I'm glad I took the time to fix the scaly croissant's lizard enclosure sensors. I find the resulting nerdy plots quite interesting in several ways, especially the 3 temperature sensors.

The cool end sensor is an air temperature monitor in the rear left corner of the glass enclosure, and pretty much follows the ambient air temperature. Anything between about 21°C and 29°C is OK here for daytime, and down to 18°C or so is fine at night.

The warm end sensor also measures air temperature, but in the rear right corner of the enclosure, near the heat lamp. This is quite close to the air temperature sensor of the thermostat that controls the heat lamp, so the temperature measured here is fairly consistent and constant during the day. The actual temperature here doesn't matter very much, though

The basking temperature sensor in an infrared sensor measuring the surface temperature of Jerry's basking rock directly under the heat lamp. This is the temperature that's most important but it's also the one that varies the most, despite the use of a thermostat. The exact temperature isn't critical, but ideally it should be in the range 40-46°C.

The brief dips in basking rock temperature are a nice bonus of having this sort of sensor. They're an indication that a cool lizard has just plonked himself under the sensor to bask, so the frequency of dips in the data are an indirect indication of how active he's being.

The slower changes, on the other hand, are driven by changes in the ambient temperature in the room. When the room warms up the amount of heat escaping the enclosure decreases, the warm end air temperature starts to rise, so the thermostat turns down the heat lamp to compensate, and the basking spot temperature drops. It's important to have the thermostat's temperature sensor as close as practical to the basking spot in order to minimise this effect, but it's still pretty strong. Consequently, and counter intuitively, if I let the room get too hot them my lizard will end up with not enough heat rather than too much.

Ideally the thermostat controlling the heat lamp would use an infrared surface temperature sensor but all the commercially available ones just use an air temperature sensor. Maybe one day I'll make my own thermostat, with blackjack & direct surface temperature control.

Everything back in place and working as intended. There are air temperature and humidity sensors in the corner at both the warm and cool ends of the enclosure, an infrared temperature sensor aimed at the centre of the basking spot, and a UV sensor at the side of the basking area.

The ambient humidity is a bit high again today and the enclosure is following suit, but it's nice and cool which is helping to establish a good temperature gradient.

With the bad cables replaced this thing is once again reliable reading all the sensors, an sending the readings to both the e-ink display and an Adafruit IO web dashboard.

Before I can reinstall it all in the lizard enclosure I do need to reprint a couple of my 3D printed sensor mounts though, because they got broken.

I should probably update the software too, though it is all working as is.

Same cable problem with this analogue UV sensor, same hacky solution.

It's another bodge job, but this hacked up bit of Cat 5 will hopefully last a bit longer in the hot, high UV flux environment than the old lightweight ribbon cable.

This ribbon cable I used for the I2C infrared temperature sensor turned out not to be durable enough. It's in part of the enclosure illuminated with UV light, and I think that's why the insulation has crumbled off the wire. I'll need to replace this.