We have always had coyotes in our neighborhood, but this spring and summer they are much more of a problem. In the past I would have coyote encounters maybe a few times a year. In the last few years that increased to about a dozen, but th...
It's been couple of years since the Save the Bees Design Challenge but that challenge inspired me to support native pollinators in our area (mason bees and leafcutter bees).
The Finisher's Prize was a Insect Hotel that I put out in the ...
My wife was looking for Legos for my grandson that she remembered we had stored in a footlocker in the garage. It turned out that there were no Legos but dozens of toy transformers in a wide range of sizes. These date from the mid 80s to ...
Actually, it started mid last week when I got a UPS notification about a pending delivery from Hungary. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but it arrived on Friday
Turns out that it was a package from Arduino. tariq.ahmad had told me...
I just completed my community college beginning beekeeping class - 3 hours of classroom instruction and 1 1/2 hours of bee hive maintenance demonstration at a suburban backyard apiary. I discussed this class in an earlier post: Backyard Be...
Happy Earth Day 2023!!
This year's theme is Invest in Our Planet.
My contribution has been my solar system that I installed at the very end of 2017. To date it has generated about 28 MWh and my net electricity consumption for the last 64 months...
I had posted earlier Backyard Beekeeping: Native Bees about a local Parks and Recreation class that I had signed up for. It was a small class of about a dozen people held in an outbuilding at a local farm. Not quite the han...
I enrolled in a community college course about backyard honey bee hives - Backyard Beekeeping: Back to School. That course is in May after the Save the Bees Challenge has completed. My wife pointed out to me that our local Parks and ...
The "Save the Bees Challenge" has raised my awareness of the potential for actually having a honeybee hive in my backyard. It will be a little late for the challenge, but I signed up for a class on Backyard Beekeeeping at Portland Community Col...
Last month scottiebabe inspired me with her post A simple game on the RPi Pico to buy a Pi Pico LCD. I doubt that I'll ever develop a game for it, but it seemed like a piggyback display with buttons would be a perfect additio...
I've achieved another milestone with my fitness electronics - 5000 days on my WII Fit Plus system with balance board.
I'm always amazed when I get some longevity with electronics, especially stuff that I use on a daily basis. In this ca...
I bought a 7" Amazon Kindle Fire HDX when it first came out in November 2013. It's claim to fame was its high resolution 1920x1200 color display. I've been using it pretty much daily since then for an hour or two for videos and puzzles.&n...
I was somewhat inspired by a post by scottiebabe - Electronic Die to look at square NeoPixel Arrays. I've used NeoPixels in PCB strips and rings and also flexible strips before, but haven't tried square arrays....
I noticed an article in the NY Times a few days ago Apple iPod Phasing Out that Apple is discontinuing production of its iconic iPod music player after 21 years.
I got an iPod Nano for my birthday in about the middle of that time span (2009...
I recently purchased a Wio Terminal LoRaWan Chassis that adds LoRa and GNSS capabilities to the Wio Terminal. I had read about a project done by Paul Pinault (disk91) - WioLoRaWANFieldTester that uses this setup to monitor L...
I had mentioned in a post back last July "Summer of tinyML" that Hackster.io was running a year-long event with Xilinx - the Big Xcellent Adventure. You basically do activities related to Xilinx FPGAs to earn points that you use ...
Seems like a lot of us on E14 have cats, dogs, or other pets. I saw an interesting article on Hackster about a LoRa based pet tracker: Katzentracker LoRa Locator
It's a really neat and compact unit incorporating a miniature LoRa module...
Last year Luxonis ran a Kickstarter campaign to add another camera to their OAK-D DepthAI lineup -> the OAK-D-Lite.
Like the other DepthAI cameras it uses the Intel Movidius Myriad-X VPU as its vision engine and has the familiar 3 camera setup (2 ...
Another year in the books for my rooftop solar system and time for my annual review. When I installed the system, the breakeven point for ROI was estimated at under 5 years. At our current electricity cost the breakeven point occurs at a...
When I started out in home automation over 30 years, I used X10 modules that I bought first from Radio Shack and later IBM units that I bought from Egghead. I retired the last of my units just last year. All of the functionality has been ...
This is my first post on the new site, a follow-up to I've Got To Get Me One Of These!
I'll have to admit that navigating the new site software and structure has been challenging, so it will be interesting if this works out...
I naively had thou...
I recently started having problems with an LED bulb "burning out". I've used LED filament lights for a few years. I have noticed that they don't seem to have the lifespan of the more prevalent individual chip on substrate lights that I no...
I'm finishing up my rainy day project that I started earlier MLX90640 Thermal Camera on Wio Terminal . I 3D printed a cover for the camera module and cut a small proto PCB to mount a short dual row header to allow me to plug the module into ...
I'm want to use the MLX90640 Thermal Camera module from Adafruit with my Wio Terminal to make a diagnostic tool that I can use for thermal measurements. I tried out a module with a 55 degree FOV lens with Jupyter Notebooks on my PC Using the ML...
