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One of our recent projects here at mcgarrybowen LABS demonstrates a new way to integrate sensor data with websites in a real-time and scalable way. We used a micro-controller–a small and inexpensive single circuit board computer–to collect data from a range of physical sensors and let that data affect elements on a website.

Our goal was to show the sort of physical interactions that small sensors could bring to our digital work. The range of potential uses for this technology is very large, but a few opportunities include websites that change depending on user involvement at a given location, devices that can control web elements simply by being moved around or played with, or projects that collect and report real-time data about what users are doing with a remote installation.

The electronic components of the project were based around the Arduino microcontroller, while the website was built using Tornado, a high performance web server capable of providing data sent from the Arduino to a large number of users simultaneously.

The Arduino-to-Tornado communication used WebSockets, a relatively new technology that allowed the sensor data to be sent to the webserver in real-time. To enable this communication, we built a custom web-socket library for Arduino which it hopes to release to the public following further development.

The end result was a simple demo site that allowed the user to play with a wide range of sensors – we used measurements from the following to affect elements on our demo site: a temperature sensor, a joystick, a photocell to measure light levels, and an accelerometer to measure orientation.

Temperature sensor in prototyping enclosure

Joystick sensor in prototype enclosure

Demo Site Example