I have just been sent a PanaVise JrPanaVise Jr and a few other goodies thanks to Daniel from Element14. From young age I've just soldered stuff on a solder mat, propped up as required, I did try a small plastic vice in the past but it was not re...
My experiments with U-Center and the GPS module had shown that the direction indication was not very reliable. Following a link in Kevin Saye's post, I discovered a command that should tell the orientation. But my device did not seem to be generating...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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!
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
