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What happened in the web/software industry is now happening with hardware: the distance between an idea and its materialization has shortened, and objects can now be created anywhere on the planet, more easily and cheaply than ever .
Slowly but surely, the capability to create objects is going down to the general public. Arduino is the poster child of the revolution, an open source board than almost anyone can use at his advantage to create simple applications in a matter of minutes
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A few months back, I bought a Current Cost electricity meter, hacked that and started pushing the data up to Pachube and displaying real-time electricity usage right here on my blog. But, electricity is only one part of the picture – we also use gas for our heating and hot water systems, and I wanted to track our usage of this too. The catch, of course, is that there doesn’t appear to be a consumer product on the market to do this for me, and I really wanted an excuse to go out and buy an Arduino and start playing with that.
My goal for this project was to hook the gas meter up to Pachube, using EEML as the format:
Archive for April 2009
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"The lack of desire to relinquish XP by users was part of what became known as the "Good Enough" revolution in both software and hardware. At the beginning of the 21st century, computing hardware had evolved sufficiently to reach a level of performance that allowed for speedy execution of virtually all common computing tasks. Prior to this, the only way to guarantee good performance was to buy expensive cutting-edge hardware. But now chips costing just a few dollars offered more performance than most people would ever need.
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"Whilst reading the feedback to my last, apparently controversial, blog post about learning a new language to improve you own skillset I noticed something about the way we, as developers, sell ourselves and describe ourselves to one another. Every developer I know, even myself is guilty of it, and there is almost an entire industry revolving around this same concept.
So, what is this? In essence, this is our need as developers to label ourselves with a particular technological expertise – for instance, you may be a PHP developer, you may be a .NET developer, you may be a Java developer – which is fine, but very few of us will just describe ourselves as just a developer, or even web developer in preference."
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"There’s a study out from McKinsey, Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing; many readers will have seen the commentary here & there around the Web. I’d recommend taking the time to page through the 34 well-put-together pages of the original. Its conclusion is deeply wrong."
Tim Bray on cloud computing.
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Well, I now have a version of the Arduino DHCP library that I feel moderately comfortable releasing to the wild. If you're interested in the background story, check out these posts.
Download here: Arduino DHCP Library v0.1
I've tested it with an Arduino Duemilanove (ATMega168), but I'm positive that there will be bugs in the code and that for some (hopefully not many) people it will just plain not work. If you do try to use it and find that it doesn't work, try using Wireshark to see what packets (if any) are flying across the wire. Even if you can't figure it out, sending Wireshark capture logs to me will be helpful for me to debug.
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Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
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A funny, interesting but sometimes scatter-gun talk at the Royal Institution by two engaging academics in the field of science communication.
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"What is a friend?" This question is constantly echoing across the internet. But, digital relationships (just like non-digtal ones) are not absolute. They are fluid. And online friendship is better described along a spectrum defined by the actions people take and how we feel about them. The more useful question for individuals and brands who are interested in cultivating online friendships is How do I move my friends from acquaintanceship to "best friendliness"?
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"When I think of communication in a large group of people, I imagine a pond. Small, round, slightly green water. You can see the edges of this pond and there’s a willow tree over there looking both informed and sad. Metaphorically, all the people in the organization are standing somewhere on this pond. Our positions are based on whom we know and where we are in the organization chart. When something happens in the company, when something noteworthy is said, a drop falls in the pond and creates a ripple."
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"With the help of super awesome ruby hacker Mike Dalessio, I wrote an XML/HTML parsing library for ruby called Nokogiri. What is so great about Nokogiri? Well, for one it is really easy to parse HTML or XML:"
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The family business of N.R. Bardwell was established in 1944 selling electronic components. Today it is still very much a family affair with five family members involved.
We have widened the stock to include many other electrical items. However not all our stock is included on the web site. Please get in touch if you do not see what you require.
Callers are welcome at our shop at 288 Abbeydale Road, Sheffield S7 1FL. Hours 9.30 am- 5.00pm Monday – Saturday inclusive.
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In this post I will try to show, why it’s a good idea to use a current limiting resistor for an LED. And when it’s save to drive the LED without any resistor.
If you read about LEDs, you will notice that everyone tells you, that you need a current limiting resistor. But mostly they do not tell you why.
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Here is an alphabetical list of online mathematics books, textbooks, monographs, lecture notes, and other mathematics related documents freely available on the web.
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Google is tight-lipped about its computing operations, but the company for the first time on Wednesday revealed the hardware at the core of its Internet might at a conference here about the increasingly prominent issue of data center efficiency.
With all the controversy over MPs’ expenses, I wasn’t unduly surprised to see that Parliament have released the raw data in PDF form. Nice for presentational purposes, but bugger-all use for analysis. Funny, that?
I briefly toyed with attempting to convert from PDF to spreadsheet, but the Guardian got there first – and they’ve released the raw data in Google spreadsheet form so anyone can mash it up and see what happens. Cue some hacking…
MySociety’s TheyWorkForYou site has an API that allows you to do all kinds of intriguing things, including retrieving geographical data about constituencies. A few Ruby scripts later, I’ve got the raw data pulled down – the latitude and longitude of the constituency centre point, from which it’s a very quick job to calculate the distance from Westminster using a great circle calculation. I figured that as I was mainly interested in travel, using Westminster tube station as the centre point from which distances were calculated would be a good-enough approximation. Of course, it’s a bit of a rough calculation – the centre of the constituency isn’t necessarily the point from which the Member travels, and if the constituency has an odd shape it’ll distort the result slightly. But no more than they’ve been distorting the system…
The results are here –> http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pX5xUAGpnOKXBe3rY77M9AA&hl=en_GB There are one or two glitches – for some reason, the Northern Ireland constituencies don’t have lat/long data so those are broken, and there’s the possibility that things got slightly mixed up for MPs that share surnames. But a quick scan suggests it’s OK.
The next stage would be to start correlating between distances and expenditure on travel, and plotting this in interesting ways. Cue a rapid learning curve on Google Maps. This is something of an overnight hack project, but it does raise some interesting questions about the way data can be interpreted in ways that the originators probably didn’t expect – I’d be amazed if Google Maps mashups ever crossed the minds of the Commons Fees Office when they (reluctantly) released the information. Given the raw data, some controversy and geeks with time on their hands, it’s unsurprising that interesting things result.
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Wordics is a tool that generates colorful word clouds from text. The sizes of the words in the cloud are different. They depend upon the importance of the words which is measured by their frequency in the text compared to their natural occurrence in the language.
