Ambient Orb
A long-time friend of mine started playing with his Ambient Orb a year or so ago. At the time, he explained all sorts of details of how he’d setup a Windows service and .NET providers. I remember thinking, “wow, their API must be pretty complex”.
While in Salt Lake City on vacation, I picked up an orb on sale for $50 and decided to investigate this on my own. Today, I finally got around to looking into the API, and implementing a client. After looking at the ‘API’ I decided on BASH to implement my client.
Spoiler: It’s 2 lines of bash to retrieve our current daily customer count and post it to the ambient orb API. And, before you waste your time both my Orb ID and the database password have been changed.
After combining my ’service’ with the ever powerful CRON, my Orb now updates every 15 minutes.
[tags]ambient orb, bash, intellicontact[/tags]
July 27th, 2006 at 6:45 am
$50?! Mine is actually “in the shop”, so to speak. It stopped showing a few colors but blue so I had to send it in to them. Which reminds me that I should email them about the status….
Their “api” really couldn’t get any easier. It almost sounds silly that I wrote all that code, but it does allow a few things that, to me, would be annoying to script in Windows like you did. So, to get around me feeling claustrophobic, for lack of a better term, in a scripting environment, is why there’s all that supporting code :) Well, that and it was something to code at the time.
July 27th, 2006 at 10:00 am
I’m sure you learned a lot in the process, which was the key challenge :). I was mainly pleased to find that it was so simple to implement and change.