Bee-O-Neo-Tweet-O

The tough part of this project is that it lacked an actual sensor - but this might be changing soon.

Check out the June 2015 news here: http://www.seacoastscience.com and keep your fingers crossed!

Do I think we'll get a $5 IC sensor out of this? Probably not - at least at first. But I could see something like an inexpensive I2C based device one day. The key is that it has to be inexpensive enough to get into Makers hands, and to get a LOT of them out there.

With IoT dev boards integrating wireless and support for the Arduino IDE & Libraries it seems like this could boil down to something as simple as an Autonomo, battery, solar panel, and some wiring :)

The last little while I've been tinkering with the RF24 library for those inexpensive Nordic based radios. Pretty neat. The hardest part has actually been getting a Processing sketch to parse the serial stream in a stable way; ie not chopping off a 32 byte packet at random places. I think the easy answer is to just stream a bunch of data into a buffer until a no-receive window happens, then parse the buffer.

Update!

Ah!

Seems (under OSX Yosemite / Processing 2.2.1, at least) that serial data arrives in 48 byte blobs from the driver. Nice.

I also switched to sending a start character trigger, and at 250000 bps a typical send (32 bytes/packet x 32 packets = 1024 bytes) takes at least 42ms, but occasionally up to 73ms, but 50ms seems about right.

I also discovered that one of the odd things that was fouling up processing was a weird behavior of the control.p5 library; it was causing a long delay at the end of every loop() pass.