Phidgets

Phidget is a shorthand for “physical world widget”, which is some hardware sensor or controller connecting to a computer, originally created by students of University of Alberta, later packaged and distributed by Phidgets Inc..

Phidgets are a painless way to extend a USB-equipped computer’s interactions with the physical world, providing a wide range of sensors, displays, and controllers as simple as plugging them in. With an acceptable pricetag, phidgets open up a world of new possibilities for software developers with only limited skills in electronics, ultimately resulting in some fun projects.

Phidgets Inc. provides software drivers and libraries for Windows, Windows CE, Mac OSX, and Linux, including driver source code (with a restrictive license, though). There are APIs for COM, Java, .Net, C, ActionScript, and bindings to a variety of languages to speed up development. Browsing the web and the forum for python support I’ve also came across the python-phidgets and the phydget projects that provide python bindings.

I decided to give phidgets a try, so I’ve purchased a 3-axis phidget accelerometer, a phidget interface kit with text-LCD, and a few analog sensors to measure temperature, magnetic fields, and light, and also a touch sensor. The sensors are going to be used in a home-automation project, while the accelerometer will somehow become an input device (thinking of something like the accelerometer mouse).

With the limited time I have spent with my phidgets so far, I’ve added accelerometer support to phydget (should you be interested, here’s the source code for my accelerometer-enabled version), and created a minimalistic visualizer for the accelerometer readings using the excellent vpython library. More to come as soon as I could make some progress in either of my planned phidgets projects…