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A project log for F.L.O.P.R. - Fish Life Operational Pi Reporter

Using Raspberry Pi, java, and sensors, FLOPR will report on aquarium parameters and control some functions.

forcefed317forcefed317 05/28/2017 at 09:520 Comments

For a while now I've been wanting to do something useful with a SoC and start learning about the IoT. I chose Raspberry Pi as the SoC due to popularity and capabilities. In my Computer Science classes, I've used java primarily, so I wanted to explore it's use with the RPi. Python seems to be the weapon of choice, but I like doing things the hard way.

Before I even get to sensors, calibrations, and computations, I had to make sure I could interface with the FLOPR. Yes, my inspiration for the project theme is based on one of my favorite 80s movies and it's antagonist (?) the WOPR computer. The first step here was to make sure I could get FLOPR to talk to me. I want to combine as many methods and types of sensors to increase my learning potential for this project, so I wanted alerts to go out as text messages, and reports to go out as email.

I've seen tutorials about using a free aspect of Twilio to originate SMS messages from java via internet. After much struggle, and some help from reddit and Twilio's help desk, I got it working. I also looked into sending emails using SMTP with a gmail account. After a lot of fine tuning, I have that working the way I want it also. While working these two avenues, I was introduced to Maven, a dependency manager. After a week of trial and error, I am getting better at dealing with maven, and I was able to write a short java program to send both a text and email to myself from inside the NetBeans IDE. Huge success.

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