Hardware/Modding/Hacking: Plotly, Arduino, and Xiaomi IoT thermometers
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How to draw scatter plot using Plotly library in Python.
Plotly is the library using which we can generate the interactive graphs which are good visualisation. Using this visualisation we can draw some conclusion or it will make us easy to conclude something by looking at the chart or graphs. In the normal scenario it becomes really difficult to arrive at the decision simply looking at data values.
In this post we are going to learn how to use scatter plot using Plotly library in Python.
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Real Robot One is a high-performance robotic arm that you can build yourself | Arduino Blog
Robotic arms are versatile machines and are great for learning about principles of robotics or even doing useful work for hobbyists. That work might be picking and placing components on PCBs, packing boxes, or anything else you can imagine. But to perform that work well, the robotic arm needs more hardware than we tend to see in DIY projects. Pavel Surynek wanted a high-performance robotic arm and the result is RR1: Real Robot One, which features closed-loop feedback for accuracy and repeatability.
In an open-loop robotic system, the controller only outputs positioning commands and doesn’t receive any feedback. Because it has no feedback, the controller doesn’t know if the position is accurate and can’t actively compensate for issues like backlash in the motors. Closed-loop feedback provides real-time, real-world position data to the controller, so it can ensure that results match commands. RR1 receives closed-loop feedback data from encoders on each of the six joints, which are driven by stepper motors through 3D-printed planetary gearboxes.
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Jonathan Dowland: Temperature monitoring
I've been having some temperature problems in my house, so I wanted to set up some thermometers which I could read from a computer, and look at trends.
I bought a pack of three cheap Xiaomi IoT thermometers. There's some official Xiaomi tooling to access them from smartphones and suchlike, but I wanted something more open. The thermometers have some rudimentary security on them to try and ensure you use the official tooling. This is pretty weak, and the open-source Home Assistant (HA) has support for querying them. I wasn't already running HA and it looked to do more than I needed right now.
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It's been long enough since I last looked at something like this that the best in class software was things like multi router traffic grapher, and rrdtool, or things that build on top of them like Munin. The world seems to have moved on (rightly or wrongly) with a cornucopia of options like Prometheus, Grafana, Graphite/Carbon, InfluxDB, statsd, etc.