bertoLAB

I’ve created the beginnings of a simple home security system using the Sentilla Pervasive Computers Kit(PERK) I got at JavaOne. This kit contains a few small wireless computers(called Motes), about the size of a pack of gum, that I can program in Java. They come with a temperature and accelerometer sensor in each Mote, and have the ability to add on more sensors.

I attached the Mote above my front door with a small bracket I built with some spare Legos, and wrote an application that reads the accelerometer sensor in the Mote, and when the door opens, it sends a message out over the wireless network.

I created another application that runs on my computer that listens for these DoorMessages, and when it receives one it sends an email to me. I’m currently sending emails to my gmail.com account, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it only takes about 5 seconds from when the door opens until the email pops up in gmail.

You can find the Mote application code here.

You can find the Client application that runs on your server here.

In the future I plan on adding some additional capabilities to the Client application which could include:

• Set a schedule of when to actually send the emails – like only email me between 9 and 5
• Place the second Mote in our car, and only send emails when the car is gone( and the second Mote cannot be reached )
• Integrate with a webcam on my home server to record video or pictures when the door opens.

So in my first post I set a goal of being able to track visitor statistics for my blog. It turns out that WordPress has a Plugin that allows you to do this – WordPress Stats. It was pretty easy to setup up, and here is a quick description of the steps.

1. You must sign up for a WordPress API key. This also creates a blog for you on WordPress.com. Find more at http://wordpress.com/api-keys/
2. Download the plugin from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
3. Upload the contents of this file to your blog, under the directory wp-content/plugins
4. Log in to your blog and go to the admin Dashboard.
5. Click on Plugins in the top right menu.
6. Click on Edit for the Stats plugin.
7. Modify the line $stats_wpcom_api_key = ” to put your API key in the empty quotes.
8. Go back to Plugins and activate.
9. Now when you visit the Dashboard, there is a link for Blog Stats. You may be presented with a login screen when viewing stats. Enter your wordpress.com username and password here, not your blog password.

Also, I found this site quite useful:

http://myinternetstuff.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/what-can-you-do-with-your-api-key/

A few weeks ago I posted my first YouTube video – of my dog playing and yelping at the dog park. It’s not the most entertaining video in the world, and I don’t expect to win many awards for it, but here you are.

So I’ve got my blog all set up and this is the official first post. WordPress(this blogging software) was incredibly easy to setup and get started. Out of the box it seems very easy to use. There are a few changes that I would like to try out, so I’m going to use this post as a test for different features.

The changes that I would like to make include:

1. Customizing the look and feel of the site to include my own logo.
2. Statistics for an individual page or blog post to gather basic visitor counts.
3. Creating Page content, besides blog postings.

So it’s off to the races we go…