lulLABy

The lab monitoring platform that lets you rest easy.

This project is a work in progress, and is probably broken

Custom lab equipment monitor from the Dunn Lab.

This project is built around Particle Photon boards that have the following three tools for viewing the world:

• D0 is connected to a digital temperature probe. The probe is wired as follows: Red=3.3V from Photon, Black=Gnd, White= D0 with a 4.7K pullup resistor to 3.3V.

• D1 and D2 are hardwired to the alarm relay on the equipment. The relay common is connected to ground, the normally closed contact is connected to D1, and the normally open contact is connected to D2.

• TX and RX are connected to a RS232 converter board to monitor the status of instruments that have serial output (like -80C freezers). VCC on the converter board is wired to 3.3V from the Photon.

The intent is for each piece of equipment to have one photon, and for the code on all the photons to be the same. Each of the three sensors above is optional, and the monitor will function fine when only a subset of devices are attached.

Getting set up

Particle monitor boards

Getting the photon MAC address

Some institutions require that you register the MAC address of any headless device that you connect to the wireless network. To get the MAC address of a new Photon using an apple computer:

• Install the Particle.io command line interface as described at https://docs.particle.io/guide/getting-started/connect/photon/

• Plug the Photon into your computer via USB

• Put the Photon in listening mode

• Run ls /dev/cu.usb*

• Run screen /dev/cu.usbmodem1111 where cu.usb* is the path you got from the above command

• Type m to get the mac address

At Yale, you would then register the MAC address at https://regvm2.its.yale.edu, wait a few minutes for it to propagate, and then configure the Photon to connect to the yale wireless SSID.

Server

The server is run in a docker container, which can be run locally or on a cloud service like an Amazon EC2 instance.

Build the docker file in the docker/ directory of this repository as described in my Docker cheat sheet.

Then run it is follows:

docker run -d \
  -e PARTICLE_ACCESS_TOKEN='access_token' \
  -e SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL='slack_webhook_url' \
  image

Where:

• access_token is the particle access token, available from the particle console

• slack_webhook_url is the webhook url from the slack integration

• image is the id of the image you build

Running the monitor

References

This project draws on a variety of others, including:

• http://diotlabs.daraghbyrne.me/3-working-with-sensors/DS18B20/ temperature monitor

• https://community.particle.io/t/serial-tutorial/26946 RS232 interface