Fixing an industry-wide problem for cheap!

so this is going to be a little bit of a weird video we're not doing an intro there's no benchmarks there's no product review we're just going to get into it I spent nearly 13 years as an IT manager and administrator before starting my YouTube channel one of my main jobs was deploying and managing server racks for small to medium-sized organizations this could be anything from Standalone server and switch infrastructure or centrally managed servers connected through privately owned fiber all of these sites typically had one thing in common something so incredibly simple that it was often an afterthought to the organization we were working with but it was also vitally important to making sure their server rack stayed up and running it's a feature we insisted be installed with each and every deployment often costing our customers more than $1,000 on top of the rest of the install all to answer a single question how hot is your server room temperature monitoring seems like a pretty simple thing to solve especially with how analytical and data hungry it people tend to be we have sensors and monitoring software for everything from CPU load to memory utilization to hard drive Health down to individual service latency and the exact number of bits being transmitted over a network at any given time but when it comes to environmental monitoring that's a feature that often goes unmonitored in small and even medium-sized businesses and even more so in home labs when building out server installs the most common way we would monitor temperature was through environmental monitoring cards added on to a UPS unit it seems that every UPS manufacturer has an option to make their UPS units smart adding basic network monitoring for power use and adding an alert functionality through the use of SNMP traps or client software to help initiate shutdowns in servers in the event of a power outage or you can opt for the deluxe models with environmental monitoring built right into the card that's right now you get a thermal Probe on a string to be able to place in front of your server rack and the ability to monitor temperature via SNMP the problem is depending on who makes your UPS unit these cards can be anywhere from $450 to $800 and they often don't even include the thermal probes which can run upwards of $100 each on top of that probably the best value out there right now for temperature monitoring in a rack mount unit is apc's smart UPS lineup which is actually what I run out in my Home Server their environmental network cards used to be around $450 but have come all the way down to about $120 brand new of course that also means you need an APC smart UPS unit which typically start at around $1,200 brand new for a rack mounted unit far more expensive than other network connected UPS units from the likes of triplite or Eaton but those models have equally expensive environmental cards so you end up paying roughly the same price regardless of which manufacturer you buy from in the end Standalone temperature monitoring systems are even more expensive than these add-on modules too so the question comes back to how do you monitor temperature over SNMP in a server rack this problem seemed like an easy one to solve so I did meet ax effect the first home lab and SMB product available from Craft Computing the idea is pretty simple measure the temperature of your server rack and make that data available via SNMP for monitoring and alerting ax effect is designed to be simple and secure to deploy to your network environment as well as delivering more accurate temperature data than most other Solutions on the market today all at a fraction of the cost of a baked in UPS environmental monitor it's powered by a Raspberry Pi rp240 the temperature sensor is accurate out of the box to Plus or minus. 3° C and has a 01 de CI Fidelity delivering smooth charting to your SNMP monitoring software ax effect is currently in beta as we're developing the final product the beta version is built around the rasbury pi Pico W development board along with our own custom PCB and 3D printed enclosure in fact someone you might know has been cranking out all the cases in their print farm for me this last week thank you Joel we're going to offer 400 of these beta units for sale while we develop the final product and these are available for delivery basically immediately you placing an order is not like a Kickstarter it's not a crowdfunding campaign you place the order I place the order for the Betty unit you get your delivery in between 3 and 4 weeks that's how far along we are in this process we will have the final retail version for sale sometime in Q4 of this year that's 2024 during the beta phase we're also seeking feedback feature suggestions and Bug reports as we continue to develop and refine the firmware and finalize the final retail version the beta version uses USB micro for power and connects to your network with 2.4 GHz 80211 and Wi-Fi on the Raspberry Pi Pico W configuration is handled via USB serial connection and is persistent to the device through Power cycling the thermal probe we're using is actually a temperature humidity and pressure sensor allinone the beta version currently enables temperature monitoring with humidity and pressure also on the road map for the final version and here's the part I'm probably most excited about the final version of ax effect is going to come in two different flavors both of which are still going to be designed around the rp240 from Rasberry Pi but using 100% Custom Design boards not based on the Raspberry Pi Pico Dev board the first will be Wi-Fi connected with USBC for power and serial configuration the second will have ethernet and can use either USB or power over ethernet for power we're also toying with the idea of adding in a DC Barrel Jack for those of you with DC power distribution in your server racks but the final features are going to come down to what you want to see out of a device like this at this point the beta firmware is feature complete we're currently supporting SNMP V1 and v2c with SNMP V3 on the road map for the final product the most exciting part for you guys is the affordability of all this I'm going to be selling the beta version for just $65 and I have a pricing goal of $60 for the final version of ax effect Wi-Fi pricing on the ethernet and Poe version is still to be determined depending on development and final component costs so let's walk you through setting up an ax effect sensor how it works and what you can expect but first today's video does have a sponsor and it's PCB way who is also manufacturing and assembling the ax effect temperature sensor boards they actually reached out to me all the way back in 2020 asking if I had any projects that they could help out with and I actually turned them down it's not that I wasn't interested in working with them it's just that I'm not a PCB designer nor did I have any aspirations to become a logistics company or sell products myself boy lot can change in four years fast forward to 2024 and I knew exactly who I wanted to work with When developing ax effect and I placed an order for our first validation run of the boards with PCB way before reaching out to them to see if they were still interested in working with me I wanted to walk through the ordering and validation process before agreeing to sponsorship as it's a process I had exactly zero experience with believe me when I say PCB way made it simple to upload Gerber files for the PCB layout as well as took care of ordering specific opponents my developer and I had chosen for this design while I'm not scared of soldering I knew it wasn't feasible for me to build out enough boards for a full production run even in these early stages PCB way not only handled the manufacturing of the PCB but fully assembled and delivered the final boards as well of course they offer a whole host of other services as well well from 3D printing to CNC Manufacturing Services I will likely be taking advantage of when we produce the full retail version of ax effect later this year visit PCB Way by following my referral link down in the video description where you'll get a $5 credit as a new user and again a huge thanks to PCB way for sponsoring this video and for their work on this product so far with that out of the way let's take a quick look at the serial configuration and get one of them set up and ready to go all the units that we sell here in the beta phase are going to come pre- flashed with with our current firmware on it however we may be issuing bug fixes or additional features as we go along so you might need to later upgrade or reflash the firmware yourself on the ax effect units there's this little uh button here in the top also known as a compliant mechanism for you mark robber fans uh that presses down on the boot mode selector on the Raspberry Pi Pico uh what you're going to want to do is hold that in and then insert your USB cable with the other end attached to your PC that will bring up literally what looks like a USB drive on your PC and all you have to do is copy the latest firmware onto the Raspberry Pi Pico it'll copy everything over and then automatically reboot and boot up into the latest firmware to actually configure Axe effect that is done over a USB serial connection so again keep the USB cable attached to your PC and you'll connect to this at 115200 B for this I'm going to be using putty but any serial terminal access program that you have on whatever operating system will work this is literally as old as network communication gets so I'm going to go serial this is on Comm 9 right now and then 115200 connect once you've connected over serial just press enter a couple times on the console and this main menu should appear now if you just flashed a new version of the firmware we do recommend doing a factory reset at this point to clear out any old values that may have changed locations in memory with the new version of the firmware to do that I'm just going to press f for a factory reset and the device will automatically reset booted back up let's just go ahead and walk through a couple of these options starting with i for info if I go to the info screen we can see our current Network host name uh Wi-Fi SSID IP address and Mac address of the device as well as all of our relevant SNMP information so that is the current port number Community name for SNMP v2c as well as all of your contact and location information also at the top of the screen here you will see the current readout from the temperature sensor but you probably didn't buy this as a serial connction thermometer you wanted a network connected thermometer so I'm going to hit Q to go back to the main menu and then C to enter the configuration screen and here is where you actually enter all of that information in so we've got Wi-Fi configuration and SNMP configuration all of it is configurable in this menu so I'm going to press n and then enter a network SSID and I have a test Network here on my home network called ax effect strangely enough I'm going to press P to change the password for this demonstration I'm just just going to leave the SNMP Community name at public although I do recommend changing that when you go and deploy this now to save our changes you can press W although that will not actually apply your changes until the device reboots you can also press R from this menu to write changes and automatically reboot Axe effect so we're going to do that now booted back up if I press I I should be able to go and see the current configuration and here we can see that ax effect is connected to the Wi-Fi ax effect and we have an IP address of 10.0.0 1999 so at this point we should be good to add this to whatever SNMP monitoring software we want so for today's demo I'm going to use observium which is what I typically use to monitor my own home network once I'm logged in I'm going to go over to devices and then down to add device and here we just need two pieces of information one is the IP address or the host name and the other is the SNMP Community name so I'm going to go 10.1 199 and then we're going to enter the community name of public going to add the device now on my install of observium I have it set to automatically probe any new devices for any snmps that it has a matching Mi for and in observium it will automatically pull down the temperature sensor as a readable device all right and just like that we've got a new temperature probe added to observium you can see we've got a result of 24.3 De c um if I go over to my temperature sensor probes which is all of my Axe effect units running here uh you can see that the 24.3 which is right down here is ever so slightly higher than the rest of the probes here on my desk although I have been holding this one so there might be a little extra residual body heat in there but 24.3 versus 23.82 23.9 23.64% that's as easy as it is to get one of these up and running on your network uh I've had multiple sensors running for literally weeks on end at this point with no issues to speak of now as we're going through all this I do want to be clear about my own expectations for Axe effect while I've designed it with server racks and network installation in mind it is just a Wi-Fi connected temperature sensor with SNMP support there's no reason it can't work in any other environment where you need accurate temperature monitoring and alerting that said I'm also not going to be seeking any regulatory approval for food or medical use so keep that in mind also while this is technically a smart device the goal was to actually make it as dumb as possible to prevent any potential security issues configuration is done entirely through serial communication there's no web host or HTTP data to exploit and local access is needed to perform any configuration changes we're working on SNMP V3 support for the final version which will support encryption and user-based Authentication the beta version currently supports SNMP V1 and v2c which rely on PL text Community strings because of this Axe effect is a readon device and cannot modify any aspect of your network or server infrastructure it can only tell you the temperature it's up to your own SNMP software to take action with that data now I probably don't need to tell anyone this but SNMP can be something of a nightmare for beginners especially if the device you want to monitor doesn't use standard oids lucky for you we're actually utilizing a standard Mi that's included in most SNMP monitoring software already ax effect reports via the entity sensor Mi and as long as your SNMP monitoring software isn't stupid it should autodetect not only the temperature data but properly format that data as well for example if I jump into observium all I need to do is add the device specify the SNMP v2c Community name and the temperature sensor is automatically created I have eight of these devices running in my house right now one on the intake side of my server rack one on the exhaust side and six more literally sitting right here on the desk in front of me as of the time of filming this video the sensors have been sitting on my desk for about 4 hours and have leveled out to between let's see what are they at right now uh 23.5 1 C and 24.11 C so a spread of about 6 or hey look at that plus or minus of. 3° again while probably not accurate enough for high-end medical or or food applications it's far better than the standard test of sending an intern into the server room and asking them if it's hot in there I've also successfully imported the sensors into zabic and my developer has been testing out sensors with home assistant both of which have been working flawlessly as well what while I'm extremely proud and very happy with what we've done here already there's still a ton of work to be done to avoid being reliant on Raspberry Pi Pico Dev boards we're going to be designing our own board from scratch to utilize the rp240 processors including sourcing an FCC certified radio module for the Wi-Fi version and implementing ethernet and Poe onto the wired versions I also want to do away with the micro USB port and instead Implement USBC moving forward I'm also thrilled with the way these 3D printed enclosures came out the final version is not going to be 3D printed though the beta case has a number of nice features like rackm mat holes for both vertical and horizontal orientations in a oneu form factor as well as a physical break between the thermal probe and the of the components to prevent heat transfer between the two and I absolutely nailed the design on my very first attempt just kidding here's all my first try for the final version I'm going to be seeking either injection molding or some other process that makes much more sense for mass production in fact I wonder if my chronics needs any beta testers for that new $3,000 SLS printer both the Wi-Fi and the ethernet version will come with a complete case redesign as the PCB and board layout are going to be completely different on the final product form factor is also one of the areas I'd like to hear your feedback about as again it's currently sized to fit in a oneu space horizontally or can be vertically mounted to a rack side rail or you can just screw it into a wall anywhere that you need a Wi-Fi enabled temperature sensor so that's Axe effect if you're watching this video they're actually for sale right now over at craft computing.com like I said this is not some crowdfunding or Kickstarter campaign this is not like help me fund the F if you're ordering a product we will be shipping your product within the next 3 weeks I literally just need to place the order on the boards to have them made we've already gone through 40 different boards for validation they are all working fantastically well and I have review samples heading out to some people you might have heard of so stay tuned for more information on that link to craftcompany.co.uk down in the video description now note this is going to be a slightly different website than craft computing. store which is where all of my merch will remain up for sale they are two completely different storefronts for a variety of reasons related to business that I really don't need to get into right now so thank you all so much for watching and thank you so much for the support and honestly the encouragement and confidence that you gave me to be able to go out and do something like this this is crazy this has been a huge Endeavor a huge amount of money uh invested into development and uh really a big undertaking and a potential business change for myself not that YouTube's going to go away but man I'm always seeking to diversify income and revenue streams and if this is a hit trust me there will be more SMB and home lab products to follow in the meantime leave me a comment let me know what you'd like to see with ax effect in the final version or where you can see yourself using one of these but in the meantime on your way down there make sure to drop this video a like And subscribe to craft Computing if you haven't done so already and if you like the content you see on this channel I want to help support more crazy projects like this couple ways you can do it again craft computing. store craftting dcom pick yourself up an ax effect shipping now or join the patreon link is also down in the video description and gets you exclusive access to my Discord server and my Discord peeps also got advanced notice on when these were available for sale that's going to do for me in this one thank you all so so incredibly much for watching and as always I will see you in the next video cheers everyone

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 158,585

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Id: bbxU_ZJRsPQ

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2024