More on the Arduino Ethernet shield:

Arduino Ethernet Shield

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Ah - a official Arduino Ethernet shield

Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to get a pre-release Arduino Ethernet shield from the good folk at tinker.it to play with. At that time, I had spent some time trying to improve the TCP-stack for the nuelectonics ethernet shield, but that was hard work and I wasn’t making much progress.

The advantage of this new shield is that all of the hard work is done for you - the API provided is very simple to use and doesn’t take up too much program space. It also includes an SD card slot and although that isn’t supported in the library yet, it’s potentially a very cool addition.

Massimo has now announced the shield to the world. Hopefully they will be available from the tinker.it store soon.

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Just bought a couple of these for my next Arduino project :

Low Cost Humidity & Temperature Sensor SHT10

Description
The SHT10 digital humidity and temperature sensor is fully calibrated and offers excellent long term stability and ease of use at lowest cost.

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The blog story referred to below is about a short piece of code written in Ruby (ok - I'm giving in - I will have to start using Ruby), which communicates with Firmata firmware running on the Arduino, and displays in real-time data from the analogue ports.

This should be easily expandable to accommodate other readings:

I decided to write a piece of software which would read data from the serial port, and use Firmata’s code-set, which happens to be MIDI based, to decipher the incoming data.

The result is this crude ruby script. (I just picked up learning ruby, so please ignore the horrible syntax, and roundabout procedures)

Download: firmataAnalogMonitor.rb

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As we have a number of lights (and other devices) controlled by using the X10 protocol, the following is quite interesting :

Arduino -> X10 Wireless

Overview:

The CM17A is a dongle that sends X10 commands (ON, OFF, BRIGHT, DIM) via RF to X10 receivers. The receivers then send signals down the house wiring to control lights and appliances. The CM17A is relatively cheap (about 10USD on eBay).

Although this technique seemed to generate little interest when posted in the forum, for some, it might be a good safe way to (wirelessly) control devices connected to the house wiring.

[From Arduino playground - CM17A ]

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And at last a "shell" for interactive use of the Arduino

Justin wrote in to tell us about the new firmware he wrote for Arduino -

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This is a interesting piece of software - which should allow you to turn the Arduino into a extensible platform for collecting data, controlled by a host computer.

Firmata

This page is dedicated to a generic protocol called Firmata for communicating with microcontrollers from software on a host computer. It is intended to work with any host computer software package. Right now there is a matching object in a number of languages. It is easy to add objects for other software to use this protocol. Basically, this firmware establishes a protocol for talking to the Arduino from the host software. The aim is to allow people to completely control the Arduino from software on the host computer.

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A minor revision has been made to the main Arduino board :

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Wow - new microcontroller chips means that the otherwise superb Arduino can be upgraded to take a controller chip with much more memory:

Ladyada writes- Running out of space in your big Arduino project? Good news! Finally, after months of backorders, one can now buy the latest improvement to the 'ATmega8′ line of chips: the ATmega328's. The '328 has 32K of flash, and 2K of SRAM. Basically its got the capacity of an ATmega32 but in a slimmer package. These chips are notable for their ability to drop-in replace the ATmega168. So that means if you have an Arduino or compatible clone, it is a easy 2 minute swap. [From Upgrade your Arduino projects]

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