End of Day 1 at Maker Faire

wpsuperadmin MakerFaire Leave a Comment

Day 1 has already ended and so much has happened so far. Unfortunately I am unable to retrieve the pictures off my camera with the devices I have with me. I have a lot of exciting things to share and will post them as soon as I get back home to the office. Look for some live posts tomorrow. Feel free to comment about some of your favorite things about the Maker Faire.

Day 1 at Maker Faire

wpsuperadmin MakerFaire Leave a Comment

Some pictures from the Maker Faire today. Ian Lesnet  presenting ‘Get your stuff made’  Make: Pavilion Life Size Starcraft Marine Defuse the Bomb by DFRobot.com Make: Pavilion

How To: Fly With Homemade Electronics

wpsuperadmin On the Web, Tutorials Leave a Comment

Something I found that could be really helpful from grathio.com. “About once a month I see an article about some ambitious maker who’s project  created an alarm at airport security. Most makers who travel with homemade electronics and other prototypes have a fear that their innocuous project wil catapult them to the front page as a threat to national security. While these news reports make up a good list of how to travel with bespoke electronics, but what I really want to collect is information on how to avoid getting into these situations to begin with.” Read More

What is your dream smartphone?

wpsuperadmin Smartphones Leave a Comment

The smartphone industry is growing like mad, more devices from more manufacturers. A lot of options for everyone’s taste; or you would think. It seems like you would be able to find the perfect smartphone with all these options but there is always something missing or just not quit right, in my opinion. As time goes on and technology evolves what you want from your smartphone changes and improves, constantly trying to do more with it. What is that device that can fill the void? That is what I want to find out. Here is what I have in mind at this point in time. 4.0 – 4.65in Super HD AMOLED 2Ghz+ Quad-Core ARM Quad-Core GPU Pentaband with LTE for …

Side Project – VMWare ESXi

wpsuperadmin Other Projects Leave a Comment

Some time late last year, I decided that most off-the-shelf routers are terrible and I needed to find a better solution. After looking high and low on the interwebs I settled on pfSense, a FreeBSD based firewall. The only thing I needed was another network port, so after some research I bought a dual port Intel NIC on eBay. That didn’t work out so well. I was running VMWare ESXi 4.0 which wouldn’t cooperate; giving me PSOD’s. Thinking that ESXi 4.1 would solve the problem, I then took the risk of upgrading. The reason I say risk is because to this day I haven’t figured out how I got ESXi to work on the MCP73 nForce chipset. I had to …

Microsoft Windows 8 Consumer Preview detailed impressions

wpsuperadmin On the Web Leave a Comment

The early days of Windows were inauspicious ones. Sitting on top of DOS, it was hardly a revolution in personal computing — instead it felt like a disjointed platform perched uncomfortably atop a command prompt, ready to come crashing down at any moment. That’s what it was, and often that’s what it did. The early days of Windows required constant jumps from GUI to shell as users ran a wide assortment of apps, only some of which played nice inside a window.It was over a decade later, after Windows 95, that the operating system would truly ditch its DOS underpinnings and feel like a totally integrated system. Why are we reminiscing? Because we’re reaching that same point again. With the Windows …

Farewell to SBot 2 Version 1

wpsuperadmin SBot2 Leave a Comment

At last the time has come to say farewell to SBot 2 v1. I have decided to rebuild it using a new chassis instead of trying to rig something up to get it to work. I wanted this robot to be durable and usable all day with autonomous operation. After so many issues, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. SBot2 brought me many learning experiences and the like Sbot 1, it has enabled me to rebuild it with a much better design. Building SBot 2 brought many good and bad times. A lot of money spent with very little much to show for it, except for a robot that can go forward and backward and “try” to stop before it hits an object. So …

Taking the plunge: CarPC to CarDroid

wpsuperadmin Automotive Leave a Comment

For the past seven years I have had a computer in my car and it has been a great project. The problem  been reliability for every day use. Running on a hard drive or flash memory, I have had problems. Surprisingly, the hard drive had less problems than running from compact flash. It turned out to be bad flash card though. I found out after I pulled the card for another project. Now I am waiting for the RMA replacement. Last year I had been playing with the idea of pulling the computer out and just integrating my Android phone somehow. I had tried a test with my old phone but I didn’t like the results. It was a Samsung …