ssmith73:
Hi All,
I have a temperature controller setup in my workshop -..........it generates plenty of data that i would like to put up on the web and monitor when i am bored at work, i'd also like to be able to control i/o's over the web - but that's a stretch goal.What do i need, keeping things simple?.........but i don't understand how i would transfer the data currently sitting in an Arduino-nano to this, so that it can provide access to the web, or how to access the web,
This sounds like an exercise for the Internet of Things, and that approach isn't nasty at at all. It is simply a matter of just a few lines of lines of code packaging a datafeed and sending it off to a to an outside service. This involves no Apache, no PHP, no MySQL (whatever the hell they are), and I submit that getting it all to work on your home network first would be an utterly futile exercise.
The essential Arduino line is something like
ret = cosmclient.put(feed, cosmKey);
All the dirty work is done at the other end, and you get to see nice little graphs on your phone in the lunchbreak. The dirty work includes timestamping.
I used Xively for this. This was because it had updates at ten second intervals and, at the time, was free. There was two way traffic, but I only used it to download stored data, and I don't recall what else was on offer - if anything. There is a raft of these facilities, I believe the post popular is Thingspeak. Another is Blynk. All the relevant ones will have Arduino-specific examples. Blynk has a phone app. Others are accessed through a web browser in the normal manner.
The service will involve an extra library or two but your display Mega is the obvious choice, as it is already a central point for data, and should be able to handle that. I use an Ethernet shield. If you want WiFi using ESP8266, it may be possible to have a NODE-MCU ESP8266 replace a Mega.