DanBailey.net cyclist, writer, font designer, geek

Ambient Web Metrics

Basics
This is a little bit of cleverness I threw together with Arduino. While it does amount to a blinkenlights project, I'm hoping that the project will spark enough interest to kick people into buying an Arduino board of their own and monkeying around with it.

As I write this the Arduino board is plugged into my Mac via USB. Currently the board only has one LED, plugged into Pin 13, and is listening to the USB port. The Mac is also running a XAMPP (XML-Apache-MySQL-PHP-Perl) webserver.

When you visit the site you're now reading, it uses HTTP to call up a file on the Mac. That file is a basic PHP page that, in addition to displaying the information in the bottom of the right-hand column ("Ambient Web Metrics"), sends a single byte ("D") to the port that the Arduino board is listening to. Arduino board receives data, parses it, and if it's the proper letter, flashes the LED, letting me know that someone's visited a page on this site. Fairly simple, but it was fun to set up, nevertheless.

The Future
The project's not entirely done. The next order of business is to wire up a couple more LEDs to the board, and light them up individually, based on visits to other sites I run -- fontosaurus.com and bike612.com. I've got a cheap-o project enclosure from Radio Shack, and I'll be assembling everything into that sometime next week.

Video Demo
Coming soon!

The Hardware
Coming soon!

The Code
Coming soon!