ioBridge tells us when someone’s at HackPGH

schmarty — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:54:21 +0000

Last Friday, HackPittsburgh was lucky enough to get an in-person presentation and demo of the ioBridge, a fantastic way to wire up your electronics projects to the web. On top of that, the ioBridge team was nice enough to donate one of their awesome IO-204 control modules, and a handful of expansion modules!

Members Andy Leer and Marty McGuire thought that a nice first project for our ioBridge would be a shop presence notification system. The idea is simple: the ioBridge senses the ambient light in the shop. A web-widget reads this data from the ioBridge service, and displays an open sign if the light level is above a certain threshold, or a closed sign in the light level is below threshold. If the module is offline, we should not display the widget at all.

Step 1 – Prepare the ioBridge

Set up your ioBridge with the ambient light sensor module on channel 1 and connect it to the internet. Next, register your module as described on the ioBridge Interface page.

Step 2 – Get your module’s Feed ID

On the Modules page, copy your Feed URL by right-clicking on the link shown below and copying it to the clipboard.

This URL gives you a JSON snapshot of the state of your module, including its ID, Online/Offline status, and the status of the lines on each channel. Now, we need to do something with this data!

Step 3 – Feed your module data to jQuery

jQuery is an excellent JavaScript foundation library for making AJAX techniques easy. In this case, we’ll be using jQuery to periodically load the JSON-formatted data from the ioBridge and update parts of the web page accordingly. Below is the code for a simple test page that will display the Online/Offline status of the module, and whether the ambient light is over 500 (on a scale of 0–1023):

Step 4 – Pretty It Up

The last part of this project involved creating a couple of images to indicate lights-on/lights-off and some changes in the code to show the appropriate image only if the ioBridge appears to be Online. Here are the images that Andy created:

Because we use Wordpress to host this blog, it was a pretty simple matter to add jQuery to the main template, and create a plain HTML widget that includes all of the correct code:

This is what it looks like at time of writing, with the ioBridge online and the shop lights off:

ioBridge Demo – Friday, Nov. 13 @ 7pm

schmarty — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:05:14 +0000

Want to put some sensor data on the internet? Maybe you’d like to go the other way and control your project remotely over the web? You can do all of these things, and more, without having to set up your own server and without writing code using an ioBridge!

On Friday, November 13th, at 7pm, ioBridge developer (and comedian) Hans Scharler will visit HackPittsburgh to give a demo of the ioBridge IO-204 I/O module, show off some of its capabilities, and answer questions about what you can do with it!

As a Friday event, this talk is open to the public, so bring your friends!

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about the ioBridge (or get one of your own), you can check out the ioBridge website, ioBridge blog, and ioBridge FAQ.