Tag Archives: raspberry pi

Cloud-native ramblings: Adding Redis

Many people think I am “just” building a paludarium… But they don’t see the complex world of automation behind it. In fact, there is a full blown application running the paludarium, build in a limited-but-functional cloud-native architecture.

This architecture is limited… Because you can have multiple instances of your microservices… But in the end there is only one piece of hardware to control. A single relais, a single led light, a single pump, a single valve and a single level sensor. And this is a problem; what if multiple microservices all talk to the one hardware platform at the same time? I needed a way to put a lock on who can send commands, and Redis came to the rescue.

The limitations of having “one hardware”

What if you have all kinds of microservices and functions that all want to talk to a single hardware platform? There are several functions and services that want to talk to the hardware:

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Work in Progress: Getting the RaspBerry Pi to talk to the Canopy

In my previous post I managed to program the chips in the Canopy. Now I can adjust the code inside the Canopy where needed. Next thing to get working is to allow the Raspberry Pi to talk to the chips inside the Canopy.

Raspberry Pi, Atmel AVR and serial communications

Luckily the Raspberry Pi has a serial port, because the AVR controllers I used have one too, and they use this serial port to get commands from whoever is controlling the bus… Which should be the Raspberry Pi.

Problem is that the Raspberry Pi does not have a true RS232 serial port: the signals are there (on the GPIO headers), but they have 0-3.3V levels Read more »

Raspberry Pi – Fetching live meteorologic data from the web!

In version 1.0 of the paludarium, I had fetched an entire year of data, and I put that into the controlling software. That software in turn simulated that year of weather over and over again. But wouldn’t it be the coolest thing if I managed to pull the meteorologic data live from the web? With the Raspberry Pi I figured it should be possible. Todays goal was to fetch live meteorologic data from the La Selva biological station in Costa Rica. After some fighting with basic Python, I managed to get it going!

Where the data is

The data is actually freely available here: http://www.ots.ac.cr/meteoro/default.php?pestacion=2.

La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica - Home of the meteo station who's data I'll be using!

La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica – Home of the meteo station who’s data I’ll be using!

I found out you can build a URL that will fetch half-hour data for one entire day. As an example: Read more »

The first two hours playing with Raspberry Pi

Unbelievable what can be accomplished in only two hours. Today I finally unpacked my Raspberry Pi and started to play with it. Pretty soon I had it up and running… This is going to work out just fine 🙂

The Raspberry Pi. This will be the new brains behind the Paludarium v2.0!

The Raspberry Pi. This will be the new brains behind the Paludarium v2.0!



Getting the Raspberry Pi to boot

I just typed up the downloads page at raspberry.org, found the tool to Read more »