Virtual Breadboard Full Instructions Provided

Intermediate Full instructions provided 1 hour 10,640 Things used in this project Hardware components Arduino UNO 1 Buy from Newark Buy from Adafruit Buy from Arduino Store Buy from CPC Photo resistor 1 Resistor 3.3k ohm 1 Itead Nextion Enhanced 3.5 Touch Display 1 Software apps and online services Nextion GUI Editor Arduino IDE GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program Story Back in July of this year a few design students from Germany launched a satirical Kickstarter to prototype the Fridgeye; a beautiful light sensor for your refrigerator.

Combine the fact that we generally expect ludicrous hardware projects to appear on Kickstarter with how much effort the team put into making it seem real, its no wonder that people werent sure what to think.

Its no secret that I was a fan of the project from the beginning but not because Im dying to know what my fridge light is doing.

Build The Fridgeye Device The bulk of this post will be focused on getting the Fridgeye app running with the Nextion touch display connected to an Arduino but before we get that far we need an actual device that can sense light.

No problem. Lets take 5 minutes and build one.

All you need is an Arduino, breadboard, photoresistor, and a 3.3K resistor.

Well wire it up like this.

I built my Fridgeye device on a ProtoShield with a mini breadboard on it.

Virtual Breadboard Serial Output Of

But you can use the minute you have left to throw down this super simple sketch on your Arduino and watch the serial output of the light sensor from within the Arduino IDE.

You should see a new integer value representing the light level about every half second.

Cover the sensor up, turn the lights on and off, and maybe even try shining your smartphone flashlight on it.

Youll notice they range from almost 0 in complete darkness to almost 1024 when bombarded with light.

Whats the Fridgeye App The Fridgeye app is the trusty companion to your Fridgeye device.

Everyone knows that in todays grand world of IoT your device doesnt stand a chance unless it has an app of some sort to go with it.

Its peanut butter and jelly, milk and cereal, peas and carrots.

If we take a look at the Kickstarter page, its literally just the percentage of light that the Fridgeye detects and appears to only ever be 0 or 100 percent.

Lets go straight from the concept drawings and bring it into the real world.

Getting Started with the Nextion Display For this project Im using the Nextion Enhanced 3.5 touch display.

Its a full resistive touch screen display thats meant to handle the heavy lifting of graphic control so that even very low end devices like the Arduino can talk to it over a pair of serial lines.

While the display itself is very nice the documentation can be very hard to navigate, especially for beginners so lets walk through it one step at a time.

Display Programming Model If youve ever programmed an Arduino to use a display before youve probably used something like a simple graphics library that abstracted away the low level commands of drawing on the screen surface.

While very nice, those libraries still require you to do a lot of the pixel pushing to draw things on the screen.

The Nextion displays use a different approach that will feel very familiar if youre used to the MVVM or MVC patterns.

Essentially, the app appearance is configured entirely up front and stored on the screen itself.

At runtime the Arduino references pieces of the UI using pre-assigned IDs.

Virtual Breadboard Full Cracked