A facebook Lamp

posted by Alessandro Ricco

How to mix up Facebook, LabVIEW, Arduino, Firmata and a lot of spare time.

This year i spent my winter holiday at home so i got a lot of spare time and what is better than Facebook to waste your time? :)

More or less my laptop remain connected to facebook at least for 10 hours a day and i spent my time uploading photo, checking the status of my friends and searching for people that i didn’t see in the last 15 years…
Now i can proudly say to be a very “professional” user of this controversial social network.

What i found very tedious in this period is the need to go to my pc, update the facebook page and check if there are somethings new, becouse 90% of the time there was no news at all.

So i start to think that could be usefull if my laptop could advise me for each news on my facebook and… i realize a Facebook Lamp.


Facebook Lamp is an RGB led lamp that advise you if you have notifications on facebook changing its color or fading from one to others , the lamp in connected to my laptop via USB and is controlled by a custom software, written by me, able to connect to the web and retrive information from your facebook pages.

Via my software i can decide to enable or not the lamp and which color associate to each of my friends, so if Anne is Red and she changes her status the Lamp starts blinking smootly in red.

I use this for a couple of days and i found it very usefull, it permits me to go away from my pc but be able to understand in a very clear way if something new happened on facebook and from who, no more manual update of facebook pages, less time sit in front of screen and real time advise.Also the lamp is very nice and the smooting fading of its color light is fascinating.

The tech inside it.

don't try this at home... put the resistor on the LED...

Facebook Lamp hardware side is made using an Arduino 10000 and a superflux RGB led covered by an IKEA lastic cup … no more, no exernal power suppy is required, it take what it need from USB.

I installed Arduino with Firmata Standard V2 that gives me all the controll on the single arduino pins from my laptop via USB.

Firmata is already inscluded in Arduino starting from version 0012, informations and references are here http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Interfacing/Firmata

I konw that probably this is not the best in term of efficency because her the arduino is used only ad “pin driver” and all the calculations are made on PC, but that is i decide to use firmata also in thi experiment because i’m realizing a LabVIEW library for Firmata… stay tuned!

The hostcontroll software on laptop is written in LabVIEW, it is able to download your RSS “friends status ” update from facebook, parse it and to display the author name & photo and  the first 200 characters for each of the last 20 posts.

There is more; it searches for you if an update come from a certain friend or group of friends and, if so, commands to  arduino to light up the appropriate color of the RGB led.

The code software for host PC in still in pre-alpha version and i’m working on it but if you are interested i can share it for sure!

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Published:
01.21.09 / 11pm
Category:
arduino, labview