Chariot 1.2 Release

Qualia Networks announces release 1.2 of its web-of-things product, Chariot. Chariot is our flagship Maker tool for structuring your Arduino experiment as a web-of-things.

See our documentation on GitHub for a description of new features in this release by visiting the link on our support page.

We have created some exciting new examples for the web-of-things enthusiast. We have an implementation of the MVC design pattern for bare metal that shows the design power of Chariot. We also provide a cold chain sketch that uses the precision temp sensor on Chariot to establish a cold chain mesh monitoring system. Another sketch uses the exciting new ESP8266 WiFi UNO to set up a tracking system. We use Blynk (see blynk.cc) to track temp, location, accelerometer and magnetometer telemetry provided by Chariot-equipped Arduino motes and deliver it to a smartphone app. We have also included an Arduino websocket example that allows Curl or Chrome and Firefox browsers to communicate directly with motes in Chariot web-of-things experiments. Our release also includes the classic access to Arduino's IO pins via the web-of-things.

New in 1.2! Bare metal Model-View-Controller design pattern as web-of-things: This photo shows three Chariot-equipped Arduinos. The one in back is the Model--it drives an Adafruit camera servo, accepting subscriptions from the View (right) that displays the azimuth updates on a meter. The Model receives commands from the Controller (left) that set the azimuth angle via POST. The MVC design pattern is completely implemented by CoAP transactions exchanged transparently over the Chariot mesh. The resources used in this example are discovered and provided to the Arduino M, V, C sketches by Chariot. This release introduces a new feature that allows the current system session number to be retrieved via CoAP from any Arduino target. The View and Controller components use this (like a counting semaphore) to determine subscription staleness and changes to overall system state. Controller and View components incorporate low-cost 2.8" TFT displays purchased from Amazon for about $20 each. See the examples folder on our Github repository for the code.