It’s now been a couple of days since my introduction on Pinoccio.  I left my Field Scout in the wilderness that is my workbench, plugging it in occasionally to charge it, and it dutifully checked in with HQ every couple of minutes and reported on its vital signs (remember I haven’t actually asked it to do anything yet!).  It’s time to find out what has been happening with it.  We can do this using Pinoccio HQ, some Linux command line hacking and some free online graphing tools.

So what data does the Scout report to HQ?  The dashboard shows the live temperature and battery status of the currently selected Scout:

This data is logged in HQ as well, and it is possible to use the API to download a history report.

Continue reading →

Pinoccio is an Arduino-compatible, web-enabled, wireless mesh networking ecosystem.  Check out their website for more information, these little boards are awesome!!

Pinoccio Field Scout (Lego for scale)

One of the first things that amazed me about Pinoccio was its ScoutScript feature.  This lets you run live commands on your Scout without recompiling!  As an embedded engineer I’m so used to the code->compile->download->review process that being able to simply type a command on a microcontroller and see the result is amazing.  See this demo I stole from the Pinoccio homepage:

As you can see, there are a lot of things available to play with – temperature, battery charge (that’s the 94%), an RGB LED on the Scout’s PCB, and all the digital and analogue pins are right there too.

I’m a little obsessed with the temperature of things, so I’ll be doing a couple of projects on measuring various temperatures around my home.  Let’s have a look at the Pinoccio and then set it up for some data collection.

Continue reading →

I have a Raspberry Pi with a 16×2 RGB LCD and plastic case.  I felt like getting it to measure and display an accurate temperature on the LCD.  Later I will add a webserver to graph the data.

Continue reading →