Check out this awesome Kickstarter project by the same guys that worked with Ladyada to develop the Drawdio. Take a MaKey MaKey controller, connect up some alligator clips to just about anything conductive, and interact with your computer and the internet.
Alligator Clip two objects to the MaKey MaKey board. For example, you and an apple.
When you touch the apple, you make a connection, and MaKey MaKey sends the computer a keyboard message. The computer just thinks MaKey MaKey is a regular keyboard (or mouse). Therefore it works with all programs and webpages, because all programs and webpages take keyboard and mouse input.
Today is a significant one in our history, because today is the day that Pachube grows up. You might have noticed already: Pachube is now Cosm!
We haven’t exactly been silent over the last few months since being acquired by LogMeIn but we also haven’t spoken much about the biggest task that’s been occupying us almost round the clock: building out and relaunching the service under a new (pronounceable! spellable!! memorable!!!) name, with a completely new (cleaner! easier!! functional!!!) design, that brings with it a whole host of features and attributes that help you build Internet of Things products, applications and services more quickly, scalably and collaboratively. Pachube.com has evolved into Cosm.com. And we mean business.
Although miles of suburban sprawl surrounded us, complex environmental processes were constantly occurring all around us. They were just a little difficult to see. I decided to shift the focus of the course from simply “What is the environment?” to, “How do we study our environment?” Using parts primarily from Adafruit Industries, I made an environmental sensor. Temperature, humidity, light level, and ozone concentration data were collected using the DHT22 sensor, a photo cell, and Futurlec’s MQ131 gas sensor. A Boarduino and Xbee got our sensors talking to our school server and a 6V solar panel powered the beast. Everything fit nicely into an Otterbox and some Sugru provided stability and weatherproofing.
I’m working on a project which involves the thermal printer, but couldn’t run the LCD assistant since I’m on Linux — the Ruby code which is included with the lib is a fine backup, but since I also didn’t have Ruby installed, I decided to do a quick Byte-array tool in PHP. I think it may come handy for others as well.
Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer. Build an “Internet of Things” connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4″ wide receipt paper. The example sketch we’ve written will connect to Twitter’s search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you’ve gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.
The project is not very difficult but does require some light soldering, so you’ll want to have a little experience with a soldering iron. You’ll also need a small flathead screwdriver to assemble the box. It’s also best if you’ve had a little Arduino experience so you can feel comfortable downloading the IDE and uploading our example sketch.
This pack does not contain an Arduino+Arduino Ethernet Shield, Arduino Ethernet or Ethernet cable To complete the project you will need to add either an Arduino + Ethernet Shieldor an Arduino UNO Ethernet. If you’re using an Arduino UNO Ethernet you will also need an FTDI friend or FTDI cable to upload the sketch. A plain straight-thru Ethernet cable is also required (any length)
Radon is a radioactive gas. It comes from the natural breakdown of uranium in soil, rock and water and gets into the air we breathe. Radon can be found all over the U.S. It can get into any type of building and result in a high indoor radon level. It typically moves up through the ground to the air above and into your home through cracks and other holes in the foundation. Your home traps radon inside, where it can build up.
The average indoor radon level is estimated to be about 1.3 pCi/L, and about 0.4 pCi/L of radon is normally found in the outside air. The U.S. Congress has set a long-term goal that indoor radon levels be no more than outdoor levels. While this goal is not yet technologically achievable in all cases, most homes today can be reduced to 2 pCi/L or below.
The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the cameras settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they dont output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.
The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazons Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete. The developer sets the guidelines for each task and designs the interface for the worker to submit their results. The developer also sets the price theyre willing to pay for the successful completion of each task. An approval and reputation system ensures that workers are incented to deliver acceptable results. For faster and cheaper results, the camera can also be put into accomplice mode, where it will send an instant message to any other person. That IM will contain a link to the picture and a form where they can input the description of the image.
The camera itself is powered by the BeagleBone, an embedded Linux platform from Texas Instruments. Attached to the BeagleBone is a USB webcam, a thermal printer from Adafruit, a trio of status LEDs and a shutter button. A series of Python scripts define the interface and bring together all the different parts from capture, processing, error handling, and the printed output. My mrBBIO module is used for GPIO control (the LEDs and the shutter button), and I used open-source command line utilities to communicate with Mechanical Turk. The device connects to the internet via ethernet and gets power from an external 5 volt source, but I would love to make a another version thats battery operated and uses wireless data. Ideally, The Descriptive Camera would look and feel like a typical digital camera.
This project uses an Arduino Uno, an ethernet shield, a thermal printer (aka receipt printer) and a Staples easy button to print out the current discount percentages available at the tkts times square booth for Broadway shows.
When the network is ready the light shines yellow. When printing is occurring the green light is lit. The red light is lit up to indicate if there is a network error.
Nice video!
Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer. Build an “Internet of Things” connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4″ wide receipt paper. The example sketch we’ve written will connect to Twitter’s search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you’ve gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.
The project is not very difficult but does require some light soldering, so you’ll want to have a little experience with a soldering iron. You’ll also need a small flathead screwdriver to assemble the box. It’s also best if you’ve had a little Arduino experience so you can feel comfortable downloading the IDE and uploading our example sketch.
This pack does not contain an Arduino+Arduino Ethernet Shield, Arduino Ethernet or Ethernet cable To complete the project you will need to add either an Arduino + Ethernet Shieldor an Arduino UNO Ethernet. If you’re using an Arduino UNO Ethernet you will also need an FTDI friend or FTDI cable to upload the sketch. A plain straight-thru Ethernet cable is also required (any length)
You’d know thermal printers as the things that receipts come from. They work by selectively heating up parts of thermochromic paper. The parts that are warmed up turn black, the rest stay white. There’s a lot to recommend them: They don’t need ink; they are cheap to run; they’re fast, quiet, and reliable; it’s easy to replace the paper. This is why so many cash registers use them, along with shipping labellers, and undersea explorers.
“Recently, a few accidents of implementation gave more life to my tinkerings than I had originally intended.” So begins James Adam’s introduction to Go Free Range’s Printer, an open source kit “for exploring the possibilities of internet-of-things printing.” He adds two more reasons to dig thermal printers. First, their serial port makes it easy for hardware hackers to work with them. Second, “thermal printers are smaller than normal printers, which makes them seem far less intimidating and more playful.”
With allergies and asthma I’m interested in both the indoor and outdoor air quality. I heat with a Quadrafire woodstove. It is suppose to be a clean stove. I was interested in the impact on both my inside air (ie. ash/dust) and outside air (smoke). New York State monitors the air quality at several locations around the State. Certified Allergy & Asthma Consultants in Albany NY published daily pollen counts. I have several weatherstations collecting data ( KNYREXFO1 [barn roof], KNYCLIFT1 [garage roof]),
There are several citizen group projects that are developing open source equipment (e.g. Air Quality Egg). There are several recent discussions about adding a Particulate sensor. The Egg Project aims to give citizens a way to participate in the conversation about air quality. It is composed of a sensing device that measures the air quality in the immediate environment and an on-line community that is sharing this information in real-time. It is a community-developed, open source project that is driven by people who care about the air they breathe.
The $290 DC1100 Pro Air Quality is a true Laser Particle Counter with two different size ranges. The small channel (0.5> Micron) should see bacteria and mold. The Large channel (2.5> micron) should see dust and pollen. The LCD display constantly shows bargraphs and values for the small and large particles. The unit saves 30 days of air quality data. I ordered the unit with the PC Interface Option and connected it to an Arduino Ethernet so I can automatically log the data to Pachube. That way air quality alerts can be triggered and sent to twitter and my cell phone.
We’ve built an open-source distributed software system for making it simple to produce really great looking content on little printers like that in the IoT printer kit. Take a look here: http://gofreerange.com/printer. I strongly suspect that it would be trivial to get this working with the IoT kit itself. Anyone fancy giving it a go?
Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer. Build an “Internet of Things” connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4″ wide receipt paper. The example sketch we’ve written will connect to Twitter’s search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you’ve gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.
The project is not very difficult but does require some light soldering, so you’ll want to have a little experience with a soldering iron. You’ll also need a small flathead screwdriver to assemble the box. It’s also best if you’ve had a little Arduino experience so you can feel comfortable downloading the IDE and uploading our example sketch.
This pack does not contain an Arduino+Arduino Ethernet Shield, Arduino Ethernet or Ethernet cable To complete the project you will need to add either an Arduino + Ethernet Shieldor an Arduino UNO Ethernet. If you’re using an Arduino UNO Ethernet you will also need an FTDI friend or FTDI cable to upload the sketch. A plain straight-thru Ethernet cable is also required (any length)
The Internet of Things Assistant is a Ruby on Rails application that can act as a front-end for an Adafruit Internet of Things Printer. It turns your IoT Printer into a handy assistant that will print out snippets of information you tell it to at a certain time each day, or on demand.
Features
Multi-user support. Any number of users can share one printer (for example a team in an office, or a family at home).
A web-based interface to pick what you want printed and when.
Scheduled-based printing; print once a day at the time you specify on the days you specify.
On-demand printing; print whenever you like at the touch of a button.
Administration interface for configuring your Assistant; e.g. disallowing new user creation and downloading the code for your Printer.
The application can be deployed on Heroku using the cedar stack.
In addition, the following ‘modules’ for the printouts are included by default:
Adafruit IoT Printer Project Pack “Internet of Things” printer. Build an “Internet of Things” connected mini printer that will do your bidding! This is a fun weekend project that comes with a beautiful laser cut case. Once assembled, the little printer connects to Ethernet to get Internet data for printing onto 2 1/4″ wide receipt paper. The example sketch we’ve written will connect to Twitter’s search API and retrieve and print tweets according to your requests: you can have it print out tweets from a person, a hashtag, mentioning a word, etc! Once you’ve gotten that working, you can of course easily adapt our sketch to customize the printer.
The project is not very difficult but does require some light soldering, so you’ll want to have a little experience with a soldering iron. You’ll also need a small flathead screwdriver to assemble the box. It’s also best if you’ve had a little Arduino experience so you can feel comfortable downloading the IDE and uploading our example sketch.
This pack does not contain an Arduino+Arduino Ethernet Shield, Arduino Ethernet or Ethernet cable To complete the project you will need to add either an Arduino + Ethernet Shieldor an Arduino UNO Ethernet. If you’re using an Arduino UNO Ethernet you will also need an FTDI friend or FTDI cable to upload the sketch. A plain straight-thru Ethernet cable is also required (any length)
Printable catalog (PDF)
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