‘Vehicle Environment Monitor’ for Remotely Monitoring Vehicular Cabin Temperature
Thanks to forums user keyl for sending this in! While the inspiration behind the project was to monitor the internal temperature of a vehicle while a pet stays in the car and the owner runs errands, the project has much greater applications and could be easily modified from the GitHub repo with all the steps and code. Read the entire backstory here for more details.
This is Max, a 6 year old Golden Retriever that I adopted when he was a little puppy. He and I both love outdoors and we have such a close binding that he’d beg me to take him whenever I’m going out. I try to take him to wherever I go as much as possible – going on a hike, paddle boarding on the water, shopping in the mall, etc. But the reality is, in an area as pet friendly as Seattle, there’re a lot of places that don’t welcome dogs, mostly the restaurants and the grocery stores.
If we go out for a day in urban area, he most likely will be staying in the car during lunch time. When it comes to pet safety, I’m a little paranoid as most pet owner would be. When leaving him in the car, I make sure to park in the shade, have the sunroof open, wind the windows down, etc. But no matter how much I do, when I sit in the restaurants I always worry about the temperature in the car.
Until one day I decided to do something about it – making a in-car, wireless real-time temperature monitor, which transmits periodic readings to the receiver that I carry with me. This gives me a piece of mind knowing that my pup is staying safely and comfortably in the car!
Adafruit Feather 32u4 Basic Proto: At the Feather 32u4’s heart is at ATmega32u4 clocked at 8 MHz and at 3.3V logic, a chip setup we’ve had tons of experience with as it’s the same as the Flora. This chip has 32K of flash and 2K of RAM, with built in USB so not only does it have a USB-to-Serial program & debug capability built in with no need for an FTDI-like chip, it can also act like a mouse, keyboard, USB MIDI device, etc. This chip is well supported in the Arduino IDE and can run just about every sensor/library out there. Read more.
Adafruit LoRa Radio FeatherWing – RFM95W 900 MHz: Add short-hop wireless to your Feather with these Radio Featherwings. These add-ons for any Feather board will let you integrate packetized radio (with the RFM69 radio) or LoRa radio (with the RFM9x’s). These radios are good options for kilometer-range radio, and paired with one of our WiFi, cellular or Bluetooth Feathers, will let you bridge from 433/900 MHz to the Internet or your mobile device. Read more.
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