To learn Google AppEngine I decided to build a finite state machine. When the state changes it calls a webhook. Transitions are triggered by webhook too.
However it needed a practical application. So I built a way of tracking when I enter and leave my home, updated by tapping a card against an RFID reader, using the same gesture used for tapping in and out of the underground on an Oyster card.
There is a demo version available that tracks if I am asleep or awake. I figure this data has less safety implications than showing if my home is free to be robbed.
Well, it’s about time I wrote a post about Spreadtweet. It’s my latest cool app - a Twitter client disguised as Excel.
It’s had some crazy traffic in the last few days, and has been downloaded a few thousand times so far. For a little while, it was trending on Twitter, too. And it’s certainly had an effect on my follower numbers:
Awesome! Beat that, Dan.
Pulp Browsers
Well, it wasn’t technically an Appril project, but Pulp Browsers has been rocking around the internet for the past few days.
Let The Right One Tweet
I got one of these lovely Aruinos last week. They’re a great hardware platform that makes it easy to build physical stuff in the same way frameworks make it easy to build web apps.
After completing a tutorial showing me how to make an arduino blinking LED, the hardware world equivalant of Hello World, I thought “Wow, this is cool. I wonder how far I can push this blinking LED technology. Perhaps I can use it to communicate using some secret long/short pulse coding. A retro-twitter”. Alas it appears someone beat me to this idea and created a protocol called “Morse Code” which seems a common standard but I can’t find an RFC for it.
Which leads me to my first Arduino Project: Twitter Morse Code. It takes tweets, and shows them as morse code instead. It’s very simple and has two parts
Checks Twitter Search for any new tweets including the #morse hashtag, pushing any new tweets down the serial cable as a string.
In this set up the arduino is a ‘dumb’ output peripheral that does only what the computer it is teathered to says. It would be interesting to give the arduino an ethernet controller to allow it to talk directly to twitter without being tied to a PC.
My first ‘experiment’ was done in a couple of hours on Friday night. I can’t even call it an app, since I didn’t write a single line of code for it. Here it is:
I’ve made my house tweet it’s energy usage! I wanted to take some invisible data from my home and find a way of showing it to myself unobtrusively. This isn’t the most ideal format, but it was quick and simple to create and will let me know if this is interesting and worth pursuing or if I should try something else.
How it Works
It’s made entirely from existing software, web services and some internet ductape, as follows:
A Current Cost monitors the current in the cables entering my electricity meter
CC outputs XML consumption data over a serial cable
Looking back perhaps writing some custom code would have been simpler! I think I’ll carry on by making the tweets more legible, with per day energy usage and comparison of if this is above or below previous usage.
Since Friday I’ve been tinkering with my new Arduino at BarCampBournemouth, hopefully there will be something to show for that soon.
I’ve had it with these snakes!
Well, it’s Appril the 3rd, and I still haven’t figured out what big app I’m going to do.
So, I figured that instead of doing one huge app, I’m going to do loads of small projects.
It’s more fun, more interesting, and I’ll learn more.
The Goal - Our goal for Appril is to build the best possible apps in a month part time, to see how much is possible with such limited time and resources.
The App - I’ve decided not to make an app. I had a big list of about 20 possible app ideas. I ran through them and found they fell into 3 groups:
Already solved - Why build something when I like the current implementations? In some cases they were in progress and unlaunched but I was confident the people working on the problem would solve it better than me.
Too big - They couldnt be achieved in a month part-time. I dont want appril to affect my daytime work or social life so the app has to be tiny. I tried looking at small sub-pieces of the big problems but they ended up falling under group three..
Too boring - I thought they were good ideas or important problems but solving them wouldn’t be fun. What’s the point of doing it if it isn’t enjoyable? Appril is intended as a fun playful challenge not a dull grind to the finish.
The Experiment - So here’s what I’m doing. I’m going to experiment with fun technologies I haven’t used at all or as much as I’d like. Arduino, Processing, CouchDB, Google AppEngine, RFID, QR codes, etc. Since it’s an experiment and not an app it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work, is useless, gets no users or set’s my workbench on fire. I’m broadly working under the goal of hooking up as much of my home into the ‘Internet of Things’ as possible.
So here goes, Welcome to Appril, my month of useless fun experimentation.
What to build..
With 12 hours until Appril begins I have yet to decide what to do. Some ideas currently being weighed up:
Favorite Things: A page that pulls in only the awesome bits of the internet. Like your fav tweets, flickr photos, vimeo videos, hypemachine songs, etc. A big box of loveliness.
Web Based Twitter Client: I like the concepts of tweetdeck with it’s friend groups and searches but AIR runs painfully slow on my machine, so why not an in-browser clone of the idea but with a different UI that better suits me?
Easy Electricity Monitoring: I have a current cost device that measures my home electricity usage. It also dumps out an xml feed of my usage patterns. There’s plenty of different apps that plug into this to do graphing, sharing, etc but it’s hard to decide which to use and where to get started. There needs to be a simple app & user guide. Perhaps like a last.fm scrobbler-style app that let’s you choose which webhooks to push to.
Printing: An app that turns your blog/tweets/friendfeed/facebook into a big pdf you can print via lulu to read and treasure offline.
Welcome to Appril!
I’ve nearly chosen my app idea for Appril. Who will succeed?
