[AG-DEV] Using AG venues to monitor remote equipment

Christoph Willing c.willing at uq.edu.au
Tue Jan 6 19:05:50 CST 2009


I just had 2 weeks holiday a long way away from UQVislab. During this  
time there was an air conditioning failure in the building hosting the  
lab and I was emailed about a possible impact on our machine room. How  
could I determine whether anything needed attention? Although all the  
expected services seemed to be running OK, perhaps the machine room  
temperature was slowly increasing to some critical level?

Well, it just happens that a long time ago I set up a temperature  
sensing system which, every few seconds, uploads the current machine  
room temperature(s) into an AG venue as a Shared Application. All I  
had to do was to enter that venue and join the Shared Application to  
see a visual representation of the temperature sensors and see that  
the temperatures were all normal.

In fact it was a little messier than that - the temperature sender had  
stopped so I had to ssh in and restart it. Also, the existing shared  
app package needed some updating to run with the latest wxPython that  
was on my laptop. Nevertheless, it was pretty easy to sort out and a  
relief to see that everything was OK.


Anyway, the real point of all this is to remind everyone what a great  
resource the AG toolkit is and how there's so much more we can do with  
it than just videoconferencing. The way I used it above is just an  
example - the data could be anything you like. If you need to keep the  
data private, you can set up a venue so that only those with the right  
credentials can enter and view the data. There are lots of  
possibilities - so get coding!


There are some details about the temperature monitoring project at:
     http://www.vislab.uq.edu.au/research/accessgrid/software/instruments/

That page includes a download of the client shared application &  
instructions on monitoring our machine room temperature for us :)


chris



Christoph Willing                       +61 7 3365 8316
QCIF Access Grid Manager
University of Queensland




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