• Badabinski@kbin.earth
    0·
    5 months ago

    Alright, I have the sensor installed. It’s a bit cooler and more overcast today, but I’ll hopefully be able to get some good data.

    A graph from Home Assistant showing the current temperature of the mailbox.

    • rhandyrhoads@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      By the way, just a quick tip, if you haven’t already maybe try airgapping the sensor from the metal with some foam so you’re measuring the air itself.

      • Badabinski@kbin.earth
        0·
        5 months ago

        I have it positioned right now so that the probe tip isn’t touching any metal, but I’ll probably add a bit of foam. I have some incredibly irritating foam packing peanuts that would probably work well. I’ll go do that now.

        EDIT: here it is, in all its gloriously crappy, uh, glory:

        a picture of a temperature probe poking into the inside of a mailbox. A Styrofoam packing peanut with a hole in it has been put over the probe to stop it from touching the walls of the mailbox.

    • makeshiftreaper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      I don’t know if this could inadvertently dox you but I’d be curious to see an hourly outside temperature too to see how much hotter a mailbox gets than outside. Based off your first graph here I’m wondering if cars having glass windows makes a greenhouse effect that would make a car hotter than a mailbox, everything else equal?

      • Badabinski@kbin.earth
        0·
        5 months ago

        Seems like a worthwhile thing to do! I’m not worried about doxxing, since someone would have to go to pretty extreme measures to correlate with the exact climate where I’m at. I installed the sensor after the hottest time of day had already passed, but here’s what it looked like:

        A graph showing the outside temperature versus the temperature in the mailbox.

        I’m pretty sure the spikes in the mailbox temperature were due to cloud cover.