Picture of Texting Doormat with Intel Edison
Doorbells are so old-fashioned. Who wants to rely on user input to tell you when someone is at your front door when you can use a microcontroller to tell you?
In this project, we’ll be building a pressure sensor that lives under your doormat. When the pressure sensor registers an input over a certain weight, it sends you a text using the Intel Edison and the Twilio API.
We’ll be using Node.js to run our sketch. If you’ve been reading my other Instructables about the Edison, this step is going to be the same as all the others. If you’ve already got an Edison with the Yocto image, feel free to skip to the next step.
Full disclosure, I’m working on a Mac, so these instructions will skew that way. To get started, you should have a freshly-flashed Edison. After you board is flashed, you can try to find the IP address and enter all the additional commands, or you can just “npm install bloop” on the machine that you’re trying to SSH in from. Bloop is a tool from Rex St. John, and it’s an absolute lifesaver when you’re working with the Edison. Instead of running “screen /dev/cu.usbserial-XXXXX 115200 -L”, all you have to do is run “bloop c” in terminal and it will connect to the Edison it finds on your network. Once you’re in, run “configure_edison –setup” to get your wi-fi and user creds defined.
While all this is happening, you can start downloading the Edison Yocto Image from this site. You want the link that says, “Edison Yocto complete image.” Once downloaded, you’ll need to load the files onto a micro SD card – you can read up on Yocto and how to get those files onto the SD card here. After you load the files, power down your Edison, insert the SD card, and the power it back up. To test your install is working, SSH into your Edison and type “node -v”. If that returns the version of Node that you have installed you’re good to go. If it says “Command not found,” you’re going to need to try loading Yocto onto the SD card again, because something went wrong.
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