Author Archives: tigoe

Networked Bed Presence sensor

John Schimmel and I had a meeting with a friend the other day who has chronic condition, and is looking for tools to notify her family and friends of her activity at home, so she can live more independently. A … Continue reading

Posted in arduino/wiring, circuits, electronics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Serial ports on an iPhone?

hc gilje posted some useful notes on accessing the serial ports of an iPhone. Bottom line: Apple has not made it easy to let the iphone communicate with external devices. Basically, you need a jailbroken phone to do anything. That … Continue reading

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Using PepperMill to turn a motor into a sensor

Nicolas Villar sent me a sample of the PepperMill, a new sensor board he and Steve Hodges designed at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.  It’s a nifty little board.  You attach a DC motor and the board can an output … Continue reading

Posted in arduino/wiring, circuits, electronics | 3 Comments

Rob Faludi just turned me on to CoolTerm, a serial terminal app for OSX and Windows. It looks like a nice addition, and is cross platform, which is handy for teaching; no need to reference different apps on different platforms. I’ve … Continue reading

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Bluetooth Mate with Lilypad

Coming late to the game, I’m trying out a Bluetooth Mate from SparkFun with an Arduino Lilypad.Overall, it’s a nice Bluetooth radio to use with microcontrollers.  A few thoughts on getting it working:

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Intervalometer and motion trigger for Nikon D90

Matt Mets has written a nice Nikon remote control library for Arduino. I used it to make a motion trigger and intervalometer. It looks like this:

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Blog Housekeeping

I’m making some changes to this blog. I’ve been unhappy about the fact that all the code is static, not the code I use every day. Instead, I want a nice code repository, so whatever I write on my machine … Continue reading

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Reading data from a uLog logger, saving to a file

Here’s a Processing sketch that takes data from Sparkfun’s uLog datalogger via a serial port, and saves the results to a file. To use this, you’ll need: uLog datalogger with some data on it USB-to-serial adaptor; there are many types … Continue reading

Posted in Processing, circuits | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Simple Client URL example in PHP

Here’s a simple example of using the cURL program through PHP’s client URL library. It’s a really powerful way to use HTTP, because you can set just about every HTTP option using the library.

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Mail form in PHP

Here’s a simple HTML/PHP form that takes data from the form and sends it in mail via HTTP POST. Save it as formToMe.php:

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