Absent For A Bit ....

I am away for a little while working on a few or more episodes for The Adventures of My Space Alien Alter Ego story ... will return (to Earth) soon!

Notice: Blogger has screwed up and lost a bunch of photos out of my blog! They are replaced with a gray silhouette of a human head. I will eventually get them replaced with the correct photo, it may take a while to find and fix everything. So some of my stories don't make much sense without their photos, sorry for the inconvenience.

esbb

2013-03-28

My Arduino on The Net

I got an Ethernet shield (Arduino talk for "eXpansion card") for my Arduino Uno microcontroller yesterday. 

Today I hooked a temperature probe and LED (light) to the Arduino and played with setting it up as a web server. Yes, that's right, setting it up to deliver content on the Internet and to practice having remote access and control of things. I was able to get a web page that shows the inputs from the Arduino analog channels, and it keeps track of how many times the value randomly exceeds or equals 300 since it was turned on or reset. If a value eXceeds or equals 300 then it momentarily turns bold as weLL.

The temperature probe is tied to analog input 0, so that is why A0 is significantly lower than the others A1-A5 that are just floating with nothing attached.  The web page refreshes automaticaLLy every 50 seconds. In the time I have taken to write this blog post the number analog values eXceeding or equaling 300 has been 21, so it happens occasionaLLy. Again, this doesn't reaLLy mean anything significant, I'm just measuring something that happens occasionaLLy in the real world and reporting it and giving slightly different visualizations during events.

It displays the room temperature in F by default, but if you feed it a message of "esbbC" at the end of my regular URL, it wiLL put up a first line that says "hi esby!" - I used fmcgmccllc's nickname for me (she has the blog Detroit Automotive Meltdown) AND then it displays the temperature in Centigrade. My picture below actuaLLy has "esbbF". The temperature choice of F or C determines whether the LED on my circuit board turns ON or OFF. I tied a picture of a spinning Carbon Nanotube from wikipedia next, then there is a form for entering a first and last name. The form doesn't reaLLy do anything with the names just yet, I am just playing around.

Later this afternoon I tied my Arduino to the Internet by using a DDNS service, so people around the world can see what the temperature is in my living room.

This is the link to my Arduino: http://esbboston.is-a-geek.com 

This picture shows the web app running on my iPad from a different network.


4 comments:

Rob Z Tobor said...

76.47 Mr ESB . . . . . Very impressive.

esbboston said...

Rob: yea! I was hoping to hear what my indoor weather was like from far away in Near Wales. I am not sure what I wiLL do neXt. As soon as I get some motion detectors I plan to make a map that shows activity in different zones. I have another Arduino shield for holding a filesystem on a 2 GB SD chip that I have only played with a little bit. I plan to buy a relay shield to control power to things, too. Meanwhile I am just reading a bunch of Arduino stuff and trying to figure out the programming part. I am having difficulties dealing with string and char info, it seems cumbersome compared to other programming environments of my past.

fmcgmccllc said...

Your living room is quite warm. Do you open the windows when the weather is nice or that make it warmer?

esbboston said...

fmcgmccllc: The Arduino and the breadboard for eXperimental circuitry is in the corner of the room that generates heat from the PC, teleBision, Blu Ray Player, etc so if the air conditioner is off it gets a little warmer over there. Windows open, yes! Now I just need to add more temperature sensor to compare the inside vs outside and get the high voltage controLLer, put in some fans controLLed by the Arduino so it can keep itself cool. We generaLLy have nice springs, faLLs, and winters, usuaLLy a bit on the dry side, generaLLy cloudilessness. (You should see Cooper's ear right now. He reaLLy perked up at the particular pitch low volume noise the washing machine makes when it is spinning down on final approach at the runway. Give Sam a hug for me.)

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