I’ll start with a little bit of background information. Here in New Zealand there is a chap called John Campbell. He hosts a current affairs show, Campbell Live, which is on TV3 each weeknight at 7pm. John Campbell is an active Twitterer who likes to get involved with his fellow Tweeters. He is that special, he [...]

Here we have a live web cam of our Twitter LED project, showing the occurrences of keywords related to the FIFA World Cup. More information about the project can be found at this earlier blog post. If the image is too dark to see the project, you can turn a light on. If the camera [...]

Yesterday we filmed a video demonstrating how shift registers can be used, along with the Twitter Feed plugin, to create a real-life interpretation of keyword activity on the Twitter public stream. There is a bot running on the Telecontrol server which is monitoring the Twitter public stream for occurrences of pre-defined keywords in real time. [...]

Here we have a video illustrating how to flash the telecontrol .hex file to the Arduino micro controller. You might be wondering why the firmware is being distributed pre-compiled and not as an Arduino sketch file. This is because the protocol needs to be protected. By “protected”, we mean that the server requires the device [...]

We have put together a video as an introduction to our Telecontrol project. The default configuration with the current version of the firmware (0.4.0) allows the device to perform the following tasks via the web service (api) and/or plugins: – Set the state of up to 12 digital outputs (the analogue input pins can be [...]

A quick video explaining the concept of Arduino Shields for expanding the functionality of the Arduino micro controller. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us via the Contact page, or via the comments section below.

Our first video for the Telecontrol project. This is a simple introduction to the Arduino Microcontroller. We tried to keep it nice and simple for people to understand. It was pouring down at the time of filming, which can be heard in the background. For more information about the Arduino, take a look at their [...]

There is nothing worse than a blog that hasn’t been updated for a while. For me, it’s been about 6 months. Time for an update! I’ve been pretty busy this year. Real busy. As some of you will already know, my wife and I had a daughter in January. Trust me, babies take a lot [...]

This year we’re bringing back the Telecontrol section of PacificLights because it proved to be quite popular in 2007, and missed in 2008. Not only are we bringing it back, but we’ll be blogging instructions on how to do it yourself. It doesn’t end there either. We’ve partnered up with Mindkits, who sell heaps of [...]