Arduino, ethernet, nRF24L01, and Pachube/Cosm/Xively

This took a lot of digging and trial and error to figure out. For those who don’t know, the nRF24L01+ is a low power 2.4 GHz wireless transceiver chip from Nordic Semiconductor that is the heart of an extremely inexpensive series of Arduino-compatible wireless modules. They use SPI, are power misers, and have a theoretical range of about 150 feet, more or less, depending on what lies between the transceivers. Bandwidth is fine for sensor data, I’ve been using mine to send updates every couple of seconds. They can pump more data, but don’t expect miracles. However they are a fantastic alternative to much more expensive modules. They can be had (delivered!) for a couple of dollars each, and they are a great solution for sending data between microcontrollers. Use cases include any kind of remote sensor installation, or anything collecting data in an environment or location that is inconvenient for cabling. More information on what these modules do can be found here.

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Drupal Migrate – An Introduction

Some time ago, I volunteered to migrate a white label implementation of a Drupal 6 site that is destined to be shut down and merge its data into another Drupal 6 site that uses (mostly) the same content types and structures. I had it all mapped out. It would be easy. Just a few lines of code, some mySQL queries, and we’d be done with it.

It turns out that merging into an existing Drupal site where you want to keep the data from being overwritten is more of a big-ish deal than I thought.

Fortunately, there are great tools out there to help with this, and the one I chose to use is the Drupal Migrate module. Even though this module is designed primarily to migrate D5, D6 (and earlier) sites into D7, there is a D6 version of the module, and it doesn’t care what the source is, so you can use it to merge/migrate between two same-version Drupal sites. It’s not standard operating procedure, but it’s supported, but it’s a barely-documented scenario, hence this series of posts.

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