What are you going to build with Flutter?

[taylor]

What are you going to build with Flutter? Share your projects here!

[up2late]

Hi, I have some lofty goals for flutter. I have a lot of interests that I dabble in so I can see flutter working in many areas of my life. I like flying drones and working with any RC vehicles. The range on flutter could change the way I control my vehicles. I'm into home automation so the possibilities here are endless. I have a large property and would love to know when people or animals are moving where they should not be moving. The property is pushing the distance limits of flutter, so mesh networking? How about a sensor for water trough levels? A way to open and close the chicken coop? Is the gate to pasture X open or closed?

I backed at the "Skynet" level so I think I'll have plenty to play with for a while.

[esse_prometheus]

My project is going to be ambitious and relies on the mesh networking capability of the Flutter boards. I run a community outreach that hosts events on roughly 30 acres of land that doesn't have power. We currently use radios to communicate over the area, however we could automate aspects of our events. My plan is to build a network of self contained Flutter boxes with solar panels for charging that would allow automation and relay of information over the area.

[up2late]

We'll be sharing notes I think. I'll be covering about the same amount of space and also working with solar power and mesh networking. This is going to be really fun. What types of data are you planning on running between the nodes?

[HiTechFarmer]

I'm a farmer and would like to have a solar powered mesh network of field sensors that will show me historical weather soil condition data both in parts of the field and as a whole. Creating heat-maps of the soil data along with rainfall across multiple fields is CRUCIAL when planning across thousands of acres.

My ultimate goal would be to have something modular so I could add them easily to any field and move them from field to field at will.

[Sam]

I want to use flutter to create a network on my ranch so that I can monitor what my livestock is doing in the barn with video and audio, as well as security (ie, gate is open, water is low, motion unexpectedly along the fence line.) I would also like to be able to connect my front gate to the internet so I can open it using my cell phone wherever I am.

[esse_prometheus]

I'm not currently planning on transmitting anything that is very data intensive. I'm currently planning to transmit minimal data, such as button presses and commands to play a locally stored audio file. Once I have that, I'm planning to test out some other ideas such as a/v transmission from a quadrotor, but that is going to wait until I have a usable network built.

[jwm]

My project is to create yellow caution lights for a local kart track that I race with. We need to be able to run lights as it will be easier than looking for the corner workers (as they sometimes run off to help a racer that spun, so not safe).

Wiring everything up was going to be costly, not to mention it would not be as easy to make a portable controller.

I think Flutter will fit our needs, let us create multiple light stations and have a few ways to control them all.

[jet_flyer]

I'm thinking of a mother ship of sorts, a larger UAV can control smaller MAVs using the flutter mesh network. Can get a lot don't with only one main connection between the mother ship and the ground station

[mitchd]

My usage for Flutter will be to monitor a sugar bush (maple syrup industry). It will need to work in a remote, harsh environment and have low power requirements. The primary sensing will be temperature, ambient light (cloud cover), and the main productivity booster of sensing vacuum. As it is today, a vacuum leak is only detectable by noting a pressure change at the vacuum pump located at the main of miles of plastic tubing. The sugarer has to go and schlep over rough terrain and possibly deep snow to check the lines. Having a mesh of sensors would cut down on the search. (Yes, there is a binary search that occurs today as the mainlines branch, but it still takes hours.) Inside the sugar house will be a myriad of temperature, vacuum, ambient noise, sap tank fluid level sensors hooked up to both gsm (to autodial to annouce trouble) and a website.

[MaterGrower]

I will be setting up a data collection network for my farm. I want to place a monitoring system in every field and greenhouse to collect Temperature, moisture levels, light, wind, EC, PH. I want a flutter for each piece of mobile machinery, tractors, harvest machines, spray rigs and have a GPS shield for flutter so i can keep track of all equipment, stolen or working.
I use data collection software called Pendragon (Pendragonsoftware.com) and there is another kickstarter funded data collector called Sensodrone but this microcontroller is limiting with the number of sensors you can collect data with. Would flutter be interested in having there microcontroller talk with pendragon software so we can synchronize the data with my cell phone then with my database? I have a huge amount of data to collect.

In your recent video post you mentioned something about overlying data on google maps. This would be phenomenal if i can overlay temperature data, and ect to google maps and having gps points of collected data.

Can we upload to Weather underground?

How about image capture so i can have an image of the actual crop.

[taylor]

@MaterGrower @jet_flyer @jwm @mitchd @HiTechFarmer @up2late

These are all really great applications, thank you for sharing this with everyone. As I nail down the code for Flutter, I really start to feel the potential, and it's really cool to hear that it will be solving your problems! I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how Flutter can be most useful, and it seems like wireless sensor networks are going to be a big deal. Today I finally turned on hardware addressing and played with more than two boards at a time. They're all timing synchronized to around 200 microseconds to satisfy the frequency hopping code I built in last week, so I have a few boards just blinking away all in concert on my desk. It's pretty neat! Actually I feel like I should get a bunch out and make a video....

But farm and property monitoring will be great for Flutter! It should work our really well for the kart track application too!

[gcomer]

Ran across an article this morning ( http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2465582,00.asp ) that got me wondering if Flutter might be a good candidate to help develop a solution. Especially with the possibility of modular certification.

One possible issue I could see that would need to be addressed, is the sheer number of devices there could be potentially out there, and whether the hardware addressing would support that. Need to read what was said on that again.

All the V2V push is going to be on new vehicles, wonder if there will be a market for retrofitting it into existing vehicles on the road currently. May have to start looking into that myself.

Whatever is developed, would be nice to have good encryption built in from the start!

[pittsville]

I hope to be able to control a 10 foot satellite dish actuator motor. The dish needs 36volts on two wires and 2 more wires for pulse sensing to determine the position of the dish. My satellite receiver is a good distance away from the dish, so I hope to provide the 36 volts to the dish locally and use the Flutter device to apply the 36 volts, and reverse the polarity of the 36 volts to control the direction of movement. I'm not advanced enough to be able to implement the pulse counting and memory functions which could return the dish to exact positions for different satellites, but I think I know enough to send the pulses from the dish motor to the flutter receiver board and verify that they are getting there. Maybe it wouldn't be that hard? The pulses come from a magnetic switch, so I could probably connect that to an input, and have it control an output at the receiver board, which I could connect to the incoming pulse terminals on the satellite receiver.

[up2late]

Sure that should be pretty straight forward to get going. Maybe pair flutter with an H bridge type motor controler just have to make sure it does not pull too much current. I'm sure something can be worked out for position tracking as well, have to put a little thought into that one and maybe look up some typical motors used in these.

[NotTheStig]

My first project will be building a data logging system for my race car. Looking to send GPS, accelerometer, OBDII, and possibly a few additional analog and/or digital inputs (brake position would be first on the list) to a base station in the pits. I hope it will be relatively straight forward (at least sending the raw data, building a dashboard might be a pain). I also plan on writing session data to a SD card locally since range might be a problem at a few tracks.

How does the Flutter handle losing a connection? Will it auto-connect or is that a coding issue?

[taylor]

@NotTheStig The racecar sounds sweet! Flutter definitely auto-connects, so no worries there. I am still working out what the auto-connect interval will be. It can be as little as 1 second or as much as 20 or 30 seconds, depending on timing requirements and power budget. We'll probably make a basic low power/high power mode, where low power things take longer to reconnect. High power is fine for anything not running on a small battery. Not sure what the scheme will be but you will have options and we will make it simple!

@pittsville Satellite dish actuator should be like no problem. Sounds like you need an H bridge to control the motors, so I'd look at Pololu.com for that. Flutter can definitely read the dish position and provide control signals for the motor controller. Flutter can't take 36 volts in, so it will need a lower voltage supply of its own (16v max for the Basic), but the H bridge should let you still drive the motor at 36v even if Flutter is running at a lower voltage. Just make sure the H bridge is 3.3v signal compatible.

[taylor]

That vehicle to vehicle communications stuff seems very interesting and I'd love to have Flutter on that. Sadly, they'll probably pick some messy protocol with an expensive license. But who knows, maybe we can show them that Flutter is better!

[NotTheStig]

Power won't be an issue since it can run off the car's power system, though I might have a backup battery so the pits can get an update if the power is shut off (car crashes of breaks down).

Many of the lower cost auto data logging systems on the market today don't have communications back to the pits. You download off an SD card after the race. The pro setups use a pretty powerful transmitter and (like your voice radio communications) need to be FCC licensed. We'd have people at some grassroots races running non-licensed radios and they step over emergency channels (not good and very illegal). Even if I lose the connection temporarily on longer tracks, it's worth not having to deal with the pain and expense of the FCC license.

[grymoire]

I'm a security concultant, and have worked with industrial systems that use the 900Mhz frequency. I would like to use Flutter to learn more about wireless security and cryptography, and also build tools that can be used to analyze 900Mhz wireless systems, especially as a way to test the security of such systems. So I would like to use it as a packet sniffer, caapturing raw traffic, and then see if I can evaluate the security of such a system.