Cloud Shield GUI?

Joel Finkle

For those of us who already understand the Twine/Spool stuff, could you post a couple pix of the GUI you get for the Cloud Shield?

From the comments on the Facebook post, it's currently only on/off... but how many on/offs are there to the shield interface?  If there are two "touch capacitive buttons" and a whole bunch of GPIO pins, it seems reasonable to send more complex signals using multiple GPIO pins.  Is this possible?  Can I say

     If pins 5, 3, 2 and 1 are high, 

    Then send a message "The number is 23"

John Kestner

There's just the one signal. The headers are for stability, and to pass through pads to solder to. 

But you'll be able to do something similar once we update it for analog support. Your Arduino logic would say if pins 5, 3, 2, and 1 are high, then twine.triggerWithValue(23) - which would be sending a PWMed signal over pin 9 - and then your Twine rule would look like WHEN cloudshield's value is 23, THEN email "The number is 23". Of course, you'll have to allow for some imprecision in sending/reading an analog value, but we'll probably incorporate this into the Arduino library to make it easy and reliable.

Joel Finkle

So for now, the capacitive buttons basically are more useful for communicating to the Arduino, along with any other I/O you're using, but eventually the shield is merely saying "ON" or "OFF" to the Twine.

I'm guessing I can currently look at length of "ON" and "OFF" times like I can with other sensors?  Sure, it's not highly accurate, but an "ON" signal for 10 seconds that's reset after 5 seconds of "OFF" could be distinguished form a 5-second "ON" that's reset after 10 seconds of "OFF", etc. in the server-side programming.

John Kestner

Yes, exactly. Clever idea to distinguish using timing.