Joshua's Thoughts

are you a windows dev person? would you like to collab on a project involving sonar & arduino? shoot me a comment, e-mail, or twitter: joshuamc

i haven’t posted in a while, but that doesn’t mean i haven’t been doing cool stuff in what little spare time i have. i thought i’d finally record one cool project i finished.

i’m not sure what to call it other than “dynamic awareness”. in a nutshell, i interface a Maxbotix LV-EZ2 ultrasonic range-finder to my arduino diecimilia, along with a generic buzzer.

using serproxy, i channeled serial data running through my computer to network traffic. on my machine running a wamp server, i wrote a few php scripts to read the values and with ajax (using jquery) change the color of the screen to green (the farther you are) to red (the closer you are). also, the closer you get, the smaller you get.

and of course, what would a project be like these days without something twittering. you can see what this project twitters here. basically, i operated under the assumption that the closest thing to a realistic use of this system would be twitter whether or not you are at your desk.

so what does this thing do again?

arduino & sonar returns your distance away from the computer and it is displayed on the screen. the farther away you are from the computer the larger the text and the greener the screen. the closer you are, the smaller the text and the redder the screen. get within 5 inches and a buzzer alarms. distance is twittered.

how did i do the color changing?

i just used jquery to dynamically tweak the background rgb values based on the % change in distance from the screen. rgb(red,green,blue)

where’s the source?

you can download it here. any questions, shoot me a comment or twitter: joshuamc

watch the video of how it works

arduino sonar buzzer php twitter from Joshua McGinnis on Vimeo.

i’ve put together this video as a demo of “intuit checkout” – the idea that won the last intuit ideajam contest.

intuit checkout is a low-cost point of sale hardware/software solution that uses an arduino prototyping board and a parallax rfid reader.

all of the item data associated with the unique ids on the rfid’s are stored securely in a quickbase online database.

Read on…

here’s an excellent write-up on what an arduino is and what it can be used to do: link

i spent a little time last night playing with arduino and i thought i’d share this little experiment i put together.

Read on…