Arduino Yún powers this Foursquare soap bubble machine

Earlier this month, Bits & Pieces took a closer look at Stefano Guglielmetti’s Yún-powered Gmail (alert) lamp that is programmed to ping him in real-time about incoming emails labelled “important.”

And today we’re going to get up close and personal with a Foursquare soap bubble machine built around the versatile Atmel-based Yún.

“When you check in to our balcony with foursquare, a soap bubble machine starts filling the air with bursting bubbles. The first prototype uses Arduino connected to an XBee Wifly to control the soap bubble machine and a Rat Pack server that handles the Foursquare API,” Sven Kräuter explained in a guest post published on the official Arduino blog.

“Quite complex and actually and as you might have guessed the Yún helped reducing both the software and the hardware complexity drastically. Adding it to the project made it possible to cut off a lot of fat. Actually it now only consists of the Yun connected to the soap bubble machine.”

According to Kräuter, what’s true for the hardware is also true for the software.

“Reduced complexity is achieved by processing the response of the Foursquare API on Linino as opposed to letting the Ruby server take care of it,” he continued.

“And although there’s much debate when it comes to JSON processing with regular expressions in general, I just used grep and a matching regexp to extract the information from Foursquare’s JSON response. The parts marked green are the only ones necessary after adding the Yun to the setup.”

Kräuter also noted that he sees the Yún as a major milestone in making the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) available to a broader audience.

“The Yún will empower fellow makers and tinkerers, [allowing them] to spend less time debugging and more time inventing,” he added.

As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, the Yún – designed in collaboration with Dog Hunter – is based on Atmel’s ATMega32u4 microcontroller (MCU) and also features the Atheros AR9331, an SoC running Linino, a customized version of OpenWRT. The Yún is somewhat unique in the Arduino lineup, as it boasts a lightweight Linux distribution to complement the traditional microcontroller (MCU) interface.