Cosm alternatives to record sensor measurements

By mvuilleu, in Reviews and Measures, may 22,2013.

A few days ago, our beloved Cosm Beta service that we used to recommend for real-time graphs from your Yoctopuce sensors, has changed its usage terms. Renamed Xively, the web site is now focusing on revenue-generating services. Unfortunately, some essential features that we have been using, such as the ability to choose the display time range on a graph, have disappeared. It is therefore time to look for alternatives to Cosm...

Turn your Raspberry Pi into a network multimeter

By mvuilleu, in Measures and Tiny PC, april 26,2013.

Measuring devices which you can directly connect to the network are usually very expensive, more than 1'000 Euros. However, numerous applications, such as monitoring an experiment started on a napkin, could benefit from them if they were more affordable. We are going to show you therefore how to very easily transform a Raspberry Pi into a very flexible Ethernet multimeter, with the help of a simple Python script. A simple solution based on standard USB modules, demonstrated in a video.

Comparison of temperature sensors

By mvuilleu, in Measures, february 08,2013.

We often receive questions on the characteristics of our temperature sensors: their sampling rate, their accuracy, their adequacy for a particular scenario. We are going to give you a few hints to identify the sensor best suited for your needs.

Connect your sensors to the cloud

By mvuilleu, in Measures, december 18,2012.

The #1 application for most USB sensors is certainly to record the measures and draw them in a graph. We have already provided examples in previous blog posts on how to draw measure graphs in several programming languages, but so far you always had make a program of some kind to do this. Today, we show you how to leverage a public cloud-style service named Cosm (www.COSM.com) to graph your sensors without writing a single line of code. You will just need to download the latest and greatest version of our VirtualHub, and configure it to upload data to www.cosm.com. Follow the guide...

An USB optical telemeter

By mvuilleu, in Measures, november 11,2012.

While surfing on the Internet, we found a nice little sensor: an optical rangefinder built by Sharp. Robotic specialists know it well, it's the most well known sensor to detect obstacles. In our selection of products, we currently don't offer a rangefinder sensor (telemeter). As an example, we are going to show you today how you could interface analog sensors of this type thanks to a Yoctopuce module.