An autonomous water rocket launcher

By martinm, in Internet of Things and DIY, november 15,2013.

You probably heard of water rockets and might know that it's quite easy to build them yourself with soda bottles and hose nozzles. This type of "toy" can be propelled to quite breathtaking heights, which makes it a rather fun hobby. Well, Yoctopuce looked into it...

An autonomous solar weather station

By martinm, in Internet of Things and Measures, october 24,2013.

Do you recall the solar box? Actually, it has never worked well enough to be useful. Here at Yoctopuce, it has been renamed the NULL box. Ruthless, but not so far from reality. But this week, we have a new version of that experiment. This time, it is much easier to make it work because we now have hardware designed with that kind of application in mind.

How to turn on a computer remotely

By mvuilleu, in Internet of Things, august 29,2013.

Tablets and other small media players, that enable you to view DivX movies comfortably sprawled on your couch, have relegated to the closet wholesale Media Centers that hummed loudly in the living room. If this new solution is more elegant and less noisy, it doesn't solve all the issues: you must still have somewhere a real machine storing your movie library. Either it is always on, which is not very rational, or you must turn it on and off before and after, which does kill the magic. So, how do we power a computer remotely from the couch?

A standalone RSS reader

By Sébastien Rinsoz, in Internet of Things, august 16,2013.

Until a few weeks ago, our Yocto-Display required to be connected by USB to a computer in order to update the screen. Now that the YoctoHub-Ethernet has been released, we can free ourselves from this limitation. Here is how to display the content of an RSS feed on a Yocto-MaxiDisplay connected to a YoctoHub-Ethernet, using the PHP API in HTTP Callback mode.

Turn on the light from a Pebble smart watch

By Sébastien Rinsoz, in Internet of Things and Android, june 03,2013.

You have most probably already read about the Pebble smart watch, which connects to your phone to let you know about new emails, text messages, incoming calls, etc. A year after the original announcement, Pebble has eventually published the SDK to create an active “Watch App” for this watch. We thought it would be fun and convenient to be able to control our environment directly from a watch. So, to test this new SDK, we have written a small Pebble application that controls the light bulb that we used a couple of weeks ago with the Yocto-LatchedRelay.