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This weekend I was going to play around with servos and motors, but due to a missing diode I only got the servo working, displayed below. Yes, that’s a matchstick attached to it with Blu-Tac.

The processing language is actually very nice to play with. If I squint and pretend it’s Javascript then I can write in it without missing python too much.

The whole purpose of playing around with electronics is deep down I’d like to know a bit more about the factory floor hardware side of things. I’ve written a lot of software for factories but hardware tends to be black box stuff. When I couldn’t find the diode I needed I instead thought I’d see if I could get somewhere with a Direct ICS plugged to an Arduino and SCADA. Turns out you can. You need some modbus client code from here and the Mango M2M system from here.

What was supposed to be hardware time ended up playing around a lot with Java, Tomcat and understanding what modbus is and does. But at the end of the evening (I packed it in early, I was whacked) I saw this on the Mango interface …

That ‘1’, in the Nodes found list, is the sweet smell of success. Next step would be to fit some sensors on the Arduino and get Mango to monitor them.