HansR on the Web: This week's Wednesday Evening Training: Domoticz, Blockly and the digital Rube Goldberg machine

This week's Wednesday Evening Training was organized as a "klusavond"; an evening in which everyone is working on his own projects and demo's, walkthroughs and explanations are on an ad hoc basis.

Luc Slutter demonstrated us his Domoticz project in which he connected wifi switches operated using Node-RED messaging and Witty Cloud. Domoticz is a Home Automation System that lets you monitor and configure various devices like lights, switches, various sensors/meters like temperature, rain, wind, uv, electra, gas, water and much more. Notifications/Alerts can be sent to any mobile device. Interesting stuff. When his project is finished he will organize a workshop on this topic.

Also, we've taken a look at Blockley. Blockly is a client-side JavaScript library for creating visual block programming languages and editors. Using Blockly, we'll be able to define, e.g. a language for describing User Stories and, based on that language definition, be able to "drag and click"-assemble a User Story. As a next step we would be able to generate some kind of prototype code based on this digitized User Story. I've shown some demo's and have given a code & tool walkthrough on how to create a language using Blockly and how to generate code from this. There is a neat handson lab available on the web, please see the links below.

In our continuing quest for the ultimate IoT killer application we came to the conclusion that we really shouldn't continue this quest but rather concentrate on playing with technology. Inspired by artists' slogan: "l'art pour 'l art" (Art for art's sake, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_art%27s_sake) we should have our own slogan: "Technology for technology's sake". Experimenting, learning and having a lot of fun is a goal on it's own. So building some kind of a digital Rube Goldberg machine seems a nice practical common goal for us. For those who wonder what a Rube Goldberg machine is, it's a "deliberately complex contraption in which a series of devices that perform simple tasks are linked together to produce a domino effect in which activating one device triggers the next device in the sequence" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine). Therefore, we decided to define a message format describing some sort of "digital train" that will be able to travel across our various IoT devices and applications.

Each device/application will determine it's own way in which the digital train look like. For example: on a laptop it could look like a normal train, but on the next device on the virtual track, it could look like a procession of elephants and in a Unity3d scenery it would be possible to present it as a row of rolling balls. The first two railway stations: a Java program (thanks Bart van Beek) and a Node-RED flow, have been created in this evenings' session. Trains started at Bart's station, drove to my Pi and drove back to the station, all in one piece and all the digital wagons in the correct order. We will see where all this is going to lead!

Next week's Wednesday Evening Training

In next week's Wednesday Evening Training, we'll get a nice electronics 101 session and we'll be starting a handson lab on creating a programmable LED cube (for a demo, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6P3jcxKh-k). Thanks in advance, Aishwarya Dhall and Harrie van der Plas, for preparing this!

HansR on the Web

4/26/18

This week's Wednesday Evening Training: Domoticz, Blockly and the digital Rube Goldberg machine

Next week's Wednesday Evening Training

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