I'd love to use a cheaper Pi but so far I've only been able to get my hands on one so I don't want to permanently tie it up putting stuff on a TV screen.
Its a little disheartening that all these months later, the most impressive part of most Pi projects is still sourcing the damn thing in the first place.
Farnell can now ship them pretty much anywhere with a couple of weeks lead time, which isn't great but is at least an improvement on a couple of months ago.
Strange, where are you located? I've bought the RPi on amazon.com before, pretty fast shipping. When in doubt, search on amazon. It's $60 on amazon prime which includes shipping. It's about $15 more than the usual places, but with the assurance that you'll get it in 2 days.
I got mine from Element 14 / Newark in 3 days over a weekend (they tied Amazon Prime for the SDHC card it's running on). So things are getting better in the US for RPi availability.
I am looking for a solution to monitor the server room's air conditioner. I would love to use a Raspberry Pi, but I need to find an anemometer[1] for it.
1) I am going to monitor if the air conditioner is blowing and page if it is not. Paging someone earlier than the temp change does.
An Arduino might be more ideal solution for that. There is a huge collection of physical measurement devices for it and it would probably would be easier to implement with that. I'm not sure you can get an anemometer for it but a bit of tinkering would probably yield an equally effective solution. Sparkfun has a bunch of accesseries you can browse through.
You don't want to monitor if it's blowing, since the unit could still be blowing air, but not cold air. Instead, monitor the temperature coming out of/in the the duct. The temperature change in the duct will allow for a page just as fast as monitoring the flow.
This will also allow you to monitor things such as the delta of the air coming out of the duct vs the ambient temperature vs the air going into the return. With this data you can create significant savings by moving ducts or equipment since you're probably wasting a lot of good, cold air going into the return.
I've got temp sensors in the mix, but I can have the same temp near the duct for a bit after the blowing stops. I also want to make sure the blower stays at the same rate and isn't sputtering.
http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-53-d2-plug.aspx
I'd love to use a cheaper Pi but so far I've only been able to get my hands on one so I don't want to permanently tie it up putting stuff on a TV screen.
Its a little disheartening that all these months later, the most impressive part of most Pi projects is still sourcing the damn thing in the first place.