My son was old enough to get his first pet; as to why he chose a tortoise, I’ll never know. But ‘Luchito’ is now part of the family and apparently will be for 60+ years. For those who don’t know, tortoise habitats need to be equipped with UVB and heat bulbs. They need about 8 - 12 hours of light per day and the temp needs to be kept within a range of 78 degrees F - 92 degrees F. In an effort to get him interested in tinkering, making, and the general capabilities of the Raspberry Pi, I thought I’d do a fun project with him related to ensuring that his pet tortoise, ‘Luchito’, has the best care available.
What’s Connected
The Pi is connected to the internet through a WiFi dongle. The dongle is near the router, so I have not seen any drop in connection yet. We connected a light sensor (TSL2561) and a temperature sensor (BMP180). These were I2C sensors so it couldn’t have been easier to get these up on the dashboard. We had fun testing the sensors by making the temperature go up or light decrease and seeing the dashboard reflect appropriately.
Just thought of something else. Grab a Bluetooth dongle and pkace loads of sensors on Luchito to monitor vital signs, track movement, pedometer, heart rate, a camera… An IoT tortoise…
Just a basic triple axis accelerometer or even one of the multi DOF sensors would be ‘kind of’ fun but will pick up static trending it over time to see at least when active on a trend would be quite interesting to look at…
This is the sort of thing and why I am kind of hanging out for options to bring in serial data Direct to ttty AMA0 and log it as a virtual / remote variable. There are sooo many cool as things that could come in via say BTle / radio / LoRa etc now.
Since there are LoRa connections I for one would willingly put my hand up to test / demo some ideas here…
