Recently I was shown an extremely nice set of gauges by a fellow on the Arduino forum, graynomad. They were metalic looking and had a great set of parameters to mess with. Well, I couldn't resist, and decided to figure out how to use them and somehow get them on this site.
Well, I sort of got it working. It seems that Google (Blogger) has a problem with iframes, and that's pretty much the only way to include one of these. The problem is that it messes with the scrollbar in Chrome, their own browser. I'm not sure how they show up in IE, except they won't show up at all in IE8 because it doesn't support canvas. For something this complex, the canvas is the only practical solution short of using something like Flash.
So, if you're using Chrome, look over to the right where the scrollbar is, notice it doesn't look right? If you put your mouse over there and click, you'll see that it actually works, but just doesn't look right. I don't have a solution to this yet.
But, let's look at the gauge. Notice it has an LCD display and a moving hand. When my energy usage goes above the red indicator (it's on the dial), the little red LED will light up. These are all parameters that can be set for the gauge. I chose the brass look simply because it fit my taste, there are many, many combinations possible. The gauge is sort of real time. What I do is update it every 10 seconds from my datastore at Cosm which is updated every 60 seconds. So, every minute or so, it will be updated to reflect the current power usage at my house. I plan on working with these gauges quite a bit more; they're just too nice to leave alone.
Well, I sort of got it working. It seems that Google (Blogger) has a problem with iframes, and that's pretty much the only way to include one of these. The problem is that it messes with the scrollbar in Chrome, their own browser. I'm not sure how they show up in IE, except they won't show up at all in IE8 because it doesn't support canvas. For something this complex, the canvas is the only practical solution short of using something like Flash.
So, if you're using Chrome, look over to the right where the scrollbar is, notice it doesn't look right? If you put your mouse over there and click, you'll see that it actually works, but just doesn't look right. I don't have a solution to this yet.
But, let's look at the gauge. Notice it has an LCD display and a moving hand. When my energy usage goes above the red indicator (it's on the dial), the little red LED will light up. These are all parameters that can be set for the gauge. I chose the brass look simply because it fit my taste, there are many, many combinations possible. The gauge is sort of real time. What I do is update it every 10 seconds from my datastore at Cosm which is updated every 60 seconds. So, every minute or so, it will be updated to reflect the current power usage at my house. I plan on working with these gauges quite a bit more; they're just too nice to leave alone.
So, if you want to use them also, or just admire the tremendous amount of work that went into creating them, they're known as the SteelSeries and apparently were initially designed for weather displays. Just go to Google and start looking. If I gave a URL, it would be the wrong one or outdated or something, so check it out yourself.
And, sorry about your scrollbar; it'll come back when you go leave this page.
And, sorry about your scrollbar; it'll come back when you go leave this page.