Planet Arduino

We’ll admit it: we sometimes overcomplicate things. Look at [Peter Weissbrod’s] automated cat feeder, for example. It isn’t anything more than a bottle, a servo, some odds and ends, and an Arduino. However, it lets him sleep in without his cat waking him for service.

We looked at the code and thought, “This thing will just dispense food all the time! That’s not what you want!” Then we looked closer. [Peter] uses a common household timer to just turn the device on in the morning, let it run for a bit, and then turns it off. You can see a video of the mechanism, below.

Honestly, we have mixed feelings. As we are sure someone’s already quit reading to comment: you don’t really need an Arduino for this. If it were doing the timing, that might make it more justifiable. Or perhaps have it sense daylight to feed in the morning. Still, Arduinos are cheap (we just picked up some tiny Pro’s for about $3) and it is a more flexible arrangement than, say, a 555 driving the servo.

We have seen many cat feeders over the years. Some of them use custom components. Others use whatever you have on hand (including another kitchen timer). However you do it, one thing is clear: When the aliens come and observe life on Earth, they will doubtless conclude that the cats are in charge.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, home hacks

There seems to be a hacker maxim that whatever gadget you are working with, it would be better to have several of them running together. That might explain the ESP8266 web server farm that [Eldon Brown] has built. Yup, a web server farm made from three of everyone’s favorite WiFi dongle, the humble ESP8266.

Eldon’s server farm is currently serving web pages here, running on three ESP8266 boards. Or it was before this posting reduced it to a smoking ruin (screenshot below just in case). Each module is running a dynamic web page and some clever programming he came up with that makes transferring data over these cheap devices quicker.

His page isn’t anything too fancy but it is impressive considering it is running on about $30 worth of hardware, including the breadboard it is wired into. The page includes dynamically-generated graphics and some back-end stuff. I don’t think that it will replace any LAMP servers anytime soon (the ESP8266 took about 2.6 seconds to generate the page below), but it is an impressive hack. [Eldon] has made the full code of the web server that is running the pages available. So, lets add web server farm to the list of things that this neat little device can handle, next to plant weigher, Bitcoin price tracker, MP3 player and many more…

Thanks to [PuceBaboon] for the tip!

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, wireless hacks

by jacobquatier.com:

Been awhile since I posted anything here, so I thought I’d use this post to give some more detail on a project I just completed. The whole idea was to create a giant meter to show website response time almost like a speedometer would. The result is something that’s both fun to watch and provides a meaningful ‘heartbeat’ of current status. After several revisions and different designs along the way, I ended up with what you see here.

Server response time meter - [Link]

by bajdi.com:

I’ve been looking for ways to control my Service droid robot, my Service droid robot has an ATmega2560 (with Arduino bootloader) and a Raspberry Pi. My goal is to control it over wifi. But I wanted to start with some more simpler things first. I’ve recently found some python code on letsmakerobots.com that lets me sent data over I2C from a Raspberry Pi to a micro controller.

Before getting this to work you need to configure I2C on the Raspberry Pi. Adafruit has written a nice guide how to do this. I also installed the python-SMBus package: sudo apt-get install python-smbus.

Controlling an Arduino through a Rapsberry Pi webserver - [Link]

L’XML-RPC è un ottimo strumento per stabilire una vasta gamma di connessioni tra i computer, per integrare ambienti e piattaforme diverse, ma senza condividere direttamente strutture di dati complesse, permette dunque di condividere tali connessioni in modo semplice e veloce. Questa tecnologia permette a Python, in questo caso, di parlare con Perl, con Java, con [...]