It’s Goose incubation time again

Goose eggs – pure aggression in a small package. Apparently geese spew the eggs out, about 30 per goose per year, then collect them all up and sit on ’em. Last year we incubated some eggs, and because geese are waterfowl, getting the humidity right is key to improving the hit-rate.

look out, here comes trouble
look out, here comes trouble

Last year I used Xively for the display, but the Cosm/Xively TCP stack is ratty. Certainly for an Arduino, which has only just enough horsepower to run a TCP/IP stack, but the Xively linux library wasn’t that reliable on the Raspberry Pi that I now use as a concentrator.

goose eggs
goose eggs
Incubator temperature

I now use RRDtool, which can run on the Raspberry Pi,

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install rrdtool

and there is a Python library that can inject data into the RRD databases called python-rrdtool

I really didn’t get on with python-rrdtool, I invoke RRDtool explicity

getstatusoutput("/usr/bin/rrdtool update "+DIR+"AB N:1234")

where DIR is the full directory path