Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Resurecting the Arduino/Xbee/Gumstix sensor network

About four years ago, I built a simple sensor network that used a couple of Arduinos, a Gumstix Linux mini computer and Xbee wireless that acted as an indoor-outdoor temperature display. A couple of years back, the outdoor part of the system stopped working. I poked it and prodded it and finally just decided the Arduino clone I was using had died.

Finally, after it had sat on my shelf for a couple of years, I figured I should start to look at salvaging some of the parts for something new. Just as a last chance, I once again unplugged the processor and juggled the wires and suddenly, it works like a charm!! As with most thing, the threat of imminent destruction got it moving!

Anyway, in honour of it's miraculous recovery, I have fixed up my blog posts and reinserted the graphics Google lost for me. The posts can be found at:

  1. Overview of the sensor network
  2. Indoor Outdoor temp display
  3. Xbee -Gumstix hardware
  4. Gumstix-Arduino software

This project is pretty old now and obviously could be done much more easily with newer models of Arduino like the Yun, but it does show some good basics on getting Zigbee and PHP and Arduino all working together. Apparently, too, it is capable of great longevity!

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Apologies and fixes!

Hello all,

It has been a very, very, very long time since I have updated this blog, but I am still around!

I just wanted to take a moment to apologize to the few of you who might stumble onto this blog and find that the graphics are missing. It seems a while ago Google changed the way it stored embedded graphics in Blogger and it messed up all the links in most of my posts! This happened a while ago and I hadn't visited in a while, but I finally got around to fixing up at least most of the posts.

I know a few people have gotten to my blog from Arduino-related searches, so I have focused on trying to fix up my Arduino related posts - although most of these are on rather antiquated hardware.

Hopefully soon I will get to some projects with the Digistump DigiSpark which is a small form factor Arduino compatible board. You can read more about it here.

Thanks!