At our daughter’s school, all the 2nd graders put together a “state board” project.  They are randomly assigned a state (in our daughter’s case, Vermont) and the students work to put together a poster on a tri-fold piece of cardboard.  From what I’ve heard, the projects often have 3D aspects like animals and products attached and several over the years have had buttons to play things like the state song.  We brainstormed possible elements we [...]

In my last post, I explored alarm monitoring using the Raspberry Pi and Arduino.  I thought I’d give the Electric Imp a try as well.  The Electric Imp is a WiFi module and Cortex-M3 processor built into an SD card form factor and available on Sparkfun for $30.  It needs a few extra bits like an ID chip to function but I picked up an Electric Imp Shield on Sparkfun to make it easy.  To configure [...]

I spotted a post by Lior Hass on Hackaday a little while back where he described his Alarmino project where his alarm system now connects with an Arduino and a custom board to simulate the phone line and interpret Contact-ID protocol.  He could then get the system to SMS him in the case of an alarm.  In his case, he did this in lieu of using a central monitoring service and it only reported events that would [...]

I wanted to control my Romo (the cellbot from Romotive) from my PC.  But I like Romotive’s control app and didn’t really want to write my own at this point using their SDK.  Instead, I just wanted to control their app from a script on my PC which hopefully would let it access all the functionality.  Of course, this meant using the protocol they use between their controller app and the app which is actually [...]