#phidgets

New Post has been published on https://www.topbreaking.news/articles/hack-your-halloween-with-phidgets.html

Hack Your Halloween With Phidgets

This project will show you how you can "hack" your Halloween decorations and get them to behave exactly how you want!The Halloween decoration we are working with has the following default functionality:Activated by throwing switch (shown in video)Activated by a loud soundOur goal for this project is… By: phidgetsinc

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The Phidgets code in Typica is specific to the 1048. As far as I know it won’t work with anything else in the line. Patches are always welcome to expand hardware support.

Handling Multiple Addresses, Mindfulness, Phidgets, and more.

Guy Stevens on handling multiple addresses multiple ways: 3 Simple Habits for Daily Mindfulness Sometimes simple things have the most impact.  Hendrik EdBerg of the PositivityBlog shares three simple ideas about daily mindfulness:  Slow Down Tell yourself:  Now I am… Disrupt your thoughts + quickly reconnect with the here and now…

There are a couple of corrections needed on this one.

Where it says to edit Typica.pro, leave off the lines that start INCLUDEPATH and LIBS. Any time Typica uses a third party library to communicate with hardware, it links that at runtime when it’s needed and not at compile time. That way if you change what hardware you’re running you don’t need to recompile Typica to do that. It also lets me distribute the program without those libraries. That way people don’t need to have libraries installed for hardware they don’t have and in cases where this is an issue I can’t get sued for illegally distributing those libraries (that’s not a concern specifically for libphidget on Linux which is GPLv3 but on other platforms and with other libraries that’s a legitimate concern that has affected how Typica was written). A compile time link, therefore, doesn’t accomplish anything and can safely be skipped. For those interested in the mechanics of how I do this, see src/phidgets.w lines 343-395

The other point of clarification that there’s a bit of system configuration needed after compiling libphidget to avoid needing to run Typica as root (Typica shouldn’t do anything harmful when run as root, but it’s good Linux hygiene to not run stuff as root when you don’t have to). If you look in the udev folder that accompanies the libphidget source code you’ll find a file: 99-phidgets.rules that can be copied to /etc/udev/rules.d/ and then restart udev (or reboot the computer). Now when you plug in your device, the file representing that device will be created with permissions that allow non-root users to access that hardware and Typica can be run as your normal user account.

While working with completely virtualized systems and architectures is fun, for me it's never been quite as much fun as doing things in the Real World™. A few years ago I found Phidgets Inc. Phidgets are a set of "plug and play" building blocks for low cost USB sensing and control from your PC. From their website:

All the USB complexity is taken care of by our robust API. Applications can be developed quickly by programmers using their favorite language: C/C++, C#, Cocoa, Delphi, Flash AS3, Flex AS3, Java, LabVIEW, MATLAB, Max/MSP, MRS, Python, REALBasic, Visual Basic.NET, Visual Basic 6.0, Visual Basic for Applications, Visual Basic Script, and Visual C/C++/Borland.NET.

Unfortunately, there is one language that is absent from this list: Ruby.

Several years ago, there was an effort started by Craig DeHaan and later picked up by Kit Plummer which worked pretty well but the callbacks seemed a little fragile and I wanted the interface to be a little more idiomatically Ruby. Also, using FFI means it works on multiple Ruby VMs without issue, MRI, JRuby, etc. Like the previous libraries, there aren't many devices supported yet but that's just a matter of having them. There are traditional and idiomatic examples in the repository and it can be installed with everybody's favorite command: gem install phidgets-ffi.

Arduino vs. Phidgets – Dev Time Studies

Is building on an Arduino also slow? Are Phidgets too expensive? When might you use one or even the various other? Hackaday regular [Ken] reduces what he discovered from three experimental time trials.

The main development differences when considering Arduino and Phidgets tend to be a mixture of flavor preferences plus some tough facts. The Arduino is open supply, Phidgets tend to be proprietary.…