Computing stuff tied to the physical world

Still crude, but oh so cool…

In Software on Jan 18, 2013 at 00:01

Good progress on the HouseMon front. I’m still waggling from concept to concept like a drunken sailor, but every day it sinks in just a little bit more. Adding a page to the app is now a matter of adding a CoffeeScript and a Jade file, and then adding an entry to the “routes” list to make a new “Readings” page appear in the main menu:

Screen Shot 2013-01-17 at 01.01.00

The only “HTML” I wrote for this page is readings.jade, using Foundation classes:

Screen Shot 2013-01-17 at 01.03.14

And the only “JavaScript” I wrote, is in readings.coffee to embellish the output slightly:

Screen Shot 2013-01-17 at 00.18.51

The rest is a “readings” collection, which is updated automatically on the server, with all changes propagated to the browser(s). There’s already quite a bit of architecture in place, including a generic RF12demo driver which connects to a serial port, and a decoder for some of the many packets flying around the house here at JeeLabs.

But the exciting bit is that the server setup is managed from the browser. There’s an Admin page, just enough to install and remove components (“briqlets” in HouseMon-speak):

Screen Shot 2013-01-17 at 00.14.09

In this example, I installed a fake packet generator (which simply replays one of my logfiles in real time), as well as a small set of decoders for things like room node sketches.

So just to stress what there is: a basic way of managing server components via the browser, and a basic way of seeing the live data updates, again in the browser. Oh, and all sorts of RF12 capturing and decoding… even support for the Announcer idea, described recently.

Did I mention that the data shown is LIVE? Some of this stuff sure feels like magic… fun!