More Particle madness

The graphics in this post will no longer work now that I have started a new project with this particle.

Now that I’ve mastered (!) publishing sensor readings from a Particle device and visualizing them with ThingSpeak, it’s time to step up my game a little bit. I have an old BMP180 temperature and pressure sensor that I thought was toast. I’m glad I didn’t throw it out because it seems to be working well.

A static view of temperature and pressure data from a BMP180 sensor connected to a Particle Xenon.

I was interested in this sensor because it reports two values. If I want to send both values to ThingSpeak using the Particle tutorial, I would have to set up two webhooks (and possibly two channels). That seems like a lot of work. I sought an alternative. The particle community has several discussions (such as this one) that show how to do it.

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House temperature monitor

With surprisingly few problems, I have been able to set up a mesh network with a node that is monitoring the temperature of my house. AND I figured out a way to show it dynamically on a web page:

Read on to see the workflow

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It’s elemental

I recently purchased a few particles in part because they are little devices that are named after elements that allow you to connect sensors to the internet; what about these items does not scream BoBtheChemist?

I’m currently running through some tutorials and am sure to forget a thing or three, so I’m going to chronicle my experience in hopes to (a) have a central repository for my work, (b) show that my website does have some activity (c) possibly serve as a resource for the 1-2 bots that frequent my website.

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Up up and away

Do you know what a film canister is?  It’s a small plastic container that used to contain film.  Do you know what film is?  If you don’t, chances are you were born after 2003, which is about the time when digital photography overtook film photography.  It’s interesting that the container that was used to store film has actually outlived the film itself; you can buy packs of film canisters on Amazon for about $0.50 a piece.  They are useful for storage, art projects and film canister rockets.

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