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.

Arduino’s Yún powers this Gmail (alert) lamp

The Atmel-powered Arduino Yún may have only begun shipping this week, but eager Makers like Stefano Guglielmetti have already begun using the board in various DIY projects. Specifically, Guglielmetti built a Gmail (alert) lamp programmed to ping him in real-time about incoming emails labelled “important.”

“I need to be alerted in real time when I receive some important emails. Not all the emails –  we provide customer care for many clients, with different SLAs, and I need to be alerted only for the most important ones,” Guglielmetti wrote in an official Arduino blog post. “Moreover, sometimes I look forward to receiving a [specific] email, [so] I need something flexible, eye catching, that doesn’t depend on my computer or my cellphone.”

According to Guglielmetti, the working principle behind the DIY project is really quite straightforward.

“On Gmail, I defined a new label, so I can quickly change the rules for the messages that will go under it, then I tell to Arduino Yún which label to watch for (via REST APIs… amazing) and that’s it,” he explained. “The lamp – actually only just an LED [for now] – turns on every time I get new messages under that label. It’s the bat-signal principle!”

In terms of the code, Guglielmetti says he leveraged a number of new features unique to the Yún.

“In a single day I learned how to use the Bridge library to get data from REST webservices, how to save and load data from the Linux filesystem, and how to run processes on the Linux side and get the STDOUT results,” Guglielmetti added. “Now I will build the actual lamp, improving both the hardware and software.”

Additional information about the Gmail lamp project can be found here.

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.

The Atmel-powered Arduino Yún can be snapped up for $69, or €52.