February 2008

The Handiest Thing Ever (for soft material fabricators)

Kate Hartman turned me on to the nifitiest place ever: the Big Button.

This is the information center for the Fashion District. You need to know where to get something there, they’ll tell you. It’s located at the corner of 39th St. and Seventh Ave.and well worth a visit.

construction

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XBee Library graphing and logging application

Here’s a program that uses Rob Faludi and Dan Shiffman’s XBee library for processing to read three analog sensors from multiple remote XBee radios and graph them. It also saves the data to a comma-delimited file. It also makes sounds when the value exceeds a given threshold. For this application, you need two or more XBee series 1 radios. One is attached to the serial port of the computer, and the other is remote, broadcasting three analog values.

This also uses the ControlP5 library by Andreas Schlegel and the Ess library by Krister Olsson.

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code
XBee
Processing

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XBee Library graphing application

Here’s a simple program that uses Rob Faludi and Dan Shiffman’s XBee library for processing to read three analog sensors from a remote XBee radio and graph it. For this application, you need two XBee series 1 radios. One is attached to the serial port of the computer, and the other is remote, broadcasting three analog values.

Continue Reading »

code
XBee
Processing

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Logging Sensor data to a Web Database using Sensorbase.org

Sensorbase.org is an open data repository run by the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA. It’s a database of sensor databases. You can upload datasets to it, and you can browse other datasets as well. If you’ve never set up a database before but are interested in logging sensor data, it’s a good tool to get started. If you know what you’re doing already and you need to log a lot of sensor data, or compare it to similar work from others, it’s a convenient tool.

Since I like working with sensors and microcontrollers connected directly to the Internet, I thought it would be useful to be able to put data directly into Sensorbase from sensors connected to a microcontroller, without a personal computer in between.

Continue Reading »

code
XBee
Lantronix
Arduino/Wiring
PHP

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