Snekmon Reptile Environment Monitoring and Alerting

[technoendo]

Have been reading this forum for many months and just registered today for my first post here. Hi! You guys are super awesome and have been a font of knowledge for the countless hours I've intensely studied a particular snake, morph, behavior, problem, etc giving me confidence to eventually purchase my first snake (an extreme okeetee from south mountain reptiles).

This is an overkill and expensive project that deploys using an arguably complex configuration management system (Chef), on maybe not the most favorable platforms (Linux), and with noisy push notifications (alerts) to your costly smartphone. To be clear -- I still use a UTH + thermostat (primary heat source) with a mild red incandescant bulb (not even a secondary heat source but does put out a tiny amount of heat), and this software installation/configuration cookbook I've packaged is just an additional system that handles monitoring and remote alerting.

I had it all running, then my raspberry pi ate its filesystem, so I decided to repackage it up in a way that would be easy for me to redeploy should it happen again. I was proud enough of it to give it a little polish and present it to you. \o/

https://github.com/igarrison/chef-cookbooks/tree/master/snekmon

When I open my okeetee's screen top glass vivarium and go inside the humid hide where the center temp+humidity probe is located its fun to see the humidity graphs spike all the way back up around %95 when I re-wet the spahgnum moss. Or see days when I turn on the house furnace and the ambient temperature of the entire viv goes up. I'm looking forward to the first few freak hot days of spring and summer and getting some alerts to my phone that its too hot. Little things like this to just be more in tune with the conditions inside the enclosure my snake is trapped in.

If my UTH failed and I got a "toocold" alert I have the capability of using my smart phone to increase the thermostat temperature of the house furnace. This makes me feel like a mad scientist!

With the raspberry pi 2 recently released and still at a $35 USD price point I'm considering grabbing one of those with a picam or usb webcam and seeing what interesting things I could present to myself while I'm at work (zoneminder security camera video shorts from motion detection? Or go for full Nginx RTSP video streaming to a remote computer or iphone?). It would be fun to be at work and see "the last 5 motion detection video highlights" or a live video feed of my snake enclosure on a dashboard right next to my temperature/humidity graphs.

Here is a recent pic and video of my okeetee to deliver a bit more content to this post. Its been smooth slithering so far. He has been calming down after more frequent handlings, has always eaten like a champ, and has a hot/cool and humid hide along with plenty of aspen to burrow in.

 

[obboi34]

I think that's a very neat idea. Definitely more than I can do, but I really like the idea of having such a system monitoring an enclosure. I'd think that having a camera that captured motion would find all the good stuff since corns sleep so much, but having a live video stream you could just tune into would be comforting too. I always like being able to look at my girl curled up when I come home.

 

[technoendo]

Hi obboi34!

Good point on the live camera mostly inactive due to cornsnakes love of burrowing and hiding. I'd likely be using zoneminder (http://www.zoneminder.com/screenshots). My viv is a screen top glass tank so I'll need to cover the back/sides and manage "movement in glass reflections" such that humans walking around aren't triggering pictures.

It would be hilarious to have something that sends you one random motion detection picture every 5 or 10 minutes until motion stops. Maybe have make it schedule aware and be able to enable it when you are at work but disable it when everyone is home. Might get old after a few days, but I'm amused enough to consider it.

It would be useful if I could do thermal imaging and display the long wavelength of infrared so you could actually see the heat gradient in your viv along with the graphs/alerts, but unfortunately this looks too costly to do even at lowish resolutions.

Alerts when water is empty? Automatic refill would be actually useful, but this also introduces risks like "oops, I filled the viv with 5 inches of water".

I can power lights on and off in fancy ways (have it follow sunrise/sunset of a given latitude/longitude, or gain light intesity and fade like sunrise/sunset over an hour in the morning and evening) but lighting isn't vital for cornsnakes so this feels like a gimmick.

Measuring or weighing a snake would be helpful, but those are all harder problems than I think I can elegantly solve.

I probably will combine toohot/toocold notification graphs with the main temp/humidity graphs so faults can be seen in context. Then I'll look into a camera feature.