I mentioned LiveGraph in the post about my Arduino I2C sniffer sketch, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail about it, because it’s also really handy for visualizing data recorded with the Datalogger Shield. LiveGraph is nice because it’s easy to install, easy to use, and it’s written in Java, so it’s cross-platform. Another nice feature is the native support of CSV files, and the ability to quickly export the graph as an image file.

That said, there are a few things you should keep in mind when using it, which will make your life easier:

1. When you are creating the format for your CSV file, put the time axis as the first entry, and make it a single value field, such as minutes or seconds (LG cannot parse a colon-delimited “time” format, i.e. 12:34:56).
2. By default, LiveGraph uses samples as it’s x-axis, and plots the first field in the CSV as regular data. This means when you first load the CSV file, you’ll see a straight diagonal line on your graph which may dominate the plot. You can turn this off by clicking the appropriate checkbox in the “data series settings” window.
3. You can tell LG to use time (the first field in the CSV) as the x-axis by choosing “data series” at the bottom of the “graph settings” window. This is exceedingly helpful if you are not logging data at regular intervals, but rather whenever some event occurs.
4. If you want to export your plot as an image, you can do that through the “LiveGraph” window in the “plot” menu. Something to remember though: even though you’ve chosen the image file type (jpg, png, etc.) you still have to manually add the extension to the file name (“myplot.png”).

You can download the software and check out the manual here. LiveGraph is released under the BSD license and you can check out the source code at sourceforge. Happy plotting!

*In case you are wondering, the plot above represents barometric data collected with the logger shield and a pressure sensor on the Protoshield. It’s recording the relative pressure change as I venture into New York City. Those two high peaks, representing higher pressure, are under the Hudson river.

Marvelous! The folks at Adaptive Path made a fridge alarm with a magnet + hall effect sensor, a buzzer, an Arduino, and an Adafruit Proto Shield. Dane writes:

At Adaptive Path’s San Francisco studio, we had a fussy refrigerator that wouldn’t always latch when it was shut. Sometimes the fridge would sit open for hours, spoiling food and wasting all the unicorn tears and panda fur oil, before someone would discover it had been left open.

Like any good tinkerers we fixed the problem with technology, devising an alarm that would let us know when the fridge had been left open for too long. Whenever the pleasant sound of the 80s echoed through the office, we knew the fridge needed our attention.

Extra points for the choice of music

Nice work, folks!

A great Instructable about using the Adafruit protoshield inside a four-contestant gameshow system. RoysterBot writes:

If you have ever watched a TV quiz show you have probably seen contestants trying to press a button in order to win a chance to answer a question. The contestant’s quick reaction time results in some kind of light and/or sound indicating victory. This is a practical way to choose the next focus of the game’s activity and it adds a bit of excitement to the process. So when the holiday party planning committee decided to have a trivia contest I decided to build a quiz contestant lockout system to add an extra dimension of fun to the festivities. This would help the planning committee’s mission of creating some entertaining activities for the event.

The minimum requirements were to have a system with multiple buttons that contestants press for a chance to answer a question. The first one to press the button would lock out the other contestants. The system would need to have a simple way to quickly identify who pushed their button first. And finally the system would need to be reset for the next round.

Considering the venue of the holiday party (an upscale wine bar) I felt that the contestant buttons would be one of the most important features. They needed to be hefty and able to withstand abuse by hoards of “beverage enhanced” partygoers.

LenP17 built a capacitor meter using the new Adafruit Arduino enclosure and LCD. The cap in question is placed in the sweet spot of a 555 circuit, and the resulting frequency is measured, correlated to a particular capacitance, and then displayed by the Arduino.

More info in the forums.

Nice work, Len!

…the boys soldered together an Arduino Proto Shield kit from Adafruit. You can witness their amazing efforts in super-speed time, where sixty minutes of inhaling metallic fumes has been condensed into three power-packed minutes!

This is an extra large protoshield designed by Arduino for the Mega. We include 2 sticks of 36 pin header, 5 8-pin female headers and a 6-pin female header to allow easy pluggin’

I thought you might enjoy this. I made a Braitenberg Roomba with an Arduino and Protoshield purchased from you. Here’s a video!

For a soon-to-be-released project I needed to have a character LCD display. I’ve got a box with a few of those $10 parallel LCDs that are so popular.

There’s even a few libraries at the Arduino playground for easy use. Dave Fowler from uCHobby even started out with a great tutorial. However, I didn’t see any good tutorials on how to do the actual -connecting- part. So I took pix while I wired up one to a protoshield and tested it.

Read all about it at my LCD tutorial page!
(Or if you just want an LCD that’s ready to plug in, you can check out this cool blue LCD shield from nuelectronics.com)

First off, I have more Arduino boards in stock. Hopefully they will last more than a week.

Second, the protoshield PCBs are in! Hooray! This is a really nice protoshield for NG/Diecimila Arduinos

Nice! Full kits and PCBs are available.

Third, I have an Arduino Starter Pack which is a bundle of stuff that will get you going with Arduino hacking with ease!

There’s an Arduino, USB cable, proto shield kit, tiny breadboard (goes on top of protoshield), 9V wall adapter, 9V battery holder, and a bag of parts that will get you started with my Arduino Tutorial lessons 0-6

Fourth, we have all those fun Arduino accessories in the shop: USB cables, 9V battery holders, 9V regulated wall adapters, small and tiny breadboards, as well as extra Arduino microcontrollers with my “no-wait” hack that speeds up development

Yow!