My intention was to spend this evening playing around with Sitecore 8 and blog about it, but unfortunately there were some trouble with the distribution of the Technical preview. But today I received a long awaited UPS package with two MicroViews. It’s basically a small Arduino with a 64×48 pixel oled display built into a standard DIP package.

I found the device really simple to work with. Just hook it into to a computer using a FTDI interface and program in with the common Arduino IDE works really well! Geek Ammo and Sparkfun has done a really good job in making a user friendly product. So, instead of the standard “Hello World” program, I decided to try do something a little bit more useful with it as a first project.

In our vacation house in Lappland, about 1000km away from home, I have a little Raspberry PI hooked up with some sensors measuring temperate etc. It sends this data periodically to one of my servers at home. Using another Raspberry PI at home, I made a very simple little script that gets the current sensor values and transmits it to the MicroView over a serial line. The MicroView then reads this data and displays the current indoor and outdoor temperature and the indoor humidity at the vacation house.

Well, it’s not very pretty, actually it looks quite ugly, but as I write this blog post, it’s only three hours since I unboxed the MicroView. (The poor picture quality doesn’t help.) Now that’s what I call rapid prototyping!

Maybe next project could be showing some of the Sitecore 8 launch pad diagrams of, for example, campaign conversions and visit values, on the MicroView 🙂