Tag Archives: Arduino

Arduino YUN powered Home Surveillance Rover

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In a previous article (Internet of things), we looked into how to make a Web Controlled Mobile Home Surveillance rover. In this article, we will look into how to optimize the previous rover in every ways possible.

Disadvantages of Rover V1
1) The cost of building the rover was exorbitant. There were many circuits involved which could have been avoided.
2) There was an additional cost involved and this was the power cost. In order to power these circuits, many power supplies were required because every circuit had different voltage and current requirements.
3) Another factor was that the HTML used to control the rover was coded without AJAX which meant every command required whole page load. This caused many requests to the Rover to be skipped as the Wifi shield was not able to handle it and controlling the rover was very difficult.
4) As the eye of the rover was through Raspberry Pi camera and control was through Arduino, the viewfinder and control page were different and hence navigating the rover was difficult.

Advantages of Rover V2

1) The cost of building the rover was brought down as instead of 4 boards (i.e. Arduino UNO, Arduino Wifi shield, Arduino Motor shield and Raspberry Pi), only 2 boards sufficed (i.e. Arduino YUN and Arduino Motor shield).
2) Power cost has been reduced as only 2 boards have to be powered.
3) Controlling the Rover has become very smooth as AJAX requests are very efficient and the YUN handles these very efficiently.
4) The viewfinder and Controls are on the same page using iframes.

Arduino Yun Rover Continue reading →

Web Controlled Table Lamp using Arduino Yun and Yaler

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Anyone reading the title will definitely wonder why a Table Lamp would ever need to be switched On or Off via the Internet. Well, until unless there is something so special with a Lamp being On or Off, there is no reason for a Lamp to be controlled via the Internet. The logic here is that if you can control a Lamp over the Internet, why not any other Electrical appliance? You can control your home cooling or heating, you can control home lighting when you are on vacation (to simulate that the house is still occupied), you can check whether you have kept an Iron switched On or not, etc. According to me, the biggest product Arduino has come out with is the Yun. It is like the controller meant for Internet of Things. Just add a relay to it and you can control any Electrical Appliance over the Internet. Continue reading →

Control Input Output of Arduino Yun with AJAX

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Arduino has gone totally IoT with the Arduino Yun. It has both Wireless and wired connectivity options. IoT doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to deal with Cloud drives, automated inputs, automatic backup to SQL database, etc. It can also mean that your inputs and outputs are user controlled albeit over the Internet. In my previous project, I made a rover which would be controlled by a web interface. Since the webpage was designed such that it would load the whole page depending on each user input (this is how HTML works), many times the http request would timeout as the Arduino was not able to process whole page loads. I had to find out a way in which the web page would not have to change each time I changed the direction of the rover. This is where AJAX comes into picture. What AJAX enables us to do is send a request to the Arduino and get a reply from the Arduino while not requiring a page reload. Since I learn stuff as and when there is a requirement, I scoured the Internet for folks who had already implemented such a thing. The only article on the Internet which dealt with Arduino Yun and AJAX was “Interact and remotely control Arduino YUN with Ajax” by Boris Landoni. Continue reading →