Sune Kaae Blog: Arduino Soldering & Tinkering: Ethernet Shield & Accelerometer

Had a great & relaxing weekend, solidering & tinkering with the Arduino.

Impressed myself by soldering together three Arduino shields; Ethernet shield, Prototyping shield and SIM-Reader shield.

Ethernet by far the most interesting. Managed to get the built-in web-server to accept incoming requests from the local network and got the client to work so-and-so doing web-requests at large (couldn't get faster than 9600 kbps!). Got excited about a Cloud API for handling voice calls/DTMF & text messaging; Twilio Cloud Communications. Calls/SMS gets translated to HTTP calls to your web-infrastructure and you just return XML with a element stating text which should be read to the caller via speech synthesis (TTS). Caller can respond using DTMF. Supposedly it's also possible to record audio from the user. Looks very powerful. Here's a Twilio DTMF demo with Arduino (has nice little video).

Having put together the SIM reader card, I realized that it's really not that much fun. If all I wanted to do was to get a backup of the card, I could've purchased that for no money on Amazon. Perhaps there's a bit more fun to be had syncing the card up with Google Contacts or something, but to have a good time, I'll need probably need to at least get the GSM playground shield (~100 euro) - but ideally I'd get a shield which holds quad-band and GPS (it's currently $160 even without the shield).

Next items on the purchase-list seem to be Bluetooth and RFID components, perhaps from Libelium.

With great help from the perfectly named Live Fast - Code Young, I got the triple-axis accelerometer hooked up to the Arduino via I2C allowing text output on the Serial Port. A Processing sketch on the laptop is handling a visual illustration (just 2-axis though). The movements are pretty jittery, certainly in need of smoothing. Video & Pic: