im looking to make a mobile device that has a lcd screen that reads the html of 1 webpage and thats it and entire device dedicated to this one webpage. it must use wifi have a keyboard that can post on the page. a button to refresh the page and a button to turn it on and off a power supply to keep the energy. am i missing anything? any chance someone could send me a link to all the stuff i need on the cheapest level possible? i am willing to work with modules instead of sheilds if that is cheaper. and for wifi i have a tone of the wifi modules off of a nintendo ds if that works
- WiFi
- High resolution LCD Screen
- Keyboard
- Battery
- Touch screen?
The Arduino only has 2K of RAM. What kind of web page are you planning to render on it? What do you consider portable? Seems like you could just buy a used iPod Touch or old Nintendo DS (or PSP) for this at a price FAR below the cost of Arduino components. Plus, they'd come in a nice case... versus an awkward stack of cards.
its just a webpage of text and an input box nothing else. and what wifi module do i need? what lcd screen? i need some specifics and could i use a nintendo ds wifi module i have 3 of them
mikezelot:
its just a webpage of text and an input box nothing else.
An input Box assumes HTML coding... So even though text is still the same whether it's in HTML (let's forget the formatting tags) or plain text, the input box is not. This means, that your Arduino software must read the input box HTML code, parse it and present the box. It must then also be listening to your keyboard to input whatever you want to input.
Another thing that is also interesting is that an input box by itself is useless. So you'll need to use it in a form with a button or link or some way for the user to do something other than writing text on the box... and that is going to be another challenge for your Arduino to chew through.
While It is not completely impossible... I dare say it is damn hard to do something like this and even if possible, the result would not be great, or average... it would be quite limited in fact and most likely way off of what you pretended.
How much about microcontrollers do you know? I can say I know a fair bit and it would take me a lot of time, hair and sanity to pull this off.
I am not sure if the Arduino is ideal for your project. I would rather go with something like this: http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/proddetail.php?prod=GUI_Plug. If you buy the plug computer and the display separately, you can find a version of the plug computer that has WiFi built in. Instead of physical keyboard you can use a virtual keyboard on the touch screen. If the project will be battery powered, you can replace the built in AC adapter with a battery + a 5V regulator (or DC-DC converter). I won't probably even cost more than if you build something comparable with the Arduino.
ok so what if i just pull off of the mysql server? and input into the mysql server right off the arduino and skip the html and php. would this be possible?
Possible? Yes...
Easy? No...
Would everyone else (including me) like it?? F*ck yeah!!!
I have a document with a good description of how to interact with mySQL on my home computer. I didn't get anyone that would allow me to connect to it easily though. :\
It is exceptionally clear the ardino is not the right platform.
The hint was mysql.
So you original plan was something like this: A web server somewhere hosts a web page. The Arduino fetches the page, renders it onto an LCD screen, reads the input from the user and posts it back to the web server.
As others and I have pointed out, there are other tools (like the SheevaPlug + touch screen display) that are far more feasible for this kind project. If you are really going to read a web page (an HTML document) from the server, you need to implement an HTML parser that parses the text, the input box etc from the web page renders it onto the LCD.
If you still insist to go ahead with the Arduino, you need simplify your design. For example, do you need actual HTML pages? Is the page different every time you display it? If the page comprises of lets say a piece of text (a question) and an input box the answer, and only the question changes over time, you don't need to fetch a complete web page (html-document) from the server. You could fetch only the text part (a plain text document). That way you can get rid of parsing the HTML. You still can use http-protocol to fetch the text and send the answer back to the server, but that's an easy task.
And what comes to inputting into the mysql server directly, its feasibility depends on how do you plan to do it. You certainly won't want to port the mysql client libs into the Arduino, but you need some other kind of interface for it. It think the easiest solution, if you go over the WiFi, is to use the webserver and PHP (of whatever language you prefer) to implement an HTTP interface for inputting data into mysql. Realize that although you would use HTTP, you wouldn't use HTML, but you would do direct HTTP get-requests instead.
I would say that this is a great project although keeping it with arduino is a little tough.
You could certainly do each part separately with arduino and then put it all together separately from arduino.
You can find projects that get some text from an html in the simplest form and display it on a basic led screen.
You can work with touch screens.
You can work with full keyboards.
Although doing all of that on the arduino will prove very difficult.
Work with separate microcontrollers and programmers as well in order to get a good idea of how to work with that.
All of these things can be easily found and practiced through tutorials.
Good luck!
My comment about mysql being the hint that a Arduino isn't the right platform extends beyond the ridiculous notion of running a mysql server on the arduino.
If you are interacting with a database, you're doing operations that are going to very string heavy. Strings consume the very small amount of RAM in the ATmega chips very quickly.
I think he wanted to make an SQL client... and not a server.
I had a look at that before, and inputting data into mySQL should be feasible (not great, or even good). The main problem is the connection to the DB since you need to use a safe protocol like SSL or something like that and Arduino is not easy with the memory and speed constraints.
Not to mention getting the wireless shield and the wireless and then all the components is going to cost a lottt of money.
Then you need to program it to run with the SSL and its gonna be very laggy and choppy unless you know something we all don't
If there are security concerns, they should be solved on some other layer (e.g. on the networking hardware). Implementing SSL/encryption on the Arduino is hardly a feasible solution.