Disaster data logging

[mellifera]

I know I'm new round here, but a little bit of sympathy would be nice...

It was nice and sunny down here in South Gloucestershire yesterday so I was looking forward to returning home and checking out how the old panels had been getting on heating up my tank. On crawling up into the attic to plug in my memory stick and copy off the results, I found my old Win98 computer hung up solid. The LogTemp screen had stopped at exactly 3am in the morning. On re-booting it now only beeps 4 times (BIOS error message?) and nothing else. That seems to be the end of my data logging exploits for now.

As a matter of interest, what to folks use round here to log and store the data (as opposed to sensors to gather)? Using an old spare PC was cheap in the short term, but my power meter was showing 45W so perhaps not the best long term solution.

At least I've Sunday's data to keep me going...

Cheers, Mike.

[wyleu]

I have a dead debian based machine in our loft that can't boot pass a kernel fault, which did a similar job. It would appear that PC's in attics are beginning to not look like a long term solution, even for those of us that would claim that the large power consumption can be justified by the R&D we are doing on behalf of the renewable community... 

[Paulh_Boats]

mellifera,

Your system timer has failed: (not you, the pc  )

http://www.sysopt.com/tutorials/article.php/3552501

Maybe the battery for the timer clock has failed. It might be worth checking the lithium battery on the motherboard. There is another timer chip but I think that runs off the power supply, so remove and reconnect the board power plugs in case they have corroded in the loft atmosphere.

cheers
Paul

[daftlad]

This is a post off another thread, it looked very interesting because it uses so little power, the other device i have seen talked about is a "slug"

Look into the Atmel NGW100 (Network Gateway). It's a low power (1-2 watts!) 32 bit processor capable of running linux or windows CE / Mobile. It has two Ethernet ports, USB Host and Device, Numerous Serial Busses, SD & MMC Flash Card support, and a whole bunch of digital input / output, and much more. This is a ready made development kit intended to showcase the processor, so no soldering needed. You can pick up a lot of the I/O from nice big 0.1" headers.


http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=4102

It is an ideal home control platform - you can probably port some existing linux projects onto the AVR32 processor too. It would also make a factastic route / firewall for your internet needs, so saving some power there too.

I'm sure that there are already one wire drivers for linux, so you should be off to a good start. Link this to a little PHP script and use the Lighttpd web server, you can make a very nice control and logging system.

All of the development tools are linux based, open source, and therefore free!  Grin The NGW100 itself costs around £64.61 from Digikey. Other suppliers are available - see the distributor pages on Atmel's website.

For extra information whck out the factastic http://www.avrfreaks.net. This is a very popular website dedicated to the Atmel AVR processor range, covering both 8 bit and 32 bit varients, tools, tips, trick etc...

Tim

I just cut and pasted it, i am not sure how to do the quote thing from thread to thread
let us know how you get on if you decide to go down this route or any other route for that matter.
laters

[Paulh_Boats]

Do any of those micro-boards run Windows XP? - life is too short to mess around configuring linux and I want to run LogTemp.

[mellifera]

Paul,

Not sure about the micro-boards mentioned above, but a quick google found the fit-PC, www.fit-pc.co.uk

Certainly not cheap, the diskless one is £205, the XP HDD version is £259, but they're only 10x11x3cm, consume ~5W, fanless, USB ports, WiFi, and you can run XP on them and presumably LogTemp.

Cheers, Mike.

PS: I don't have any affiliation with fit-PC or anything like that.

[wdh]

mellifera,

Your system timer has failed: (not you, the pc  )

http://www.sysopt.com/tutorials/article.php/3552501

Maybe the battery for the timer clock has failed. It might be worth checking the lithium battery on the motherboard. There is another timer chip but I think that runs off the power supply, so remove and reconnect the board power plugs in case they have corroded in the loft atmosphere.

cheers
Paul

Yes.
And No. 

Yes, that's the AMI bios power-on-self-test indication of a 'system timer' failure.

But no, it doesn't mean that there's a problem with the battery-backed "real time" clock/calendar chip - the RTC.

Its actually a matter of timing signals used around the innards of the computer.

The unusual system timer frequency is a holdover from the original IBM PC, for compatibility reasons. The IBM designers needed several timing references in the PC system, including the CPU clock, the time-of-day timer, and the TV color burst reference for the early CGA Color Graphics Adapter. Of these, only the color burst frequency had an absolute requirement for a fixed value, to maintain compatibilty with standard color television signals if a standard TV was used as a monitor. So the PC ended up with a master oscillator running at 14.31818 MHz, which the CGA divided by 4 to get the standard color burst frequency of 3.579545 MHz. The master oscillator was divided by 3 to get the 4.77 MHz CPU clock (which only had to be less than the 5 MHz limit of the early 8088 chips), and further divided by 4 again for the 1.19318 MHz system timer. The system timer counts up 65536 ticks of this input to generate an interrupt every 54.925 msec, and 65536 of those interrupts to give an hour of 3599.59 seconds... Hmmmm.

Anyway - it almost certainly means a not-economically-repairable failure on the motherboard.


Regarding a low-wattage XP machine, it might be worth seeking out a slow old laptop - specifically of a type originally designed for extended battery run-time, NOT a "desktop replacement" type of laptop. Something that doesn't even get warm. Maybe something with a Celeron M processor???
UNDER clocking might be another way of reducing the power consumption ...

Another would be replacing the hard drive with a small (512mb ?) CompactFlash card. (That would have been a big disk when XP appeared!) BTW, the CF to old laptop (44 pin IDE) adaptor is only about £4 - eBay from Hong Kong.

[stephend]

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=43

Small, low power and will run windows.

[wdh]

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=43

Small, low power and will run windows.

Running cool enough not to need a fan would be a good "low wattage" indication, wouldn't it?    

[rt29781]

Hi wdh 512 mb will not run XP.  I have XP on a 5gb Dell and on first install all was less than 2gb now it fights for the last drop of the 5gb and it is just a print server, no office no nowt..  Unless you do a custom install 5 gb is the minimum for XP but thats ok for a 8 gb USB key....  Win 2K is much more economical and will run on 2 gb and NT even less but maybe a bit too old for drivers now....

[Paulh_Boats]

mellifera,

Check all the IC sockets. Standard procedure is to wiggle all the chips out a bit then push back in to scrape off any corrosion. Also check the crystals are fitted ok. Also dead ISA boards might be pulling down the clock lines, so systematically remove optional bits and keep rebooting.

If you have a multimeter check that the power supply gives -12, -5, +5, +12 volts, Google for the power socket pin-out.

list,
Thanks for all the board links, a bit pricey so I'll stick with my old Compaq laptop. 24 Watts but I don't need it to run forever:
http://www.millibee.com/logtemp/tank.htm

cheers
Paul

[StBarnabas]

Mellifera
these fit PCs look really nice dome with XP and 3 USB 1 serial. Seems to be no keyboard, mouse or display. 5W however is very tempting and the size!
StB

[wdh]

Hi wdh 512 mb will not run XP.  I have XP on a 5gb Dell and on first install all was less than 2gb now it fights for the last drop of the 5gb and it is just a print server, no office no nowt..  Unless you do a custom install 5 gb is the minimum for XP but thats ok for a 8 gb USB key....  Win 2K is much more economical and will run on 2 gb and NT even less but maybe a bit too old for drivers now....

Well, if ever there was a case for doing a custom install, a minimised datalogger sounds like it! No need for printing, language support, apps, multimedia, fancy video drivers, etc, etc ...
My suggestion was to use a small (cheap - free?) CF card as an internal drive in an old, slow, low wattage laptop.
I may have been optimistic about how much baggage you could lose from modern XP...  
However you can now buy a 4gb CF card new from Amazon for under a tenner - so if XP really has become so bloated that it cannot be made to fit on something smaller and about to be discarded, then so be it, a tenner it would be.

The point about CF is that it substitutes for the power drain of the internal drive, without upsetting anything. Its internal, so less vulnerable.
Oddly, its now usually slightly more expensive than usb-stick-flash.
However, maybe importantly, it allows you to use a really old machine that doesn't even have usb-boot capability, or usb2.
OK CF isn't really designed for live disk use, (any more or less than the flash in the usb sticks is) but it works fine for light duty applications ...

And incidentally, for those with an antique but low-ish wattage desktop machine, there are similar CF to desktop (40-pin) IDE + 4-pin power adaptors.



In terms of low budget and recycling, it should take only an hour or so of your time (but VERY little money) to perform a 'heart transplant' and put a replacement antique motherboard into the broken system. And one could take the opportunity of stripping out whatever wasn't strictly needed - floppy, cd/dvd, graphics card (if it has 'onboard' video, you are going to be powering it, so it would make sense to use it rather than an additional and bigger heatsink/fan cooled chip, on a card of some sort).

[rt29781]

Hi wdh, I like the CF to IDE adapter, I found them on ebay for £4.45
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Compact-Flash-IDE-Adapter-For-Laptop-2.5-Linux-CF-UK_W0QQitemZ130286937465QQcmdZViewItemQQimsxZ20090210?IMSfp=TL090210172001r20758
Has anyone used these adapters for XP or Win2k or Ubuntu?

[wdh]

I've encountered them mostly as disk drive substitutes in iPod-like devices. (The old iPod mini takes a CF card without any adaptor.)
They give LOTS more run time from the same battery - in a mini, like double the runtime - ie they draw much less power, even than a 1.8" disk.

I do recall hearing of people successfully using the things (a while ago) in Mac laptops - then having parallel ATA/IDE. But in those days CF cards in practical sizes were heinously expensive, so it was mentally filed under "interesting, but..."  !!
Again, it might relate to speeds in those days, but my recall is that the experience was fast reading, not-fast writing, but battery-friendly and spookily totally silent.
The thing just 'looks' like a disk. My guess is that plenty RAM (to minimise swapping) would be good for performance, and probably longevity.

BTW, just looked on eBay again myself, and there are SATA/CF adaptors too ...

Incidentally, such a 'no-moving-parts' "disk drive" should improve ruggedness, though I wouldn't advise drop-testing. The data should be fine, but the rest of the machine might not be!