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Topic starter
2020-04-08 2:37 pm
Hi there, my name -as you might have guessed- is Antonio and I have 72 years. I am italian by birth but live in Danmark in a small (former) farm with my danish wife, 9 dogs, 2 horses and 3 cats. Ah, and recently added to the menagerie 1 Arduino Uno, 3 Arduino Nano and a few days ago -lured by Bill's captivating intro , an ESP32. Of course I will divide equally my time between the 5 new puppies 🙂 .
Although I have an academic background (Looong time ago) in Agriculture, Biology and Computer Sciences, I have been an Army officer, a photographer and a farmer. When I retired I was looking forward at much time to devote to my hobbies, but illness struck, at first with a nasty form of cancer, which my doctors and I fought with success and the with a series of other concerns, the latest of which is a form of Parkinson's caused by a cluster of small blood cloths in a specific area of my brain. Not much to do about it, and it is progressing. OK, I said to myself that I had to find something to keep both my brain and my hands busy with something challenging, and decided for Arduino. I have some experience in programming and used to have quite steady hands with small jobs, and that is a good start (even though I already have some problems with inserting the right pins in the right holes in the breadboards).
On the Arduinos I have worked on ultrasound sensors, realtime clock, OLED 128x64 screens, sound sensors and buzzers modifying code "borrowed" and even making some from scratch, with some success -after painstakingly debugging and circuit checking- and yesterday I was quite busy with testing the Wifi Access point code from Bill (I understood the meaning of / \ In building the HTML line with the clickable link, so I added more, ending with two external leds on top of the inbuilt one, each with its own ON/OF links and lastly a link to make the two external ones blink alternatively. It worked and I am fascinated! But… when I tried to add an image and use it instead of the text link, I failed miserably. I am sure that from the HTML pow the code was right, evidently it needs something more for the specific environment, but I haven't looked into it yet. A tutorial, maybe? or where to find something about it?
OK, I have taken much of your time, so thank you for your patience, and my really heartfelt THANK YOU! - MERCI BEAUCOUP! to Bill for the time and energy -and resources- he devotes to the Dronebotshop! BTW, I am a happy and legal drone pilot myself, since three years, with a P4P 🙂
Keep calm and adopt an Arduino
2020-04-08 4:57 pm
Hi @antonio1948
A while back I was looking to have a nice looking dial widget on an information screen and the best one I found was one using the javascript canvas, and I had a go at producing some screens in HTML. Well I suppose I did succeed to a degree, but I did not like coding stuff up in HTML and found it all a bit of a pain. I did have a few clickable images on my screen, but in the main it used MQTT to display information published by a python program running on an Rpi. I just had a look at the javascript I wrote, but its all a bit of a pain to follow it now.
So it was just a thought for you, you can get your HTML screen to publish and subscribe to an MQTT broker and get your arduino or whatever board to respond to MQTT messages. Have fun with your projects. 😀
Topic starter
2020-04-08 5:11 pm
Thank you! I will certainly look into this MQTT broker, googled it and found a Mosquito broker.
Keep calm and adopt an Arduino
2020-04-08 5:34 pm
Hi antonio1948
I probably should have also pointed out that your board would need an ethernet connection, cable or wifi, to communicate with whatever computer runs an MQTT broker. I have my MQTT broker running on an old PC that now runs linux and also another that runs on an old Rpi 2. There are also cloud based MQTT brokers. The actual board I used to publish the info was an ESP8266, but I would think the newer ESP32 board would work too. The mqtt library I used on the ESP8266 was one from Adafruit. The broker machines were running MQTT Mosquito packages. The browser to receive and display the information was run on an apple computer with a firefox browser. The fixfox browser could also publish info that the esp8266 could receive . MQTT is a really nice and very easy to use mechanism for sending / receiving information between computers and/or microcontrollers as long as they can communicate over ethernet.
Antonio1948 reacted
Topic starter
2020-04-08 6:42 pm
Thanks again. I have an oldish MacbookPro running OS 10.6.8, but when using Arduino IDE i boot it with OS 10.11 from an xternal Firewire HD, and it is connected via Wifi to my router, If necessary i can connect it via Ethernet. Have also a very recent iMac I can use (My wife's, bu i have "rights" on it since it was my gift after she euthanized the n-th PC... Will look into MQTTT, (it might take me some time to understand what I can do with it...) 😉
Keep calm and adopt an Arduino