Sensor pack data publishing

Did a lot of work over the last few days using Processing to communicate via USB to an receiving XBee, and then taking the resulting information from the sensors I’ve got installed so far and publishing it in a bunch of different places.

I have the information going to several places. First, it’s going to the Weather Underground, which is where I publish my Davis Weatherstation data. This has a few big benefits, they keep track of all my data for me, and show it in pretty graphs over time. You can check out the results here.

Next, I got used twitter4j to post status to Twitter, which I also do with my Davis Weatherstation Data. But, I’m not a big fan of Twitter (or any third party site) being the only place that has my data, it’s not very easy to get it back out again.

I installed my very own microblog, using StatusNet, and am simultaneously posting updates here, so now I’ll have all the entries, and be able to archive them or review them as I see fit, without having to try to get historical information back from Twitter.

Next, I’ll use exported graphics from Processing (my primitive first version of starts this blog), and will publish a webpage with current conditions, and possibly do a little work to show a daily graph.

Got a lot of things working that were really poorly documented (or not documented at all). The results are deceptively simple, but came from lots of trial and error. I’ll be publishing all the code when I’m further along, with specific excerpts on some “how to’s”. (like how to post to twitter in Processing, and how to setup non-twitter microblogs). The software supports it all, and is really flexible, just not well documented.

Of course, that also goes for the Arduino code I’ve worked on for all the sensor data gathering. There’s some excellent starting points of working code that does all the basic setup. Using that plus the data sheets, I’m customizing it for low-power sensor operation.

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