Making Things Talk 2nd Edition

Description

Make microcontrollers, PCs, servers, and smartphones talk to each other.

Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when the devices you've built start to talk to each other, things really get interesting. With 33 easy-to-build projects, Making Things Talk shows you how to get your gadgets to communicate with you and your environment. It’s perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest.

Maybe you're a science teacher who wants to show students how to monitor the weather in several locations at once. Or a sculptor looking to stage a room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. In this expanded edition, you’ll learn how to form networks of smart devices that share data and respond to commands.

* Call your home thermostat with a smartphone and change the temperature.
* Create your own game controllers that communicate over a network.
* Use ZigBee, Bluetooth, Infrared, and plain old radio to transmit sensor data wirelessly.
* Work with Arduino 1.0, Processing, and PHP-three easy-to-use, open source environments.
* Write programs to send data across the Internet, based on physical activity in your home, office, or backyard.

 Whether you want to connect simple home sensors to the Internet, or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other gadgets, this book explains exactly what you need.

CONTENTS:

Preface; Who This Book Is For; What You Need to Know; Contents of This Book; On Buying Parts; Using Code Examples; Using Circuit Examples; Acknowledgments for the First Edition; Note on the Second Edition; Chapter 1: The Tools; 1.1 It Starts with the Stuff You Touch; 1.2 It’s About Pulses; 1.3 Computers of All Shapes and Sizes; 1.4 Good Habits; 1.5 Tools; 1.6 Using the Command Line; 1.7 Using an Oscilloscope; 1.8 It Ends with the Stuff You Touch; Chapter 2: The Simplest Network; 2.1 Supplies for Chapter 2; 2.2 Layers of Agreement; 2.3 Making the Connection: The Lower Layers; 2.4 Saying Something: The Application Layer; 2.5 Complex Conversations; 2.6 Flow Control; 2.7 Finishing Touches: Tidy It Up, Box It Up; 2.8 Conclusion; Chapter 3: A More Complex Network; 3.1 Supplies for Chapter 3; 3.2 Network Maps and Addresses; 3.3 Conclusion; Chapter 4: Look, Ma, No Computer! Microcontrollers on the Internet; 4.1 Supplies for Chapter 4; 4.2 Introducing Network Modules; 4.3 An Embedded Network Client Application; 4.4 The Finished Project; 4.5 Programming and Troubleshooting Tools for Embedded Modules; 4.6 Conclusion; Chapter 5: Communicating in (Near) Real Time; 5.1 Supplies for Chapter 5; 5.2 Interactive Systems and Feedback Loops; 5.3 Transmission Control Protocol: Sockets & Sessions; 5.4 The Clients; 5.5 Conclusion; Chapter 6: Wireless Communication; 6.1 Supplies for Chapter 6; 6.2 Why Isn’t Everything Wireless?; 6.3 Two Flavors of Wireless: Infrared and Radio; 6.4 How Radio Works; 6.5 Buying Radios; 6.6 What About WiFi?; 6.7 Conclusion; Chapter 7: Sessionless Networks; 7.1 Supplies for Chapter 7; 7.2 Sessions vs. Messages; 7.3 Who’s Out There? Broadcast Messages; 7.4 Directed Messages; 7.5 Conclusion; Chapter 8: How to Locate (Almost) Anything; 8.1 Supplies for Chapter 8; 8.2 Network Location and Physical Location; 8.3 Determining Distance; 8.4 Determining Position Through Trilateration; 8.5 Determining Orientation; 8.6 Conclusion; Chapter 9: Identification; 9.1 Supplies for Chapter 9; 9.2 Physical Identification; 9.3 Network Identification; 9.4 Conclusion; Chapter 10: Mobile Phone Networks and the Physical World; 10.1 Supplies for Chapter 10; 10.2 One Big Network; 10.3 Text-Messaging Interfaces; 10.4 Native Applications for Mobile Phones; 10.5 Conclusion; Chapter 11: Protocols Revisited; 11.1 Supplies for Chapter 11; 11.2 Make the Connections; 11.3 Text or Binary?; 11.4 MIDI; 11.5 Representational State Transfer; 11.6 Conclusion; Where to Get Stuff; Supplies; Hardware; Software;