Arduino: Standalone wifi http messenger

So I got an arduino and wishield the other day and was wondering what cool stuff I could do with it. Coupled with the lcd that I had as well I figured I may as well just combine everything into a funky little message screen.  I started off by getting the lcd working on the breadboard. This took a while in itself and I think by the end I must have known every pin on the board. This was pretty messy I was using wires I had cut out of a network cable and they kept breaking and pulling out of their sockets. A trip to my local jaycar electronics was in order.

[edit] Did have a link to it here but I turned it off.

So I bought a new soldering iron kit, a bitchload of resistors and some prototyping boards. I soldered some headers up to the lcd to make it neater and wired this onto a board:

I also bent the pins on some male to male cables so the 5v and ground cable could be easily plugged back into the arduino. The soldering is a bit messay this is the first major soldering job I've done. It's been a long time since I was a kid ripping resistors out of old electronics to use later. So I tested it, stuck it all together and ended up something like this:

I had to stuff some paper down between my soldered board and the lcd because something was shorting down there and nothing was coming up. So at this stage I had done most of the coding (mostly between getting the LCD working and getting the soldered board together). I noticed however that if a message came in and you missed it you wouldn't know, and that there was no way to show the message on screen. Basically there was no input or output apart from the web and lcd. So anyway ... I went back and added a button and led to a breadboard on the side. At some stage I'll put these on a proper board but cbf for the moment. So now we are up to

Finally here is a little video of it in action:



When the arduino receives a message it blinks the light until you press the button, which also lights up the display for the normal time. All In all I think it worked out fairly well. I have it plugged in to a 12v notebook adapter at the moment. One day I'll get a smaller wall wart because this brick isn't very efficient. My friends that I've told have had a little too much fun sending me messages. Things to do next would include as above to put the led ad switch on their own board. Change it over to battery (wouldn't last very long) or a smaller power supply. Also as it stands while the WiShield does support wep, wpa and psk2 the arduino couldn't hack the psk2 that runs on my network. At some later stage I will rectify this.

For those that are interested in creating your own or something like it, here is the schematic:

I must warn you this is the first schematic I have ever done, and is of the first major electronic build I have ever done. It will quite possibly have errors either within the electrical circuit, or within how I have done the schematic itself.

And finally here is the code I am running on the arduino to catch URLs and server the web page:

Edit:

I did the schematic up from my working implementation, did the switch implementation wrong when I put it into the drawing program.

It should go like this:

5v -------switch ----------- 10k ---------- ground
                         |
                         |  100 ohm
                         |
                       pin 1

This means that normally the pin is grounded through the 100ohm and 10kohm line (pin low). When you press the switch down almost all the 5v goes through the 100 ohm to the pin (the easier path). Some leaks through the 10k ohm to ground but enough gets through to register pin high. If the ground wasn't there the pin would get floating voltage which is invalid input.

In the schematic I have online we have

gnd --------switch ------------ 10k ------------5v
                           |
                           | 100 ohm
                           |
                         pin 1

This means that the pin always reads high through from the 5v through the 10k and 100 to pin1. When you press the switch down most of the power goes through the 10k ohm, through the switch to ground that makes a short circuit. The arduino should crash or at the very least the switch will do nothing.

Edit 2:
There was a link above to the source code that I made to run on the arduino. In moving the blog to blogger years later I lost this, but I don't know if anyone is interested enough in this project now to bother trying to find a backup. If you are reading through this and want the source post a comment and I'll go to the effort of digging through years of backups to find it.