Posts Tagged ‘pCharts’

EduTechnica.com

// February 14th, 2010 // Comments Off // Portfolio

EduTechnica.comThe Problem: Learning management system administrators have little insight into how their users are actually using their systems. In additon, not even the developers of the LMS systems know how many users they have, what versions their clients run, or what plugins are installed.

The Solution: EduTechnica.com provides a free plugin for learning management systems that collects aggregated and anonymous data directly from the LMS systems. By using our plugin, administrators can find ways to optimize their systems, provide cost justifications, analyze usage trends, and compare all of this to the rest of the industry. Industry-wide trends can quickly become visible out of what used to be only guessed at or assumed. Trends can be shared using the integrated social networking site and sharing of best practices can be easily facilitated.

The Technology: The plugins are built using various technologies based on the LMS system. The backend for data collection is a Java-based application and the data presentation layer uses PHP, MySQL, and Javascript. Custom pCharts classes and SocialEngine provide the framework.

Visit www.edutechnica.com

Arduino Web Interface

// December 4th, 2009 // Comments Off // Portfolio

arduino_temp The Problem: As part of my continuing experimentation with the Arduino platform and working towards my goal of the Brewduino, I wanted a way to have the Arduino publish data to the web.

The Solution: Live (well, so long as I have the arduino dedicated to the purpose) view of the current temperature in my home office.

The Technology: This project got my feet wet in the world of Python scripting. There’s a SerialPy class that monitors the USB port on my desktop. The Arduino passes the current temperature from a sensor into the serial bus. The Python script pushed the temperature and date to a web service running that updated a MySQL database. Finally, a PHP script pulled the most recent update and displayed it to the world.

This was more of a proof of concept into finding a way to store the data from the Arduino. Onboard storage is tight and working with external storage on the Arduino gets messy. I like the idea of using a web-based application to store and hopefully control the Arduino which would allow me to track temperature (brewing and fermentation) over a period of time, store procedures to be loaded on demand, etc. I have some pCharts I started tinkering with to get the temp data plotted.