We had a theory. Between 4-5pm our office seems to get cold and then gradually heats up again. It’d been happening for about a month but people thought we may just have been imagining it.

So today I got a thermometer. It is meant for fridge/freezers, but a temperature is a temperature right? So I placed it on the desk and was trying to decide if it was 18.5 or 19 degrees C. Dave walked in and said, “what’s that? I have a much better temperature detecting system.” I was thinking maybe he had one of those digital weather stations or maybe a USB thermometer or something. He wandered off and a few minutes later came in and said, “take a look at this!” and presented his home engineered temperature sensor. Not only does it detect movement and the temperature, it sends a wireless signal to his (also homemade) base station, where he connects to an MQ broker system.

He turns it on and gets Rob to fire up a queue browsing application and there we have it, a constant stream of temperature readings flowing over a custom wireless network, into a broker and on to our corporate LAN. I love working with techies.