For one of my projects I’m testing an SMS gateway, and decided it would be fun to build a useful alarm clock out of it. For those of you who know Python, you may find this funny. /dev/ttyUSB0 is my Arduino with a temperature sensor. The gateway credentials and phone numbers below are fictional placeholders. import serial import urllib2 def check_temp(): ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB0', 9600) t = ser.readline().strip() return float(t) t = check_temp() if int(t) < 8: message = "It+is+now+%f+degrees;+time+to+get+moving." % t f = …

Tonight, I’m proud to say, I’ve returned to childhood. Let me explain. OK, fun over, back to work. For the last year I’ve been wanting to purchase an Arduino, for no other reason than to play with. Like a kid. My Arduino arrived two days ago. This is a story of problems, but not the pull-your-hair-out type, more the… like when you run out of gas in the middle of Sydney. Going to your Christmas dinner. In your friend’s car. Long story.

For this you’ll need: an Arduino, an LED, a USB cable, and the Arduino software. Get the LED, and plug it in to your Arduino. Plug in the long end to pin 13, plug the short end to the GND. Plug in the Arduino into your laptop. Go to Tools->Serial Port. Choose the USB port that appears. Take the code from the BlinkingLED tutorial and paste it in to the arduino like so:

Status: ✅ My house is cold. I want to start playing with simple electronics before starting Operation Field, so have created Operation Cold House. This is just simply sticking a temperature sensor onto an Arduino, linking that up to my little home “server”, and uploading that to my website. I’ll display some nifty graphs, too, and link it to Pachube. Stay tuned. Update: Complete! The proof is in the pudding. I now have a personal website from home (sorry, not public) that displays the daily and weekly temperature at home. The process is basically like this: my little Arduino gathers the temperature, and is polled every minute with a python script via cron. This script then sticks the time and …

Status: ❌ It is time for a new project. I’ve finally decided I want to do some electronics stuff - at least play around in that realm a little. However, I want to “get out and about” a little as well, so this leads me to my idea: a controllable long-range RC plane. I’ve been debating whether to go the embedded Linux route, or the more simple microcontroller route. One of the first things I stumbled upon was ArduPilot, a cheap Arduino-based board allowing for a UAV. However, after looking through the requirements I would have needed to purchase an RF transmitter, and they aren’t cheap. This made me rethink the ArduPilot route and to evaluate what I really wanted to do: control the …