I’ve spend almost 2 hours on the phone with planet.nl (a big isp here), being redirected more then 5 times (and put back in the waiting queue) hang up etc. To hear the same story over and over again, and finally at the end hear it will take a months to fix. (I just wanted to move a e-mail alias from one box to the other).

I won’t go in details, because it will get me all cranky again.

Gnuplot fun

I’ve received some ds1820 I’ve ordered this morning (there temperature sensors already calibrated and uses a 1-wire protocol) , so I hooked them up to the pc to see if they work. After some fiddling around I got them to work, and seeing data scroll by is fun (esp in bad Hollywood movies). Graphs are even better.

So how to easily plot it, and have the plot live update. Plotting is easy, a simple pipe+grep+awk to get the data files, and then let gnuplot plot it. But now to make update, after some fiddling around I came to the following solution:

A script that generates the data sets, and echo’s out the needed gnuplot commands every x seconds.

then run the script like this: gnuplot < (./script.sh)

this results in the following (updating) plot:

red is the room temp, and green is the temp directly under my desk-light, you can probably spot where I turned it off for a while.