In this assignment, data travels from the sensor to the microchip to the computer to the server to a text file. Very exciting! Setting up the PHP and text files was pretty straightforward. Doing the whole “chmod” thing took a little while because I’m not quite familiar with terminal commands. For the pic/Processing setup, I started out with a trying a simple call & response just to make sure that everything was working. I then moved on to sending from Processing to the network. All code came from Tom’s Network Datalogging Suite.
The intial success that I had in the lab with a potentiometer was very excited. I then took the setup home and used a photocell measure the sunrise Sunday morning. I set it up to take readings every 30 seconds and left it running for a couple hours. I was pleased with the results.
The only real problem I ran into was a discrepancy in time:
This turned out to be an issue with the PHP code (“M” vs. “m”). I plan to redo the photocell thing so I can have readings with proper time stamps.
