Subj : OIL level sensior (was ODD DNS behaviour on Pi ZERO W with Bullseye OS)
To   : All
From : The Natural Philosopher
Date : Wed Nov 19 2025 10:08:52

On 18/11/2025 23:15, Daniel James wrote:
> On 18/11/2025 12:08, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> As part of my enhancements to the home controller, I want to send 
>> email warnings of low heating oil level.
> 
> This sounds rather like something I have been planning to do. AAMOI how 
> are you measuring the oil level?
> 

Oh. I designed a board with

- a Pi Pico W.
- a three pin temperature sensor ( TMP36) to monitor outside temperature
- an ultrasonic transmitter/receiver ( HCRS04) on it
- a nano power timer that (Was a sparkfun nano power switch  TPL5110 
until I blew it up and replaced it with a sub-board  with an Adafruit 
TPL5110 Low Power Timer ) wakes up every 2 hours, tries to make contact 
with the wifi, sends a short message to the server, and then commits 
suicide and shuts the timer down again.

Board designs all available if you want.

Also source code, suitably modified to remove my wifi password

At the far end is a Pi Zero with a very simple daemon running under 
inetd, to listen to the call and write the data to a file in a ramdisk.

A web server then parses that data and calculates the oil level and 
displays it. (along with room temps and central heating states which it 
also controls)

The intention is to run code under cron as well, and send warning emails.

I may not bother to fix the DNS problem since it seems to resend the 
mail within the hours successfully.

-- 
No Apple devices were knowingly used in the preparation of this post.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5
 * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

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