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 ...
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 ...
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...
For my Dragon detector project I was interested in activating some kind of attached "defence" when a dragon was detected. For this I intend to use the GPIO pins, the 96Boards GPIO library only has basic functionality at the moment, digital read and w...
Following on from Getting started with Dragonboard 410cFor my project to work, I need the following: Internet connectivityWebcamPythonOpenCVGPIO I decided to tackle the software elements first as those were the areas I was least familiar wi...
Once the headless Raspberry Pi had been set-up we got started with Node-Red, sensors, LEDs and Servos.For the sensors I selected 3 different kinds, light, touch and motion. The light sensor is based around a simple LM393 comparator with a preset...
After my slightly jovial entry to the DragonBoard competition was accepted, I was sent a board to do my project with. I was also sent a US power supply so had to get an adaptor for it to work (luckily the supply was rated for 240v). For setup, I...
I had a great start to 2015, I'd just been selected to Road Test a Cel Robox 3D printer at the end of December and managed to get detailed look at the inside of the printer and also do some test prints before the printer went off for an upgrade a...
A simple project to flash some LEDs as is traditional at this time of year. I took a Adafruit Trinket which is an ATTiny based board and added some transistors as simple open collector drivers. The resistors were carefully calculated by just gra...
I was lucky enough to grow up at the time that the home computing in the UK was taking off. Micro Live was on the telly and Sinclair User and Crash Magazine were in the news agents. School At school we had BBC computers, they first appeared...
