We wanted to take a moment and thank all of our customers, users, developers, and everyone that makes up the ioBridge Community. Our wish to you and yours is that you have a safe and happy holiday season. Enjoy your downtime, friends, and family. See you in the New Year!
Enjoy some projects…
Xmas-Box.com — Interactive Christmas lights sync to music, songs are selected on web site, and if you are local you can listen to the music on your radio as you watch
Pacific Lights -- Control Christmas lights in New Zealand
Serv O’Beer -- Have your iPhone pour a beverage for your New Year’s party
Santa vs. Domo -- Play with some interactive toys on Andy Leer’s blog and let Santa have it
iPhone Controlled Lights -- Control your Christmas lights with a touch of your iPhone using the open ioBridge PHP Proxy
Pete from Pete’s Fishcam and TankedCam fame got a great writeup on MoreControl.com. His system uses the ioBridge IO-204 to control and monitor his fish tank from anywhere.
“Designed for the iPhone/iPod (and Mac/PC desktop), the TankedCam app allows you to turn your Atlantis into an aquatic home automation paradise.”
Who knew when Steve aka “polymythic” posted his ioBridge project using iTurn to pour a real beer that it would get over 100k hits on YouTube and make it into print. Well, if you check out the April 2009 issue of Popular Science you will find Steve’s Serv O’Beer is the “Build of the Month” in the How 2.0 section of the magazine. There’s a photo of the latest version of the system with a sturdier frame made of Contrux and an ioBridge IO-204 to link the iPhone to a web application to drive a servo. You can read all about on Popular Science and learn how to build your own Servo O’Beer at Instructables.
Polymythic released another amazing project using his favorite microcontroller (the Arduino) and the ioBridge IO-204 driving the interface. The context for Steve’s latest project is “How do I get the Arduino and ioBridge to work together?” and “My friend wants to shot Airsoft targets in his house”. When you combine those two thoughts you end up with an automated, in-house Airsoft target range. He loads up a target program using a web page (via his iPod Touch) which sends command via the IO-204 to the Arduino which in turn controls servos that have target faces on them. By the looks of the Wolfenstein perspective in the video, the system looks fun to play with.
The interaction between the Arduino and the ioBridge IO-204 is done by using the PWM output of the ioBridge servo module to a PWM input on the Arduino. The interface is a web page of widgets that when clicked, sends a specific PWM output value. When you click a button, “800″, the ioBridge servo board sends “800″ to the Arduino and the Arduino executes a function in a look up table. The Arduino also triggers an output pin that is sent back to the ioBridge module to tell the ioBridge module it’s ready for another command. Very clever.
Check out the “Arduino/ioBridge Airsoft Target Range” blog post on Steve’s Polymythic Blog for a full write up on the project, Arduino source code, and a full-length instructional video — the whole shooting match. You can also find a few posts on his blog about weaving and bow making and the original Serv O’Beer project.
We have just released some more iPhone and iPod Touch enhancements for ioBridge’s interface to your IO-204 Monitor and Control Modules. (I wanted to say ioPhone!) Give thanks to the community for making these requests.
Persistent Log In
Even when you navigate away from Safari, you will stay signed in, so your ioBridge Dashboard will be easily accessible. Clear your cookies and sign in again to try out the new feature.
Add to Home Screen
Add ioBridge to your home screen, so you can always have quick access to your dashboard. When you sign in, click “+” at the bottom of the iPhone/iPod Touch and touch, “Add to Home Screen”. Name it what you want and touch “Add”. We also created an iPhone friendly icon for your home screen.
Dashboard
The ioBridge Dashboard is now quite larger and fills the screen when landscape oriented (without having to zoom in and out).
Let us know how this works out for everyone. We have tested and these enhancements make the dashboard very useful.
Posted in Source Code by iobridge
December 20, 2008
The iPod Touch and iPhone have an accelerometer that adjusts the screen orientation (among other things). You can tap into the orientation and execute widgets depending on the orientation of the device by using a simple HTML file with some Javascript. Put an HTML file on a web server that you can get to on your iPod Touch or iPhone.
Part of the Apple Web Kit is the command “onorientationchange”. We will use that to detect the orientation change and call a script called “updateOrientation()”.
Add the following command to the BODY tag:
1
onorientationchange="updateOrientation();"
Place the following function in the HEAD of the document and call certain widgets at the specific orientation angles of 0°, -90°, and 90°. You can call any type of widget adjusting the position of a servo, controlling a digital output, or setting the state of an X10 widget.
