Splash photography

By martinm, in DIY and Programming, july 03,2015.

In the latest issue of Make, we found a nice article by Thomas Burg and Johannes Gottwald about splash photography. The principle behind this technique, often used for commercials, is to take a picture of an object while it dips into a liquid. This can produces stunning pictures. Of course, after reading that, we were eager to give it a try...

Driving a Roomba with a smart watch

By seb, in Internet of Things, Programming and Android, june 28,2015.

For many, the 2015 innovation in the smart watch world is the Apple Watch. However, another smart watch was talked about: the Pebble Time. This was caused in particular to the unprecedented success of its Kickstarter campaign. The new version just arrived to Yoctopuce, and to celebrate this, we wrote an application enabling you to drive a Roomba from your watch.

YoctoHub and Web-Applications

By martinm, in Programming, may 29,2015.

As you may have noticed it, all Yoctopuce modules are essentially peripheral devices. Sensors provide values, actuators perform explicit actions, but the actuators cannot automatically activate themselves depending on conditions on the sensor values. In short, there is no room for any kind of user logic in our modules, you need a CPU somewhere to drive your modules. Why not use that of a web browser? It's quite possible to host a Web-App on a YoctoHub. It's a technique that we have used before, but never really took the time to explain...

A USB scale without driver

By martinm, in DIY and Programming, april 17,2015.

The Yoctopuce team recently decided to record the weight of each package to be sent, in order to compare the pre-computed weight to the actual weight. And as we don't really like repetitive tasks, we decided to do it automatically. So we bought a few scales with an RS232 output. And this week we take the opportunity to show you in detail how to transform a Kern scale into a Yocto-Scale in a jiffy.

Driving a Roomba with a Yoctopuce module

By seb, in Programming and Internet of Things, march 24,2015.

We recently bought a Roomba automatic vacuum cleaner and we started to look at how to hack it as soon as it was out of the box. The Roomba is equipped with a serial port which enables you to control the robot. This serial port uses a Mini-Din socket and works in TTL levels (incompatible with an RS232 port). Luckily, we just announced the Yocto-Serial: a serial interface which can work with TTL levels.