- Hot Shop Tracker -
IoT device for glass furnaces

At the most basic, the ‘hot shop tracker’ is a device that does three things:

• Takes in data about the physical world (in this case, signals from a PID controller and some other sensors that can be found on a glass furnace)

• Collects that data onto a microcontroller, which is connected to the internet

• Sends the data on to a server to be logged, so it can be tracked over time and analyzed

This project first got started during the Formlabs hackathon, in the summer of 2019. I worked on it with one other engineer (Evan Matteson, a skilled firmware wrangler and all-around excellent guy). After a few weeks of preparation to plan the broad strokes of the project and purchase materials, we dove into a 48-hour sprint to design, build, and integrate everything. At the end of those two days, we had a totally functional prototype of the system built, with a small oven, PID controller, multiple sensors, and web server all working and communicating with each other correctly.