Fun with Arduino
I am sure that many of you already know what an Arduino is. For those who are unfamiliar with an Arduino, it is an open source hardware project. It empowers electronics hobbyists to build awesome projects without having to waste too much time on the dirty work. For more accurate description, I strongly urge you to read: http://arduino.cc/
If you are looking for a more powerful piece of hardware, you should be getting a raspberry pi: http://www.raspberrypi.org/ Its a $50 CPU; you could connect external mouse, key board and monitor to have a bare-bones computer.
Using an arduino, one can read data of sensors easily. For instance, temperature could be read out of an temperature sensor IC. Based on the type of the sensor IC, the value of the temperature is either analog (as in LM35), in which case we could use the pins A0-A5 to directly read the output of the sensor, or if we use a sensor like TC74A0 we could use the I2C protocol to read the temperature out of the memory of the IC. A detailed description of how to implement this functionality is shown in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJX0BRUagCg
The next step is to log the temperature data on to a memory. I use an SD card for memory storage. Writing data on to a SD card using arduino is a straight forward task: it is extremely well explained in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5A3j7Rrco. I use a radioshack SD shield, supporting both SD and micro SD, instead of the shield shown in the video. However, the code shown in this video works well even for the other SD shield.
By hooking up the temperature sensor and SD card, its easy to log temperature data. The following chart plots the room temperature between 2PM and 6PM in my living room.
Karthik
If you are looking for a more powerful piece of hardware, you should be getting a raspberry pi: http://www.raspberrypi.org/ Its a $50 CPU; you could connect external mouse, key board and monitor to have a bare-bones computer.
Using an arduino, one can read data of sensors easily. For instance, temperature could be read out of an temperature sensor IC. Based on the type of the sensor IC, the value of the temperature is either analog (as in LM35), in which case we could use the pins A0-A5 to directly read the output of the sensor, or if we use a sensor like TC74A0 we could use the I2C protocol to read the temperature out of the memory of the IC. A detailed description of how to implement this functionality is shown in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJX0BRUagCg
The next step is to log the temperature data on to a memory. I use an SD card for memory storage. Writing data on to a SD card using arduino is a straight forward task: it is extremely well explained in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v5A3j7Rrco. I use a radioshack SD shield, supporting both SD and micro SD, instead of the shield shown in the video. However, the code shown in this video works well even for the other SD shield.
By hooking up the temperature sensor and SD card, its easy to log temperature data. The following chart plots the room temperature between 2PM and 6PM in my living room.
Karthik
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