Gobetwino

Nico - many thanks for that; I've been meaning to play with Gobetwino for a while now and you gave me the impetus I needed! Now I need to make it do what I want it to do !!

You're very welcome, Neil! What is it you are wanting it to do?

Hi Nico

I've developed a 2 channel temperature logger which writes  data to an SD card - you may have seen my posts about problems getting the SD card to work, but that's all sorted.

I'm using this to monitor temp inside and outside my greenhouse and, ultimately, to control heating and cooling, but for the moment, just keen to learn how the temperature varies overnight - a maximum/minimum thermometer doesn't really help: It was -2  for how long? 10 mins is not so bad but 2 hours could be!

It's a bit tedious going out to collect the SD card in the mornining, to plug into my PC & view the data in Excel. At the moment I feel that investment in a second Arduino and radio transceivers is a bit over the top....... so I had this idea:

I could run my arduino with gobetwino on my netbook, in the green house, with the netbook on my home network via WiFi, but be opening an Excel file over the network on my desktop in my office and writing the data to it.......it ought to work.

My netbook runs Windows 7. I was intending to see if I could get Gobetwino and your demo to work on the netbook, as a first step.

Does it sound feasible?

I'd appreciate your comments

Neil

Hi Neil,

That sounds like a great project! I've been thinking of automating the watering in my greenhouse, but now I'm curious about the temperatures too - you make a good point about the length of the minimum temp.

I think your idea will totally work - let the netbook do the heavy lifting of long distance wireless. And it would be relatively simple to do. It didn't take much for me to open Notepad and write to it, so once you figure out what keystrokes to make for excel (or OpenOffice equivalent) the rest should be just a lather-rinse-repeat process.

You would have to add the occasional "save" keystroke in there too.

If your greenhouse is really close to the house, you could even use bluetooth to make the serial connection to the gobetwino computer. They sell them on ebay for about $12. They all seem to be class 2 (from what I've seen), which goes max 30 meters, but according to Sir Google it's usually about 10 meters. I bought one not too long ago, and it is very easy to use to set up a serial connection to my Mac (which has built-in bluetooth), and even to my Android. I'll have to try if it will work from the closest window in the house to my greenhouse.

I agree with you on the pricing of adding extra arduinos at about $30 a pop, which is why I've been thinking of porting some of these simple sketches to the TI MSP430, which is only $4.30 (includes shipping even). I bought 2 before element14 sent me an Arduino nano and got me hooked. Two wireless transceivers would be about $5 on eBay. The difficult part would be getting the libraries ported though. I don't own wireless transceivers yet either, so I have no idea how hard or easy they would be to use.

The MSP430's are nice though, and from what I can tell they will do pretty much everything people tend to do with Arduinos. It even has a built-in temperature sensor, so for the greenhouse project that's one less sensor to hook up. The Eclipse IDE is much more complicated though - thankfully I use the same IDE for much of my other work, but I can see that being a struggle for non-programmers. I'm hoping the community will port the whole Arduino software set to work with those, because they sure are a lot more accessible for people on a budget!

So after all that rambling... yes, I think you have the easiest solution!

ps, I just noticed that there's a couple of Arduinos on eBay going at just under $20 (after shipping) with no bids, ending in 6 hrs... I'm tempted to buy one, as that would make the wifi easy to test, but how many dev boards can I have before I need an intervention?   but then again, under $20 means I don't have to deal with customs...

Cheers,

-Nico

Hi Nico

Thanks for the encouragement!

I'm intending to test Gobetwino on Windows 7 later today. I'll let you know.

The idea of using bluetooth is amazing, especially as my netbook includes a bluetooth component, but I have never used it and, indeed, have no idea how to use it. I've looked on eBay & I will have to pay about £10 GBP - a little more than you - but since they all originate from the far-east, I'm a little hesitant after I got my fingers burnt with a very cheap SD card module.

I guess I will also have to commit to another arduino soon - whilst the one I have is logging data, I can't do any more development work....

All the best

Neil

Hi Nico

Good news and frustrating news:

1. The Excel test sketch supplied in the Gobetwino samples works fine in XP.

2. Gobetwino runs in windows 7 (starter) and your demo notepad sketch works just fine.

3. I can open OpenOffice calc via Gobetwino in Windows 7 and get a spreadsheet, but when I substitute that app for excel in the Gobetwino sample, the spreadsheet opens, the commands seem to parse OK, but no numbers arrive in the sheet and Gobetwino says the process has ended after the first set of commands - the rest simply error.

However, if I remove the loop from the sketch, so only one line of data is sent, All the commands seem to run OK, except that the application doesn't open until all the commands have been sent and there is nothing in the sheet, and there is no attempt to save the file, as there is with excel in XP

I tried putting in a delay between the command to open the application and starting to send data, so I could be sure the sheet was open - 5 secs not enough; 10 secs and I got 2 correct numbers in A1 and B1 and the active cell moved to A2.

I put the loop back in to read and send 15 sets of data at 2 second intervals - this time I only got 1 (wrong) number and then Gobetwino decided the process had terminated.

Next I increased the delay between the readings from 2 secs to 5 secs - This time I got 2 correct numbers and the active cell moved to A2, but again Gobetwino decided the process had terminated after the first set of data, so everything else was errors

Finally - I've had enough for now - I tried increasing the delay between the readings to 10 secs and I got the same result as before.

I am fairly new to windows 7 and also to Open office, so I don't really know where to look. I find it confusing that Gobetwino thinks the process has terminated but the spreadsheet is still open.

I will be off the air until next week - I'm off to Paris for a few days - relaxation!

Best wishes

Neil

Hi Neil,

That's too bad - it always looks so easy doesn't it? but then the details often hurt.

If all goes well I might give it a try later this week using OO on XP.

And yes I remember something about the SD card pain conversation. So far I haven't had any issues with the little gadgets I've bought on eBay, but they haven't been as complicated as an SD card.

Hope you have an awesome time in Paris! I guess that's one of the advantages of living in Europe - all the cool places are relatively close! For me Paris would take quite a long time - living on the West coast of Canada kinda puts us far from everywhere!

Cheers,

-Nico

Hi Neil,

That's too bad - it always looks so easy doesn't it? but then the details often hurt.

If all goes well I might give it a try later this week using OO on XP.

And yes I remember something about the SD card pain conversation. So far I haven't had any issues with the little gadgets I've bought on eBay, but they haven't been as complicated as an SD card.

Hope you have an awesome time in Paris! I guess that's one of the advantages of living in Europe - all the cool places are relatively close! For me Paris would take quite a long time - living on the West coast of Canada kinda puts us far from everywhere!

Cheers,

-Nico