Arduino Pager with Google App Engine Part 2

I've now updated the web app and the arduino to only show unread messages. Pressing a button on the arduino marks a message as read and grabs the next unread one.

Arduino Pager with Google App Engine

Today I decided to turn my arduino into a pager (albeit a not very portable one). The project had two parts.

1) A Google App Engine application that would store messages submitted via a HTML textbox and provide a way of querying these messages.

2) An arduino sketch that would make requests of the web app and display the results on an LCD screen. Here's the result:

http://mattywpager.appspot.com/

The hardest part was working out how an arduino can query this app using the shared ip address of appspot.com. This was acheived by using wireshark to see what my browser was doing. The resulting sketch simply sends this to the client

    client.println("GET /last HTTP/1.1");
    client.println("HOST: myappname.appspot.com");
    client.println("Connection: keep-alive");
    client.println("Cache-Control: max-age=0");
    client.println("Accept-Language:en-us,en;q=0.5");
    client.println("Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate");
    client.println();

The whole thing took about 4 hours. But was great fun.

Agile in a Flash

Got Agile in a Flash the other day. At the end of our standups we pick a card at random and read it out. Any ideas we find relevant to our current situation we try to act on that day.