The Martha Project

Back in March I started what is called the Martha Project, which is yes, named after Martha Jones, the brief companion of the 10th Doctor. I think that I made some weak acronym to spell out Martha, but it’s purely a geeky thing. The previous half-baked blog I made documented the successes and fails, but the gist being that it’s still a working process.

The Martha Project consists of an Arduino Uno R3 Microcontroller, connected to a Sparkfun Bosch BMP 085 Barometric Sensor and a SHT 015 Temperature and Humidity Sensor. All of this will be powered by an Adafruit Solar Minty Boost Kit (a 3.7v 1300 mAh lithium battery connected to DC Polymer charging board, connected to a voltaic solar panel).

All of this will feed data to Cosm, or a similar “Internet of Things” service.

The sticking point is the communication portion of the project. I’ve had some trouble making that part work for some reason. I started off trying a set of Series 1 XBees and an Adafruit Xbee Adapter kit, also incorporating a separate Arduino and Ethernet Shield connected to the network. After a burnout of one of the adapters, and some problems trying to configure the XBees to allow the two Arduinos to talk to each other, I decided to move on to a Roving Networks WiFly GSX Breakout Board. The difficulty with this is that the code is somewhat less intuitive to figure out in comparison to say, the WiFi Shield recently released. I haven’t quite given up on the WiFly board. I’ve been using the WiFly library supplied by Tom at Arduinology, so armed with a sample from him, I’ll give it one more try. Otherwise, the official WiFI shield may be a future purchase.

The result is a bunch of (starting to be expensive) parts with no result yet – only quick working tests. I will try to document the continuation of Martha, and how she turns out.