Daily Archives: December 11, 2008

Current Cost monitoring from an iPhone

Posted on December 11, 2008 | 20 comments

For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.

Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.

This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.

I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.

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One photo, eight views

Posted on December 11, 2008 | 4 comments

Although the iPhone camera is not the best by a long shot (although the recent addition of the Clarifi has helped, in the case of close-ups anyway), it is still possible to do some interesting things with it. The App Store helps a lot here. There are one or two really handy applications for playing around with images – I actually have a whole page of them. I’m not going to list them all, but my top picks are probably Photogene, which is a small photo editing program for cropping and adjusting levels etc.; and CameraBag, which can apply a number of different processing effects to images either from the camera roll, or taken straight on the camera.

Consider the shots below – the first one is the original, and the others were all created with CameraBag.

IMG_0418 IMG_0421   IMG_0423IMG_0425IMG_0427IMG_0424IMG_0426IMG_0422  

For uploading I tend to use Tumble to post snapshots to my tumblelog, or FlickUp to get them up to Flickr.

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