Report May 2019

Checking Environmental Monitors. Steve OB.

At the lab where I work we monitor the temperature & humidity inside two cleanrooms.

The cleanrooms are use for human implantable devices (bionic eye etc).

Entry is controlled - hairnet, gown, gloves, mask, booties. Any equipment going in must be wiped down with IPA etc.

The purpose is to have the humidity between 30% - 70% which is the accepted range for handling electronics in a static safe way.

The monitoring devices are raspberry pi's with temperature/humidity sensors attached on the I2C bus.

They take a measurements and store them on board.

Every 5 minutes a Linux server out in the office transfers the data from the pi's to its hard drive.

Occasionally this has 'locked up' with no data updates AND no warning that the system was stuck.

I wrote a python program that runs on the Linux server and checks that the last entry in the datafile is no more than 30 minutes old (compared to current time).

If the last entry is more than 30 minutes old then it sends me a warning email and I can then investigate.

The program has to parse through the datafile and pick the strings to compare to the current time.

The python programme tc9 and the environment datafile are attached below.

Favourite PC Utility Programs. Anthony B.

Anthony walked us through some of his favourite utilities.

Calculators, file managers and file display systems.

Go retro and get more from Windows 10 !

Please see the attached pdf presentation for more details.