Arduino

The Arduino platform is a inexpensive way for controlling and measurement job. Arduino as an open source electronics prototyping platform is flexible, easy-to-learn, and easy-to-use. The single-board micro controller is equipped with an 8-bit Atmel AVR micro controller and most interfaces are accessible from the outside through pins.

In this section are some scripts available to gather data from the Arduino open-source electronics prototyping platform.


  • Arduino LED commander is a simple GUI for controlling an output pin of the Arduino. This project was made as a little tutorial/example to show the possibility of controlling an Arduino microcontroller with a GTK interface.

    For more details, checkout the following blog entry.

    Source code

    The source is available at: https://gitorious.org/arduino-led

    Arduino LED commander is licensed under GPLv3+, for more details check COPYING.


    Screenshot

    The toggle button is used to set a digital pin of the Arduino on and off.

    arduino-led-commander

    Video

    If you want to see the UI in action, there is a small video available.


  • Without Ethernet shield the ways to get data in your network are limited. ardunio-html shows a quick and dirty solution if you intend to use your Arduino connected to a computer over USB.

    Let’s assume that there is working temperature sensor (1 or 2) connected to your Arduino that is printing his value to the serial console.

    Source code

    The source is available at: https://gitorious.org/arduino-html

    arduino-html is licensed under GPLv3+, for more details check COPYING.

  • arduino-textfile is a very simple python script to store by the Arduino collected data in a text file. A serial connection over USB is needed to get the sensor values from microcontroller.

    Let’s assume that there is working temperature sensor (1 or 2) connected to your Arduino that is printing his value to the serial console.

    Output

    The output is tab-separated and every line contains a time stamp and the sensor value.

    15:42:48    23.50
    15:42:51    23.50
    15:42:54    23.50
    15:42:57    23.50
    15:43:00    23.50
    15:43:07    23.50

    The file can imported into a spreadsheet or proceed with gnuplot.

    Source code

    The source is available at: https://gitorious.org/arduino-textfile

    arduino-textfile is licensed under GPLv3+, for more details check COPYING.

  • With arduino-xmpp you are able to send sensor values to a XMPP/Jabber recipient. This script is running without Ethernet Shield. Through the serial connection and some lines of python the Arduino will talk to the rest of the world over over XMPP.

    arduino-xmpp is using pyfirmata and is designed to work with all available pin. At the moment only one digital pin is enabled.

    Source code

    The source is available at: https://gitorious.org/arduino-xmpp

    arduino-xmpp is licensed under GPLv3+, for more details check COPYING.

If you are interested in software solutions for the Arduino platform please visit the following page.

For more details please refer to the Arduino website and this Wikipedia article.

TI Launchpad MSP430

LaunchPad is an easy-to-use development tool for creating microcontroller-based applications. The LaunchPad development kit is a part of the Texas Instruments MSP430 Value Line series. The LaunchPad board has an integrated DIP target socket that supports up to 20 pins. This allow the sage of MSP430 Value Line devices.

For more details please refer to the TI LaunchPad website.