A Practical Introduction to IoT Using Arduino, Node.js and Plotly

adilmoujahid.com

55 points·adilmoujahid··8 comments

A good introduction, but a couple simplifiers:

1) You can read a photocell directly from a PC without an Arduino. The PC serial port and a couple of passive components can be used as a simple analog-to-digital converter for a cost of pennies. One of many examples can be found here: http://www.cedarlakeinstruments.com/blog/archives/10

2) Similar idea using a Beaglebone or Raspberry Pi would eliminate the Mac/PC for a more compact solution.

Those aren't simplifications. Those are optimizations. They actually require more hardware and technical know how than the original.

This article is a fantastic little recipe for what might be the easiest path to a first IoT project. It puts the maker in a perfect position to go on to add a second sensor or switch and further experiment. There needs to be much more of this type of thing on the web. Props to the author for writing this up.

Cleverly optimizing out the arduino or adding a fancy SBC to the mix are great suggestions. After you've got the basics.

I always like seeing how other people connect their arduino to the internet. I did something similar using python to read the data and then post it to Thingspeak. (my blog post: http://smallsciencebigadventures.com/arduino-temp-sensor.htm...)

Seems nice but something is weird with the layout of the article: http://i.imgur.com/qKi4JNR.png

what browser is that? I just checked IE and Chrome on Windows and Safari on OS X and it looks OK.

That would be the other one, Firefox.

Yeah, it seems to be broken when your browser window isn't wide enough.

The template is kinda disrespectful to the reader. http://imgur.com/NxgBh68

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