Peter Bergstrom

My friend Ben and I have been working on some projects for Maker Faire 2008. One night a month and a half ago we were talking about some potential uses of the iPhone to control real world objects and we came up with a useless but really fun application: a remote controlled watering can.

The watering can is a robot that is controlled through mobile Safari using the page rotation. The rotation event can easily be observed using javascript. When you rotate the phone into landscape mode, it will move downwards and pour, rotate it back into portrait mode and it will move back up. Using a web server on a chip called the SitePlayer that allows you to send on/off signals to IO ports, we were able to easily control the motors through AJAX.

Another application of the iPhone was to create a basic music player. We have 4 notes that you can play on the iPhone and they are translated into physical sounds via the web server. We have a bass, a high hat, and two different kinds of buzzers. In addition to using the iPhone to control the sounds, I also created a javascript-based sequencer. The online version plays WAV files controlled through the QuickTime javascript API .  

And now, here is the first test run of our two iPhone-based creations:  
http://youtube.com/watch?v=58izpfJTRuY

I was getting out of the car around 10:35PM and I looked up into the sky. Even though the sun is well past the horizon, objects moving in orbit will catch some sun even here. It’s rare to catch one at the right moment, but it is spectacular when you do. I saw two dots,  one larger and the other smaller, moving ever so slowly apart. I knew that the space shuttle should have undocked from the international space station earlier this evening. I verified my sighting at http://www.n2yo.com/ and I did actually see it. 

It’s been a while since I’ve seen things in orbit. I think that last time was in high school.

Very cool!