Planet Arduino

You’ve now got a way to optimize your Arduino Cloud dashboards for small screens, and Facebook login for the smartphone apps and your account. It’s been a busy few weeks! Only yesterday we rolled out LoRaWAN connectivity in Arduino Cloud using The Things Stack. Now we’ve even more great features to tell you about, so let’s jump right into them.

Mobile Optimized Dashboards for Arduino Cloud

Dashboards are one of Arduino Cloud’s crowning achievements. Fully customizable, and a powerful way to control boards, devices and projects, while also letting you visualize all kinds of data. It really is a cornerstone of Arduino Cloud’s offering.

A little while ago we made some changes to widget sizes, and the way they’re labelled. It gave you a much better view of the data, and made the sizing more compact. This was the first step in a redesign of Arduino Cloud dashboards that now let us improve visibility on small screens, too. 

As you probably know, your dashboards instantly work in the free Arduino IoT Remote app, too. It gives you smartphone control with no coding required. Today this great feature gets a shot in the arm, as you can now edit a dashboard’s layout for a mobile screen.

Let’s say you add a button to a new dashboard. You can now increase its size on the big screen, but reduce its size on the mobile layout. They can be in totally different positions, too. Arduino Cloud will automatically display the dashboard in the optimal size depending on your device. So you always get the best view and most ergonomic layout.

Any settings for the widgets are maintained regardless of the dashboard size. So if you link the button to a variable on the desktop dashboard, it’s also linked for the mobile layout. This way, you can optimize the layout without having to replicate any work in the settings.

At the top of the dashboard screen, you’ll now see a mobile layout button. This lets you switch between views, so you can customize the dashboard for both screen sizes. It’s available right now, so go give it a try.

Facebook Login for Arduino Cloud

Since we’re talking about Arduino Cloud updates for small screens, we also added another minor, but very useful tweak.

You can already log into your Arduino Cloud account using Google or Apple accounts. Or your Arduino account, obviously. There’s now the option to log in by connecting to Facebook, too.

It speeds up the process by only requiring a quick button click/tap, so you can get on with building those awesome mobile dashboards even faster!

As always, we want to hear your thoughts on these changes, so please let us know over on social media.

The post Arduino Cloud gets Mobile Dashboards and Facebook Login appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Selfie Plant is an interactive installation taking pictures of itself using Arduino Yún, Facebook Graph APIs and then uploads them to Facebook. It was developed by a group of students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design during “The secret life of objects” course held also by Arduino.cc team. The final prototype was placed in the exhibition of the school, to see the interaction of the audience with it and you can see the result on Facebook.

The Selfie Plant is an attempt to provoke some thoughts above genre of expression. The Selfie Plant expresses itself in the form of nice-looking selfies, which it clicks according to its mood, weather or occasion. It mimics human behaviour, by giving it’s best pose and adjusting the camera angle to take the perfect selfie.

 

In the documentation on Github you can find all the details of the project composed by an Arduino Yún, controlling 2 servo motors and adjusting the positions of the plant and the camera stick; a python script (facebook.py) which communicates with Facebook’s graph API to post the captured photos on plant’s Facebook profile. In addition you’ll need also a LED Matrix, a Bread Board and 5 Volt Battery.

Here’s a preview of the diagram:

 

Building hardware is exciting because you get to interact with the "real world". In this project you will use the LightBlue Bean to receive notifications from Facebook and Twitter

Read more on MAKE

Since last February our Arduino page on Facebook has been growing fast and today  we’re celebrating 100.000 fans: if you have an account on it, we invite you to join us and our passionate community on Facebook!

United States, India and Italy are the countries giving more “likes” to the page, but we receive videos, pictures and inquires from all over the world.

From now on we’ll be regularly posting on this blog  updates and cool projects  shared by people on our social channels.

Just to give you an idea of what comes up, here’s three  great videos posted by our fans on the Arduino page:

• Super Jeep Final

 

•  Les petits pilous

 

• Trashcan with PET detector

Using an Arduino Uno equipped with an Ethernet Shield and an LCD Keypad shield, MAKE reader Kedume demonstrates how to create a simple text display for the number of likes on any Facebook page. I think that this is a great project for an Arduino beginner because all you need [...]

Read the full article on MAKE

This time Arduino for drinks, always from Romania.

Do you know what you get if you combine Facebook, Twitter, Arduino, Raspberry PI and alcohol ? Well, you get the Social Drink Machine and a lot of really happy people at HowToWeb Bucharest.
The Social Drink Machine involves a fully enabled robotic bar which prepares your dream cocktail, a Facebook application which you use to order the drink and also a Twitter bot as an alternative ordering method.

In order to “drink with Facebook”, all you have to do is to scan the QR code displayed next to the machine with your mobile phone. It will get you to a Facebook application which enables you to choose the drink you want. Once you have decided what you want to drink, the application displays a large QR code on your mobile phone. You show this to the machine camera, and you will get your drink prepared. Actually, a robotic machine will prepare it for you. All you have to do is to place the glass, which is then moved back and forth until all of the ingredients have been mixed. And if you wanna brag about this, the application allows you to post on Facebook about the crush you just got on the cool robotic bartender.

[Robofun - Create] also made this.