Setting up the Temperature Sensor with a VigorAP

Modern electronics are highly sensitive in regards to their operational temperature. Each product has a specific recommended range in which it is designed to operate. Fortunately DrayTek products are designed with robustness in mind and so have a relatively large operating range. However, it may still be prudent to monitor the temperature within a given area so that you can be alerted if there is a sudden heat spike or loss of cooling which may affect other more temperature sensitive equipment.

Toward this end DrayTek have incorporated a temperature monitoring feature into the AP-900. This allows the AP-900 to utilise a USB thermometer to give accurate temperature readings from its own location. As the AP-900 is designed to be a part of a larger deployment of multiple access points this can theoretically allow you to use multiple sensors and get a good idea of the environmental changes over the entire building or deployment area.

By combining this feature with Syslog we are able to generate alerts if the temperature drops below or exceeds certain thresholds.

This guide will go through the simple steps required to set up the monitoring system and how to link it to syslog.

Physical Configuration

This step is pretty straight forward, plug the USB Thermometer into the USB port on the AP-900. The use of an extension USB cable is often a good idea if you wish to monitor the ambient temperature as this removes the dongle from direct physical contact with the AP-900. The sensor is then not affected by direct convective heat transfer from the AP.  

AP-900 Configuration

The settings for the thermometer can be found under the Applications menu within the AP-900's web interface. 

From here you can 'enable' the temperature monitoring feature and set the thresholds for the temperature alerts.

The Temperature Calibration options are there to allow you to modify the displayed temperature. For example if the AP-900 and thermometer are next a air conditioning outlet then the temperature taken may not directly reflect the ambient temperature of the room in which equipment is stored. You could therefore calibrate the registered temperature accordingly.

The temperature Chart tab allows you to see the recorded temperature over a given period:

Configuring alerts

As mentioned previously the AP-900 can report its temperature readings to syslog. 

Firstly you will want to have a syslog server running somewhere within your network. This can be local to the AP-900 or a remote server. Specific instructions in regards to configuring syslog can be found in other articles within this knowledge base.

In this example we will configure the AP-900 to point to a local machine which is running the Syslog application. The application itself can be found under the downloads section of this website.

Firstly we will need to access the AP-900's configuration page and then go to the System Maintenance menu and then the Sylog  sub-menu. You should enable syslog and then input the IP address of the device which is running the syslog application:

With these settings in place the AP-900 should report its temperature reading to syslog automatically:

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