So.. did anyone ever build anything useful with the nanode?
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Tee
Jul 25, 2013, 1:09:11 PM7/25/13
to nanode...@googlegroups.com
I got my nanode 1½ years ago, soldered it together immediately and looked at the blinking led. Everything was cool.
I had big plans about a small webserver, controlling some lights in the house, or the garage door, or just collecting temperatures and storing them month after month, so they could be read out later.
But then I looked at possible uses, and the coolness seemed to disappear.
First thing I noticed was that pretty much every single one of the digital in/outputs are already in use.... so theres really no easy way to control .. for example 8 leds.. just for the fun of it.
Then, after spending huge amounts of time trying to figure out how to use the ethernet... because the "documentation" is sort of non existing... to anything more than just "Hello world", I found out that there is no way this thing will ever be able to hold more than just a few lines of HTML. F.eks. You won't be able to present an HTML form with buttons, and have the nanode decode the user input.
Then finally people started to question the reliability of the nanode. That it was not really built to run 24/7 without crashing, that the TCP/IP made it crash after some time, etc.
Now, I probably know way too little of electronics to have ever been the target group of the nanode. For example I never knew of pull up/down resistors until after I had gotten completely useless readings from my nanodes ports.
So I went to my neighbour, whos an electronics geek.
He looked at the thing with some amazement, but also with fear. "This thing is not protected in any way, be careful what you connect to the inputs, or you'll fry it"- he said.
He had some ideas, but most of them involved building a completely other board that could actually do stuff, and then let the nanode control it via the serial-port... and all ideas would pretty much work out fine on their own, without the nanode.
Thats sort of when I realised that the thing was useless to me. :-/
The biggest problem I see, is the useless ethernet functionality. If you need a real webserver running anyway.. that machine could do the nanodes job.
I remember a lot of people doing some stuff with patchube. To me it seems like this is the only project that ever worked out for people... at least when they could keep the nanode running. But this is not the kind of project I would like to do. I just don't see why I would need to send my data to the other side of the world, to view it online... when I collect and look at them from the same room.
So, did anyone ever do anything useful with it?
I had big plans about a small webserver, controlling some lights in the house, or the garage door, or just collecting temperatures and storing them month after month, so they could be read out later.
But then I looked at possible uses, and the coolness seemed to disappear.
First thing I noticed was that pretty much every single one of the digital in/outputs are already in use.... so theres really no easy way to control .. for example 8 leds.. just for the fun of it.
Then, after spending huge amounts of time trying to figure out how to use the ethernet... because the "documentation" is sort of non existing... to anything more than just "Hello world", I found out that there is no way this thing will ever be able to hold more than just a few lines of HTML. F.eks. You won't be able to present an HTML form with buttons, and have the nanode decode the user input.
Then finally people started to question the reliability of the nanode. That it was not really built to run 24/7 without crashing, that the TCP/IP made it crash after some time, etc.
Now, I probably know way too little of electronics to have ever been the target group of the nanode. For example I never knew of pull up/down resistors until after I had gotten completely useless readings from my nanodes ports.
So I went to my neighbour, whos an electronics geek.
He looked at the thing with some amazement, but also with fear. "This thing is not protected in any way, be careful what you connect to the inputs, or you'll fry it"- he said.
He had some ideas, but most of them involved building a completely other board that could actually do stuff, and then let the nanode control it via the serial-port... and all ideas would pretty much work out fine on their own, without the nanode.
Thats sort of when I realised that the thing was useless to me. :-/
The biggest problem I see, is the useless ethernet functionality. If you need a real webserver running anyway.. that machine could do the nanodes job.
I remember a lot of people doing some stuff with patchube. To me it seems like this is the only project that ever worked out for people... at least when they could keep the nanode running. But this is not the kind of project I would like to do. I just don't see why I would need to send my data to the other side of the world, to view it online... when I collect and look at them from the same room.
So, did anyone ever do anything useful with it?
mikethebee
Jul 25, 2013, 3:37:20 PM7/25/13
to nanode...@googlegroups.com
My two useful projects are my Gas Meter recorder, that gave me a discrete record of our boilers gas use. This used two wireless nanodes. My MIDI keyboard sample player. And my temp monitor using a 16x1 LCD reclaimed from a video monitor and a TMP36 (http://learn.adafruit.com/tmp36-temperature-sensor/using-a-temp-sensor)
....oops, well thats my three useful projects.
Nick Rule
Jul 26, 2013, 3:25:41 AM7/26/13
to nanode...@googlegroups.com
After some fiddling (manly due to inadequate power supplies) I got my two nanodes reading river levels every three minutes and sending the data to dropbox (via an old laptop acting as a php server), to pachube (now cosm), and to my android phone home screen. At one point cosm was sending me text messages whenever the river got too high, but there were too many false alarms. The nanodes have been in place since Nov 2011, and certainly working reliably for at least the last year - I can't remember when I last rebooted either of them. The biggest remaining issue is condensation on the ultrasonic sensor that I use to measure water height, but that only seems to happen during certain weather in spring and/or autumn.
I too am looking to buy more, the cheapest I can see is a uno clone and a ethernet shield clone at approx £12 the pair at www.banggood.com (if you ignore the ethical issues). Certainly I think there is a market for arduino plus ethernet or wi-fi, as long as it is sub £20 (preferably sub £15) to separate it from the raspberry pi.
Regards
Nick
On Thursday, 25 July 2013 18:09:11 UTC+1, Tee wrote:
I too am looking to buy more, the cheapest I can see is a uno clone and a ethernet shield clone at approx £12 the pair at www.banggood.com (if you ignore the ethical issues). Certainly I think there is a market for arduino plus ethernet or wi-fi, as long as it is sub £20 (preferably sub £15) to separate it from the raspberry pi.
Regards
Nick
On Thursday, 25 July 2013 18:09:11 UTC+1, Tee wrote:
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