runs without errors by reading 

sudo systemctl status collectd
or checking 
journalctl -u collectd -b

The system automatically gets new slaves but doesn't support removing slaves while running

InfluxDB

https://www.influxdata.com/time-series-platform/influxdb/

Setup

set up as decribed in getting started section

Creating the database

Create a database in which you later wish to store the temperatures measured, for now we call it collectd_test.

In influxDB execute: 

CREATE DATABASE collectd_test

Check if it was created properly using: 

USE collectd_test

Exit using 

EXIT

Configuring for collectd

Stop the influxdb server by running: 

sudo systemctl stop influxd

The configuration file is /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf. The documentation can be found here: https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.6/administration/config/

The config file we use is this.

The interesting part is: 

[[collectd]]
  enabled = true
  bind-address = ":25826"
  database = "collectd_test"
  security-level = "none"

This enables the collectd plugin for influx and writes to the database we specify without any privileges required.

adjust the configuration file to be the same as above.

types.db

The collectd plugin for influx requires a types.db document. Copy this from /usr/share/collectd/ on the raspberry pi to /usr/local/share/collectd/ on the server running influxDB.

Restarting the server

Start the server by typing 

influxd
and leave the terminal open. If there are any errors, these should be displayed now.

To check if there are values being written into the database, use another terminal or ssh to log into influx: 

influx
and check for values in the database: 
USE collectd_test
SHOW SERIES

If something is displayed, try listing those values by using 

SELECT * FROM <name of the time series>

Grafana

The Grafana Server was pretty much set up as described in this