Big storm today off the BC West Coast, they call it a "bomb cyclone"
Thankfully we had power through most of the storm, but it did just drop offline an hour ago.
The good news is... the battery backups are working to keep us connecte...
I have a garden shed at the far corner of our lot. It has a window, and the door has a window, but it can be hard to see in there.
For a while I had a dollar-store battery operated motion light that worked quite well, but it uses D or C cells, I forg...
We took a little day trip today, on the Uchuck III from Gold River to Friendly Cove, on Vancouver Island, BC.
There’s zero cell coverage after you pass Campbell River, so we were fully disconnected for the day. Feels a little weird, but so nice...
I think I just ran into an early-stage bug on the Arduino Uno R4 WiFi.
My previous 2 blog posts separately covered displaying frames on the LED Matrix and Receiving BLE commands.Combining the 2 sketches, however, caused it to break.
When I first just...
The Arduino Uno R4 WiFi has an ESP32 WiFi module on it, which includes Bluetooth (BLE).
When it was first released, the BLE part was not yet implemented, but you can upgrade the firmware on your Arduino Uno R4 WiFi board that enables it. Judging by t...
After trying the basic Blink sketch and blinking a single LED, I thought I'd up the ante by blinking a great many LEDs!
I first tried out the included example LED_Matrix/DisplaySingleFrame, which shows up when you connect the board, or if you ch...
I saw these on a new discount website (in Canada) and thought I’d try them out, as they are fairly inexpensive. I thought they might be handy when fixing something on the in-law’s boat or golf cart, for example.
The idea is that they sol...
End of an Era!
I’ve decided to retire my good ole Sprinkler Pi - an original Pi 1 B+ running OpenSprinkler, connected to my own home brew circuit board.
It has been running successfully for 6 full seasons, only needing an occasional res...
I spent far too much time last night adding daily high and low temperature display to my Raspberry Pi node red hummingbird feeder monitoring UI.
So many limitations and quirks to work around!
First, Influxdb does not have a “start of day...
I just became aware of an AI named chatGPT by OpenAI, which can do a lot of amazing things. As in, mind-blowing how well it does things!
For example, you can ask for advice on how to get a better sleep, or even how to be more romantic, and the respon...
As I might have mentioned in my previous blog post about 3D printing, I was having trouble getting my prints to come out half decently, especially with my newer filaments.I think I mentioned having extruder problems - the print lines were often a bit...
The good folks at element14 sent me this super awesome runner-up prize for the Experimenting With Thermistors Challenge: a DeLonghi coffee and espresso maker, and it arrived today!
Here is my "before" picture:
As I'm the only cof...
I've had my 3D printer, a Creality Ender 3-Pro (from element14/Newark here), for a while, and I've printed random things like project cases, coins, and fun things with it.
The prints usually came out alright. especially when printing with the Crealit...
This hike was sponsored in part by element14
Like much of North America, we've had some unexpected weather - in our case it gave us a warm summer-like fall, which is supposed to end tomorrow.So we went up the mountain to hike the trails (Parad...
I thought I'd share with you this little alarm clock weather station I picked up as part of a shopping cart earlier this year:
I had wanted a little clock for the bedroom, because the one I had was rather hard to read, and the clock-radio-alarm thi...
I don't know if I'll make it in time for the Rube Goldberg Challenge, but here's one of my first steps in progress...
community.element14.com/.../IMG_5F00_8008.MOV
I'm using a pencil eraser for testing, as it's easy to grip. I'...
The good folks of element14 were kind enough to send me this awesome robot arm as part of a contest reward shopping cart. Thank you element14 team!
It has a lot of little pieces to put together. Good thing I had help!
After a fun afternoon buildin...
I got a little side tracked while adding an extra feature to a project I've been working on.
The plan was to "quickly add" a little buzzer to sound when the timer hits zero.
However, being the interpreted language it is, Python kicked m...
I thought I'd share something else I picked up as part of a shopping cart prize - this nice little Infrared Thermometer by Multicomp.
I guess these type of thermometers were all the rage during the height of the pandemic with all the people fever te...
Here’s a cute little weather station I picked up as part of a shopping cart prize. Perfect timing, as my previous one had recently stopped working.
I’m really enjoying the colourful UI design. I do wish the wireless outdoor sensor include...
I recently received a Multicomp MP720015 from element14 as part of a contest prize. It's a very nice little unit, but I know nothing about oscilloscopes so it's a learning curve. I mean a learning opportunity
Luckily for me, baldengine...
My house has a lot of automations - I've automated pretty much all of my main lights to go on and off on schedules, using smart switches and plugs. I can ask Alexa to turn things on or off just by blurting things out. I can even control some lights a...
Oops.
When the temperature sensor is placed directly on top of the heating element...
This is for my hummingbird feeder - the pink line is the probe that's normally up against the glass feeder containing the nectar. The blue line is the outside ...
I picked up this little “Kano Frozen II Coding Kit” recently. It was only $2 so I couldn’t pass it up!It’s kind of cute, and also looks like it has been well engineered with a nice companion app. I bought it, partly because I’m nerdy and immatur...
As of today, I am now officially retired I decided to take an early retirement to allow for more time with friends and family, and for hobbies - including this tech/maker/creator hobby I just have not had enough time for lately. And hey, p...
