Friday 7 September 2012

Eat your dinner Imp!

Connecting things to the cloud

I wanted a fun way to learn the Electric imp platform and refresh an old web app using jquery mobile.

The challenge! My 4 year old takes about 45 mins to eat her dinner and will soon having school meals. She’ll be staving by time I come to pick her up. So we’ve been using cooker timer to help speed things up.

"Eat your dinner" is a simple hardware timer running on the Imp with illuminated push buttons for control & feedback of elapsed time. The web app talks to the Imp cloud platform and a lamp server. The App & Imp display the timings of each stage. 

Stage timings can be changed using sliders on the App. The lamp server has in memory db for real time status posted from the Imp & a SQLite db for historic time stamped data displayed the Apps graphs. A wee video of it all in action is below.

I would like to thank other imper’s for their support especially Rob @Fen for blinking me up and Hugo for getting his bathroom renovated! I've been connecting real world things to web for over 6 years and it has never been this easy & fun. In my humble option Electric imp is a game changer.



Hardware



Web app
As non programmer JQM isn’t too easy to script when providing status updates from server side events. I think a move from Ajax polling & PHP to node.js & web sockets would be a better solution at the client end.
  




No comments:

Post a Comment