techiturn

I went to Andy Gelme’s Arduino session at ACEC and learned something interesting today: my router is a web server.

Now when I remember how I configure it, that’s not a surprise. Fire up 192.168.1.something in the browser and there be router options.

So I didn’t really learn that, it was more of a realisation. But then I learned about the existence of OpenWrt, which is “a very powerful, highly customizable variant of Linux [for] your router”. So install OpenWrt over whatever the default thing on your router is, then you can SSH to it and install some packages, like maybe a LAMP stack.

Now that’s only really interesting if you have something to talk to it. Let’s say, an Arduino. Arduinos can have lots of different types of sensors that collect information, e.g. the temperature, or the amount of sunlight, or waterflow. Or maybe you build a time lapse camera.

So your Arduino can talk to your router. But all those numbers are stuck on your LAN. It’s not world-readable.

So at this point, you can use Pachube or WatchMyThing to publish your Arduino-captured data. And then, of course, it’s almost trivial to get Pachube to feed into Twitter.

And then if you want to reduce power consumption you put Zigbee things (chips?) on both your souped-up router and your Arduino.

But really, at this point, your plants are on Twitter, everything else is gravy. :)