WIP: Connected LCD Display

Inspired by Tom’s joystick tutorial (http://www.instructables.com/id/Internet-connected-joystick/) and a tutorial on hooking up a serial LCD (http://www.instructables.com/id/Wiring-and-programming-an-Electric-Imp-with-an-LCD/) I’ve got a nice little project on the go creating an LCD display that show fuzzy time, the weather and various news headlines. Moving the joystick left or right moves you through these various modes, whilst up and down scrolls the text. I’ve written some text formatting code that nicely formats the text for the screen, without any character wrap around. My favourite feature is when viewing a news article you can press the button joystick and it adds that article to my Instapaper account for reading later!

As I say, work in progress but I’ll share the code once it’s all done and the private beta has finished, as this uses agents and devices functionality (which is very awesome).




Bren.

Instapaper integration is genius! :slight_smile:

Hi Hugo,
Me no understand! Instapaper account???, Agent?? (Ok I heard about agents before); Perhaps would be good to give a heads up about the magical 'Agent" in simple terms, what it can do how to integrated to imp environment especially for us beginners.
Thanks,
Ken

Agents are currently in closed beta, but documentation on them is on the devwiki.

In simple terms, an agent looks like an imp apart from it lives in the cloud and instead of hardware APIs, has HTTP APIs. Every imp gets its own agent to do web work.

Hugo,

I realize of course that there are several things in “development” and you’ll be releasing agents over time. I also know that at some point, there will be a requirement to subscribe (monthly, yearly fee) to the cloud service; after all, there has to be some way to pay for all of the “cloud agents” and “web work”. Do you know how long it will be before a subscription will be required? Knowing this might be important for people who may just want to wait until later to get more involved with the Imp.

I love seeing the new projects people are posting, but I’m nervous about spending too much time not really knowing how much this might cost me a year from now. The Imp integration possibilities are huge, but the future costs might steer me to another WiFi type of control.

That being said, perhaps the blog portion of electricimp.com could be used to give us all up-to-date information on agents, progress, cloud activity, and timelines on when you expect things to happen. As of now, the blog is not up to date and basically not of any value.

Thanks.

We’ve already stated that for developers, the service will continue to be free.

For consumer-ready solutions, ie something that doesn’t involve an IDE, there is already a requirement to pay service fees - depending on the situation, this could be the manufacturer or the customer.

The blog is getting more active as of today!

And here’s the finished thing.

Oooooo translucent! :slight_smile: