The ioBridge Team will be at Hack Pittsburgh Friday, November 13th at 7pm. We will talk about web-enabling projects and getting microcontrollers online fast and securely. The session will include hands-on demonstrations of ioBridge projects and Q&A. The presentation is open to the public. Get more details on the MAKE community bulletin board or on HackPittsburgh.org.
HackPGH is a non-profit group of makers from based in Pittsburgh, PA that runs a dedicated workshop for project development and training. To find out more about Hack Pittsburgh, visit HackPittsburgh.org – community-based activities, schedule of events, and projects.
We wanted to say thanks to everyone that visited us at the Maker Faire. We had a 10×10 booth filled with web-based projects – Scrolling LED Twitter Sign, Internet Controlled Donkey Kong, Power Monitoring, Dog Treat Dispenser, X10 Outlet Control, Temperature Charting and Logging, and an Interactive Message Center for the Serial LCD Screens. Our booth consumed 4 kWh over 2 days and peak power usage was 290 Watts.
Maker Faire Projects
Lots of people helped out to make it happen – thanks to OharaRP and thecapacity for working the LED sign. Maker Faire had some really interesting projects – underwater robots from Jesuit Robotics, a Giant LED display, Tesla Coils, Art Meets Science, cool stuff in the Maker Shed, and lots of people.
Here are some photos from Flickr of our booth before we got swarmed:
ioBridge went online in November 2008. Since that time, we have had the chance to work some really brilliant “makers” from all walks of life. Maker Faire Bay Area 2009 is May 30 and 31st in San Mateo at the fairgrounds – a gathering of people that make things, re-purpose dusty equipment, and bend circuits – our kind of people. The ioBridge team will be there with an exhibitor booth. We look forward to meeting some of the people behind all of the blogs posts, YouTube videos, and forum posts. Our booth will be filled with gizmos to play with, setup, and configure. We invite you stop by and say, “Hi” and experiment and meet the ioBridge crew. We would love to meet you and see what projects your are working on. We have a few surprises in store, so check us out. If you can’t make it to the Maker Faire, follow the action on Twitter – our booth will be live on the web!
Jason Winters, the famous Picodore and fishcam inventor himself, created a Do It Yourself (DIY) power monitoring system to chart and track power usage in your house using AC transducer clamps and an ioBridge module for web-casting the data. This project has found a lot of interest on the world wide web and the ioBridge community. Jason has used the system and discovered some amazing inefficiencies and some power suckers all around his house. I think we are interested in knowing where our money goes and how to become more efficient. I have also noticed lots of claims that this has been done before. If you dig deeper, you will find that no one has quite solved the problem quite like this and will be surprised with the ability to use it with Google Charts, Google Documents, and social networking widgets.
Jason has provided plenty of photos and details on how to recreate the power monitoring system for your own benefit. You can check out his Picobay Projects Blog or the very detailed Instructables.
