Our customers burst with ideas

By Sébastien Rinsoz, in Misc, may 03,2013.

We regularly present you with more or less original ideas on how to use our products. The subject of the posts depends on the inspiration of the week or on issues submitted to us. Usually, our examples are oriented towards home automation or industry applications. For a bit of fresh air, here are a few very different examples, created and made public directly by our customers.

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.

Yoctopuce libraries, GitHub, PyPI, and Raspberry Pi

By Sébastien Rinsoz, in Programming, april 19,2013.

This week, we publish a new version of all of our libraries and of the VirtualHub. Among the improvements, the Android, C++, C#, Delphi, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP, and VB.Net libraries are now also available on GitHub. Likewise, you can download the Python library easily via PyPI (Python Package Index). To illustrate these changes, we are going to update our "PiCooker" example software so that it uses the library available on PyPI. We will take this opportunity to make a few improvements to the code.

How to control a desk lamp by USB

By martinm, in DIY, april 12,2013.

Using a Yocto-PowerRelay to switch on a desk lamp from a computer is quite easy. However, to have to power on a computer to switch a lamp isn't really convenient. This week, we present a wiring allowing you to control a lamp both from a computer and from a simple switch, followed by a very handy application: a desk lamp controlled by a screen saver.

Samsung Smart Dock Review

By Sébastien Rinsoz, in Reviews and Android, april 05,2013.

We just found out by chance how to get rid of one of the main hindrance limiting the use of our modules with Android mobile phones: the unique USB port which also serves to connect the power supply. Given that the mobile phone must power connected modules, the phone battery capacity has been a problem so far. What's new is that the "Galaxy Note II Smart Dock" is now available. This dock allows us to realize applications which before required much more hardware. We are going to present a short compatibility example of this device and as well as of the possibilities it provides once combined with our modules.