Lucas Moffitt

Hey Guys

This weekend I attended the XNA game camp in Wollongong with Elise, it was a great event and turned out to be quite disappointing to find out that a further 10 people from Newcastle University were registered but didn’t show.

You guys missed out on some fantastic opportunities to meet with the most highly skilled XNA developers in Australia and win a whole heap of fantastic prizes just for rocking up!

Pictures for the event can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=131819&id=563877919&l=439509ea85

While I’m here, the MSP program is still open to applications, if you’re interested head over to www.student-partners.com and have a look.

Lucas

I don’t know…

Well i didn’t, but i do now!

Today my TEMPer USB thermometer arrived. I was quite disappointed to find out the state of the User Interface….

I need this thermometer to put in my server in the back room. (because i hate cords, and computer boxes everywhere i had to place it in a cabinet (I’ll do more posts on the modification of the cabinet later) )

Anyway I needed something more flexible, something that can update to twitter and / or send me a text message if it starts getting to hot in the upcoming warmer months. (sorry for the quality of the picture, the lighting is somewhat terrible )

I started out downloading the Temper.Communications.dll from the manufacturers website and dropped it into Red Gates .Net Reflector which you can download freely from here. The process was simple and within seconds i was able to see all i needed to create my own application for it.

So i cracked open Visual Studio 2008 (Thanks to Dreamspark) and did this up in VB.

Imports System
Imports TEMPer.Communication.Temperinterface

Public Class ServerTemp

    Dim AvailableComPorts$() = TEMPer.Communication.TEMPerInterface.FindDevices()
    Dim TEMPerInterface As New TEMPer.Communication.TEMPerInterface(AvailableComPorts$(0))

To read the temperature is simple…

Me.Text = TEMPerInterface.ReadTEMP

Or to find the port information

Me.Text = TEMPerInterface.PortName

After that it was as simple or as complex as you want to make it. All i wanted mine to do was send an SMS to my phone when the temperature surpassed a set ambient limit. (I decided on 40degees).

Thanks to my friends at SMSGlobal it was as simple as borrowing their API to send an SMS to my phone to warn me when the temperature started to rise.

I think it works well…

Lucas.