Arduino YUN powered Home Surveillance Rover

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

Smart phone as Security Camera

These days owning a Smart phone has become almost a must. On top of that there are those who have the urge to have the latest and greatest model. This as well as other reasons are there for quite a lot of old spare phones which are just lying at home without any use. There have been a lot of articles written about how to use these phones. Some are just silly yet useful like using it like a torch. Some are sensible like using it as a music player so that your current phone does not drain battery. Some are downright geeky like using the phone for opening a garage door. I am going to take middle ground and write about what I think is sensible use of the spare smart phone. Continue reading