Homework Board and a fish tank

stx2006

I have a homework board and I was wanting to see if it I could hook up Temp, PH, and I few other senors to it and have it email me the results every morning via GSM? If so how would I go about doing the programming for it?

Mike Green

First of all, you have to find sensors that will work easily with the HomeWork Board. They should be 5V compatible and communicate via serial or SPI. If you plan to use a simple temperature probe, what kind is it? A DS1620 is very easy to interface to a Stamp and there are plenty of coding examples. You'll need to waterproof it, but some silicone sealant and a test tube or plastic tube can be used.

The GSM device also needs to be 5V compatible and simple to use. Keep in mind that the Stamps have very little variable storage and not a huge amount of program space and a lot of GSM devices are fairly complex to setup and use from the microcontroller's standpoint. Sending e-mail via GSM with a Stamp may be difficult. NetBurner makes an ethernet interface (the SB70) that has firmware available that was designed for the Stamp. It can easily send e-mail as well as work as a webserver. You'd need some kind of wired ethernet connection. If there's WiFi available, you can use a WiFi to ethernet bridge to provide a wired ethernet connection. Most WiFi routers can be configured to work this way. If you do need to use a GSM device, texting (SMS) may be easier.

Mike Green

Any serial devices used with a HomeWork Board will need to be able to operate at 9600 Baud or lower.

In terms of programming, usually you start with available demo programs for sensors and other devices, make sure the devices work with your board. Work through things like the "What's a Microcontroller?" text and look through the Nuts and Volts columns here for ideas. Starting with the demo programs, write some demo programs for multiple sensors ... read from one then read from another and display both results.

The GSM interface will be the toughest. I'm not aware of any examples for the Stamp and a currently available GSM board. There are some examples for obsolete GSM devices ... Google "basic stamp gsm" for some old forum threads.

stx2006

I can waterproof that sensor with no problems. I don't have to have it send a email. a sms would work just fine. Reason I need it to send the data is I wont be at the location during the week to monitor the tank.

Chris Savage

TXT Messages can often be sent via e-mail, which is probably why Mike mentioned the PINK module. I used it for that very thing with a security system. When an alert was triggered the module would login to my mail server and send an e-mail to <phone#>@vtext.com which would then send a TXT to my phone. The PINK Module is much easier to deal with than a GSM from a BASIC Stamp Module standpoint because of the use of string data which is harder to deal with on the BASIC Stamp Module. The GSM Module I have here (Janus) sends text responses back when it receives a TXT message. A BS2p would be required to handle these messages due to length. So in the end the PINK is a better option if you have wired network access nearby.

stx2006

Ok thanks!