Andy Clark's Blog

Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Connecting Sensors

Workshopshed

OptoSensorAs David Murphy mentions, a stepper motor solution needs to know where the arrow is pointing when the device starts up. Looking in the spares box, I saw I had a Omron EE-SY310 reflective sensor from an old tachometer project, I used the pho...
- 18 Nov 2018
Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Device Update

Workshopshed

From the Overview in Visual Studio, you can get the "Device Status", from there you can get the application status of the attached device.It's also possible to launch the Azure Sphere developer prompt from here and run the "azspher...
- 16 Nov 2018
Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Connecting Hardware

Workshopshed

Updated SDKThis week there was an update of the SDK for the Azure Sphere so I thought I'd download that and the other tools I was using. The SDK now has support for storage, real time clock, storage and external MCU flashing, although it looks like t...
- 16 Nov 2018
Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Connecting to Azure Functions

Workshopshed

For my IOTCompass I need to be able to determined the direction to turn in. This can be done by passing the current and target positions to a function which can calculate a bearing. The calculation for this is approximated by the following formula as...
- 13 Nov 2018
Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Project Overview

Workshopshed

As hinted at in some of the previous posts I'm going to be using the board to complete a small project. Because the SDK only supported UART and GPIO at the time I started the project I was looking for something that could be run with that. My fir...
- 12 Nov 2018
Azure Sphere Secure IOT - Login, Claim Device, Upload code

Workshopshed

As mentioned in the Azure Sphere Secure IOT - First look the next step is to "claim" the board. This registers the device with the portal so you can remote control it. LoginOne of the things installed with the dev kit is the Azure Sphe...
- 10 Nov 2018
Azure Sphere Secure IOT - A closer look

Workshopshed

The magnifying glass and even a microscope came out today as I took a closer look at the board. I like how the headers have a bit of spacing between them, lets see if that's sufficient to allow for connectors. I'm a big fan of the mounting ho...
- 10 Nov 2018
Azure Sphere Secure IOT - First look

Workshopshed

Overview Azure Sphere is a new platform from Microsoft it consists of a system on chip, SDK and online tools for management. The key problem they are trying to solve is making IOT devices secure. www.youtube.com/watch Some of the princ...
- 7 Nov 2018
Latest From Novelty Automation

Workshopshed

This week I visited Novelty Automation, an arcade of quirky machines to see their latest machine designed and created by Tim Hunkin. players.brightcove.net/.../index.html {gallery} Visit PhotosTim explains the basic premise of the machineU...
- 12 Oct 2018
Makers Central

Workshopshed

This weekend I popped up the Birmingham to see the Makers Central exhibition. So that people could recognise me, I made myself a flashing EL Wire badge.It was mostly focused on YouTubers and a lot of Woodworking but there were some gems for the elect...
- 9 May 2018
Fizz Buzz Game - Buttons

Workshopshed

I wired up a couple of push buttons between D3 and Gnd, and D4 and Gnd. I had hoped to use the Gamepad library as that seems to be the right kind of thing to use. However, the AdaFruit library download does not contain Gamepad, and I could not be bot...
- 12 Mar 2018
Fizz Buzz Game - Driving the LCD

Workshopshed

Following on from the game prototyping I've started on the hardware. To display the numbers I wired up a small LCDsmall LCD I had spare from earlier experiments. It's a "Chip on Glass" model so it's very small and has an inbuilt I2C slave chip t...
- 4 Mar 2018
Dremel 3000 Review

Workshopshed

My mini-craft drill is a bit old now and often slows to a crawl when put under any load. That's a 12v device with a transformer which weights a ton! So I picked a Dremel 3000 kit from CPC at the end of last year as part of the prize for the wack...
- 1 Mar 2018
XMAS lights

Workshopshed

My tutorial to create some Christmas lights got accepted for HackSpace mag #1 It was a part woodwork and part electronics project designed to give the reader some inspiration and ideas for their own projects. For banks of LEDs were controlled us...
- 19 Dec 2017
Voice activated robot

Workshopshed

I decided to wire up the Google AIY box to Marty the Robot.OK Google! The first thing to do was to upgrade the software so I did not have to press the button to work the robot. I followed Eric Duncan Google AIY upgrade steps. After stopping...
- 21 Oct 2017
RoboGuy

Workshopshed

The dancing Element14 Blue Guy which was sent to me by tariq.ahmad was slightly damaged in transit so I resurrected him as an experimental crime-fighting cyborg named RoboGuy. players.brightcove.net/.../index.htmlStay out of trouble!
- 12 Aug 2017
Picon Zero on the Pi with NodeJS

Workshopshed

I've used the Picon Zero board from 4Tronix before when I was working on the Dragon Detector project. It is the same size as the Pi Zero and can drive 6 outputs, 4 inputs and 2 motors via H-Bridges. So it seemed a good option for driving my lates...
- 18 Jul 2017
i-Zombie

Workshopshed

Just back from an excellent talk by Tim Hunkin of "Secret life of machines" fame. He started things off with a description of how a telephone works and demonstrated a loudspeaker made from a crisp packet. He then went on to talk about his latest arca...
- 22 Jun 2017
BeagleBone Blue - Music Player

Workshopshed

When I was sent the BeagleBone Blue board my first thought was what could I build that needed 8 servos. I'd seen some fun examples in the MusicTech challenge so a music player seemed like a good idea. I bought some small servos, a glockenspiel (w...
- 7 Apr 2017
Node.JS, MQTT and Cayenne IOT dashboard

Workshopshed

As I've been experimenting with the BeagleBone Blue I decided it would make sense to do a bit of coding with Node.JS rather than Python as I've used for a few previous project. I also wanted to see if I could connect it up to MQTT as I planne...
- 20 Mar 2017
Talking Cottages, Building Gnomes and Scaring Dragons

Workshopshed

TalksEarly in 2015 I was asked to give a talk about the Enchanted Cottage project that I completed last year. A group of eager London Arduino enthusiasts learnt about my struggles and successes with the Arduino Yún. One of the attendees was Brian Byr...
- 6 Dec 2016
DragonBoard 410C I2C to drive a servo

Workshopshed

During my earlier experiments with GPIO on this board, I realised that it does not natively support PWM. I had a 4tronix Picon Zero board from my preparation for the Gnomes event and thought that could work with the DragonBoard.As for the LED and IR ...
- 3 Jun 2016
Dragonboard 410c Notifying Users

Workshopshed

When my Dragon Detector spots a new dragon I want it to notify the operator that something has happened. When looking for ways to do this, I discovered the IF THIS THEN THAT "Maker channel" this allows you to trigger IFTTT flows by calling ...
- 24 May 2016
Dragonboard 410c More GPIO

Workshopshed

As mentioned in my previous blog on Dragonboard 410C GPIO I was planning to use the libsoc library from Jack Mitch. I though I'd installed this correctly but when I tried to access it from Python it was refusing to import the library. Re-reading ...
- 21 May 2016
Dragonboard 410c - OpenCV

Workshopshed

I've put the code for the project on Github as it's now starting to get interesting. Testing on something simplerSo that I knew that OpenCV was working correctly I created a simple test script. import numpy as np import cv2 print cv...
- 20 May 2016