IBM PSL Temperature Monitor

2008.07.18 in code

Last last summer, I inherited a set of old IBM PSLs from my physics teacher. In case you don't keep up with your early-eighties home science labs, it's a rather large beige box with all sorts of modules that you can plug in, which in turn plug in to sensors (light, temperature, sonar, etc.). It's got a 25-pin serial interface, so it took a bit of ... maneuvering ... to get it attached even to my old PowerMac G4, or Robb's desktop (the machine formerly known as cary3). Crazy, I know!

Way back before last Christmas, I wanted to get the PSL temperature probe, at the very least, working. A little bit of Python later, and it was working! (the manual had sample code for all sorts of things, and also detailed protocol and implementation documentation — try to get that from nVidia!)

I then wrote a little canvas-y viewer script, and left it running, polling the temperature in our room in Cary Hall every minute for approximately two and a half months. The final output is here:



You can pretty clearly tell when Robb and I weren't at school (especially spring break, the really smooth wavy part near the beginning). It was cool at the time, just a cute little thing... I dunno!

Anyway. I put it back up, here at home.

Comments (legacy)