For a long time now I have been wanting to dabble in home automation but didn’t have the avenue to design a system. After becoming familiar with microcontrollers over the last two years I have been mentally designing a system starting with a smart outlet. Recently, before the Maker Faire I was talking with a friend and having seen a few blog posts about some projects in the home automation field I decided to move forward. I now have sometime to work on this in between other projects, mainly waiting for some parts for my new Sbot 2 redesign. With some SparkFun gift card money I decided to pull the trigger and order some parts. I decided to build a 1 channel/plug smart outlet. This would be enough …
Checking out the temperature of a Raspberry Pi
[Remy] has access to a very nice Fluke thermal camera, so when his Raspberry pi came in he pointed the thermal camera at the Raspi (Spanish, Google translation) to see how far this neat computer could be pushed before it overheated. There are three main sources of heat on the Raspberry Pi: the voltage regulator, the USB/Ethernet controller and the Broadcom SoC. At idle, these parts read 49.9° C, 48.7° C and 53° C, respectively; a little hot to the touch, but still well within the temperature ranges given in the datasheets for these components. The real test came via a stress test where the ARM CPU was at 100% utilization. The Broadcom SoC reached almost 65° C while the …
Samsung Galaxy S III: Still waiting
June 5th 2012 I pre-ordered my Samsung Galaxy S III from Best Buy. Today June 21st, US launch date, still waiting. According to my local Best Buy I could get it tomorrow, only time will tell. In the mean time… Samsung Galaxy S III
Blinky POV SMT
A short time after posting about the Blinky GRID SMT build I received an email from wayneandlayne.com. They had seen my build post and really liked it, especially the videos and pictures! I had mentioned that I was looking at getting their Blinky POV SMT kit so to say thanks they offered to send me one. I was super excited! Here’s my build. The Blinky POV SMT is similar to the Blinky GRID but it only has one row of LEDs. By waving the Blinky in the air you can see the design/text due to the effect of persistence of vision. This happens because your retina sees the image slightly longer than it is being displayed. Read more about persistence of vision. Last Thursday I came home and …
The Raspberry Pi is Running: Getting You There
Excited, I ripped open the package to find my Raspberry Pi. The packing looked like it had been run over but my Pi was still intact. Yay! First thing I realized I needed to find a power source and a SD card. After some digging I just ended up using an iPad power adapter with a cell phone micro USB cable. I was going to use my Galaxy S power adapter but I didn’t want to run it close to the limit of 700ma. For some reason I thought I had plenty of SD cards around, but I guess not. Luckily Best Buy had a 32GB Sandisk Ultra class 10 available in store for $27. Perfect! Raspberry Pi packaging, amazing it wasn’t damaged For the most part I hard …
The Pi has Arrived
Just received a UPS email that my Raspberry Pi has been delivered! Unfortunately I am stuck at work at my desk. I can’t wait to get home and taste my Pi. I will be sure to post my unboxing excitement and where it takes me. I have no idea what I am going to do with it as this point, but it should be fun. Comment below if you have ordered one and if you have received it. Update: The Pi is awesome! I was able to get it up an running and ready to start playing. I will post about it in the next day or two.
Web Site Bugs Fixed
At last, the mysterious web site bugs have been fixed! Thursday night I got the urge to work on the robot website. It was more of me wanting to add my smart outlet to the site. I will post about the smart outlet soon. I had two bugs on the site, one of which I’ve had for a year. Bug #1This bug I have had since the beginning of the web site. Whenever I would receive data from the Robot/Arduino to display on the web site, the string would be cut off. For example, if it would say something like “Current Power Usage” instead I would get “Current Po.” The same for the Robot if it would say “Left” I would get “Le” or something like that. Also, I would …
Windows 8 Release Preview Released Early
Windows 8 Release Preview is available now. “Until now, it seemed like Microsoft was gearing up to unveil the almost-final Windows 8 Release Preview in the first full week of June, just in time for what is sure to be the world’s premier Ultrabook trade show. As it turned out, though, the folks in Redmond couldn’t contain their jubilation any longer: the company is now rolling out the Release Preview several days ahead of schedule. The update, free to anyone who wants to try it, offers a few notable enhancements, including a trio of new apps, a “Flip ahead” browser gesture, Flash support and a couple of updated multi-monitor features. A few heavy hitters like Wikipedia and Box.net are also using the …
Blink Grid SMT
While browsing the Maker Shed at the Maker Faire, I came across the Blink Grid SMT and I instantly thought this is what I have been looking for. For awhile now I have looked for a kit to practice surface mount soldering. Until now I’ve tried to win a FreePCB coupon from dangerousprototypes.com but haven’t won yet. Good thing someone misplaced it at the Maker Shed since I didn’t see the bin with SMT kits. Here are a few pictures of the build process from yesterday and a video of my first time doing drag soldering. The tip I used for drag soldering I won from dangerousprototypes.com. Thanks, Ian! The kit is designed by Wayne and Layne. For more information visit www.wayneandlayne.com. …
YawCam
Last month I decided to improve the streaming software for the video feeds from my robots. Thus far I have been using Active WebCam which I’ve had good success, minus a few things. So I set out to find something else. I decided to revisit YawCam which I had tested in the past but for one reason or another I decided against it. This time though, I decided to give it a try and see if it would work for my robots. YawCam has gone through some updates since I used it last. It is actively supported and used. Getting multiple webcams to work isn’t the cleanest solution with YawCam but it works. My main selling point is that I was able to stream video …