Posts

A few years ago, I saw that you can buy these rather cool looking “Emergency Stop” buttons off the internet. It was one of those purchases you make before actually working out what you want to do with it, but at just a few quid it was hard to say no to. Fortunately, inspiration came rather quickly and within a couple of hours of it turning up on my doorstep I had a pretty nifty 1-key USB keyboard (Using a Teensy) that would send a custom keyboard combination whenever the button was pressed....

Being British, I’m not ashamed to admit that I have a (completely healthy) obsession with Tea. It’s probably not too much of a surprise then that one of the first things that I decided to hook up to the internet was my Kettle. Using some off the shelf parts, a Raspberry Pi and Node-Red I successfully hooked my kettle up to twitter so that it could take it’s place among other pieces of technology that really don’t have any business tweeting and is just another gratuitous use of the IoT....

About six months ago I was able to change my role at the company that I work for. Whilst still being a software developer, I’m very lucky to now be working on something that I’ve been interested in for a long time. I’m now a developer for the Open Source Eclipse Paho Project and as of very recently I became an official committer for it! The goal of the Eclipse Paho project is to provide open source client implementations of MQTT and MQTT-SN for all major (and some minor) languages and architectures....

The Monty Hall problem has annoyed me for a while. Not that I didn’t understand it, the wiki page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem) is quite extensive and explains it quite nicely, the problem is that I could never truely believe that by switching door, your chances of winning are 2/3 instead of 1/3 if you stick. So I decided to test it. And you know what, it’s true! #!/usr/bin/python from random import randint # Monty Hall Problem Simulator # jsutton....

My house mate is currently waiting to get his delivery of his new Raspberry Pi B+ and PiGlow, and as we were discussing this I thought it would be interesting to see if I could control a PiGlow using Node-Red. Installing the PiGlow node module sudo npm install piglow This one speaks for itself really! Setting up Node-Red to use the module functionGlobalContext: { piglow:require('piglow') } Note: If you already have a module in your functionGlobalContext, add the piglow chunk after a comma e....

A while back, I purchased a Pimoroni Pibow case for my raspberry pi as well as a Piglow and a Pihub (That’s a lot of Pi!). The first thing I thought was how awesome it all looked, especially the raspberry pi in it’s rainbow acrylic enclosure. The only problem was that I was getting fed up of having wires scattered all across my desk every day. I did try a few cable management techniques, but nothing seemed to work....

After spending the last six months working on my Dissertation, it was nice to focus on something a little different that I could use in my day to day life. I decided that I wanted a small mood lamp that I could place on my desk, which would occasionally flash a certain colour when there was an unread email in my inbox or an unseen notification on my Facebook account....

As a distraction for my Dissertation, I thought I would make my own TV-B-Gone. The TV-B-Gone is a nifty little device which acts as a universal off switch for most popular Televisions and is actually pretty simple to make, alternatively you can buy them assembled or in kits from online. I decided that I wanted to make a very lightweight version that I could house inside a sonic screwdriver toy that I got last year....

One project that has taken up a large portion of my time recently has been my energy monitor project. This setup is quite common and I was able to put the scripts together with relative ease thanks to all the people who have done it before me. Here is my version, it is a little bit different from most as I chose to code the graphing and database functions manually instead of using an RRDtool setup, if you want something a bit simpler, feel free to check out jibble....

While I have been working on the GPS car tracker project, I encountered a lot of problems with Downloading a script to the device and making it run correctly. There is a lot of documentation out there, but you have to read a lot just to understand EXACTLY how to do it. So for everyone just getting into trying out these devices, I have written a small tutorial to help you get started =]...