A little while back, Nottingham Hackspace got the opportunity to buy a bunch of Minimus V1 AVRs at a very good price. Not being one to turn down a bargain, I bought a few of these little critters to see what they can do.
On paper, they look great. USB programmable micro running an Atmel chip similar to an Arduino (so possibly compatible with the Arduino IDE), in a package slightly bigger than your average USB stick but with a couple of buttons, LEDs and all the pins broken out.
It turns out that there’s a lot of misleading, conflicting, partial, out of date, or hard to follow info out there, not to mention that most of it is for the Minimus V2. I had the V1, so struggled to get it to do anything exiting at all for ages. After a very frustrating day of trying stuff, following dead links and generally wasting a lot of time, I got some joy with the Arduino IDE. To save you the hassle, read on for what worked for me.
Whilst clearing out my wardrobe recently, I discovered I had 40 ties. Most of which I no longer wore. Some I have never worn. And some that I wouldn’t be seen dead in. But rather than just dispose of them all in one go, I decided to give them each one last outing, and I shared a photograph of each one with Twitter.
In this, the second of a series of polls, I would like to know which is YOUR least favourite ties. Click on the photo above to see a full screen picture, pick your favourite and then select up to three answers from the option below.
Remember, these are the three ties you hate the most. This can be based on colour, style, pattern, a dislike of Homer Simpson, or anything that makes you think they deserve a fiery death!
Whilst clearing out my wardrobe recently, I discovered I had 40 ties. Most of which I no longer wore. Some I have never worn. And some that I wouldn’t be seen dead in. But rather than just dispose of them all in one go, I decided to give them each one last outing, and I shared a photograph of each one with Twitter.
In this, the first of a series of polls, I would like to know which is YOUR favourite tie. Click on the photo above to see a full screen picture, pick your favourite and then select from the option below.
Remember, this is for your favourite tie. The one you like the most. Not the worst. Not the one you would burn. And not the one that should have never left 1993. Those polls are coming up later!
Voting will close at 9pm on Sunday 9th June 2013. So you’ve got less than a week!
As mentioned in a couple of other posts here, the Z88 is a great machine. It comes with 32k of RAM, although this can be expanded with plug in cartridges. An alternative, however, is to replace the internal 32k with something larger. This photo tutorial shows how you can expand the onboard memory to 512k.
This involves some pretty hardcore soldering, and is not recommended for your first soldering project. More importantly, there is some delicate unsoldering too, and if things go wrong, you’ve wrecked your Z88. You have been warned!
If you’ve been reading this blog in cronological order, you’ll know about the FTDI adapter I made for the Z88. If you don’t read this in order, you’ll know about the Minimus programming I’ve been doing and what the Minimus is (note that I’ve not blogged about that yet… be patient!)
I have already blogged on here about how awesome the Z88 is, and how ahead of it’s day it was. Well, being awesome in your own right doesn’t cut it these days – so you’ve got to be able to communicate and talk to things to be considered worthwhile.
The biggest weapon the Z88 has up its sleeve is the humble serial port. Combined with the built in terminal software (as well as the ability to ‘print’ serial data) and you’ve got a beast that’s almost ready to talk to anything. Almost…
But first there’s the slight problem of the non-standard pinout of the serial port, and then there’s the issue that few things these days use +\-6v to communicate
When there’s a wedding coming up and the bride-to-be says she would like something, it’s only fair that everything is done for her wishes to come true. And if those wishes are for pink pom-poms, well, who am I to shy away from such a task!
I remember pom-poms being made when I was a very young child, and know that cardboard circles and lots of wrapping of wool was involved. I wasn’t sure if my memory from 35 years ago was accurate, so I checked with Google, and, sure enough, that’s still the preferred way of doing things. I couldn’t help but notice it looks very slow, tricky, inefficient and inconsistent. There had to be a better way! One of the Google results, however, was for a Pom Pom Tree. The approach was different, but this still looked awkward, and not really set up for mass production. So I went to Nottingham Hackspace to make thing better.
Back in September last year, I was fortunate enough to go to a very unique art exhibition in East London where prosthetic limbs are the canvas. Spare Parts was organised by Priscilla Sutton and timed to coincide with the Paralympics, which was being held just around the corner. Whilst I went with the intention of just looking at these weird and wonderful pieces, I found myself going back the following day and buying one of the exhibits. (This will be featured in a future post). My leg-based art piece was collected after the exhibition, and to my delight and surprise, it came with a free gift of one of the legs that had been used to advertise the exhibition! You’ve heard of “how to get ahead in advertising”, well, I now know “how to get aleg in advertising!
The question now was what to do with it. I wanted to make something of it. Something interesting and respectful. Something useful. I didn’t, however, want to do any irreparable damage damage, and I certainly didn’t want to chuck it in the back of a cupboard and forget about it.
I got my Google Nexus 4 phone just over 3 weeks ago, and I love it. It is, without doubt, the best mobile I’ve ever owned, and I’ve had some really good phones before! If you want to read about how good it is, then just about every review out there will rave about it. What I want to do here, however, is tell the other side of the story and tell you about everything that’s wrong with it. Continue Reading »
One of the great things about the Raspberry Pi is the general purpose input output (GPIO) pins. They allow it to interface with other circuits. The Arduino, however, is all about connecting with other stuff, and with analog input and PWM output, it’s better at it than the Pi. But the Pi has more processing power and storage than the Arduino. They can, of course, talk to each other. So an ideal scenario is to harness the power of both of them.
The Pi can be a bit of a beast to tie down though. With connections on every side of the board, and no mounting holes (not in the first release of them anyway), it leaves your working environment quite messy. The fantastic PIBOW case from Pimoroni does a lot to tame the Pi, but not quite enough. However, replacing the bottom layer with a large sheet of perspex gives you a nice mounting board for sticking a breadboard and an Arduino to. Add to that a Pi Cobler from Adafruit to breakout all the GPIO pins and you’ve got the perfect place for prototyping your projects.
I guess now I’ve got no excuse for not getting on with a few projects of my own…
I have seen the future of computers. Yes, really I have. What would you say if I said the future would be something about the size of a pad of paper. Which runs off of 4 AA batteries, giving it about 20 hours of use or 100 days of standby. Storage is solid state with no delicate moving parts, and can be expanded with plug in modules. Software and files can be stored on these modules or bought with pre-installed on. Built in apps include word processor, spreadsheet, database, diary, communications manager, alarm clock etc. Full size tactile physical QWERTY keyboard. Continue Reading »
When I ordered my £25 Raspberry Pi, I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but when I heard that XBMC had been ported to run on the Pi I realized that I needed 2 Pis; one for XBMC, and the other so I could have one I didn’t know what to do with!
First of all, allow me to apologize. I set up my Tweeting front door at the end of 2011. Its only about 6 weeks away from 2013 now!
So, what is a Tweeting front door? Well, its a regular front door that sends a tweet every time it is opened.
Why would anyone want to know when a door has been opened? I have actually got 2 front doors, but the outer porch door isn’t locked. Because I am out of the house most of the time I have got no idea if it opened while I’m not there. Is someone stealing my mail? Has the big thing I ordered from eBay been delivered? What time did Danny come in to feed the cats while I’m on holiday?
It has also come in handy for looking back at what time something happened. Eg the time I went to do my shopping then realised I left my wallet at home I was able to tell by the time I left and the time I got back that I had wasted 17 minutes (not including working that out!). Or when some friends left after a night of drinking and saw suspicious behavior, I could look back and see it was 02:19 they left (I knew it was after midnight, but time happens at odd speeds after midnight!) .
How does it work then?Well, sensing the door opening and closing is done by a reed switch mounted to the frame and a magnet on the door, similar to a burglar alarm. This is connected to a Nanode, which continuously monitors the state of the switch. The Nanode is an Arduino clone with built in Ethernet so it can connect to the internet. Every 15 seconds the Nanode uploads the state of the switch (0 for closed, 1 for open) to Cosm.com. Cosm (formerly known as Pachube) is a free data-logging website for the IOT (Internet of Things). If the door is opened, however, it will upload the change straight away. One of the things which Cosm can do is send a tweet if certain conditions are met, such as a value changing from 0 to 1. If that happens then my protected house automation Twitter account (yes, I have more than 1) sends a tweet to me to let me know. (I use a separate protected feed for this because I don’t want to advertise to everyone on Twitter when I leave the house)
Can you give me more detailed information about how it works? Sure, the sketch I’m running on the Nanode is available here, although it is just a slightly modified version of one I found by Wicked Devices (but with a lot of it rem’d out. I should get around to tidying it up, but, hey, there’s a lot of things I should get around to!)
As for wiring, its just a case of wiring the door switch between pin 2 and ground, and giving the Nanode power and an ethernet connection. I have also got a green and red LED for status.
I missed out on the chance to order a Raspberry Pi on launch day by a few minutes. No worries though, I could wait. After all, I didn’t know what I wanted one for anyway (although I knew I wanted one). A couple of months later, in April I was able to ‘register an interest’ in a Raspberry Pi. Then in June I was invited to place an order for one. Then on Friday October 5th it arrived! Good work RS! £30 and 6 months waiting well spent!
Although a month earlier I saw that www.coolcomponents.co.uk had them in, so for £25 and 2 days of waiting I actually got one a while ago
But on Friday I started to do something with one of them. I installed Raspbmc (the media center thing built originally for the Xbox). If I am honest, I was very disappointed. It was just far too simple! Download a small exe file to a PC, then run it with SD card in. Then put it in a Pi that’s connected to Ethernet and 20 mins later it all just works! Sure, there’s tweaking that can be done and add-ins that can be added in, but 40 mins after I decided to start, I was watching an episode of Firefly. (Most of that time was actually finding leads, power supply & SD card and unnecessarily downloading Debian)
Yesterday I decided to try the Debian image for some real Linuxing! I can’t say I know my way around Linux much at all but some things were vaguely familiar. After about an hour I had managed to install a couple of programs, mount a USB drive and copy files across and run a command line movie player so I could watch the next episode of Firefly (can you see a pattern here?)
And this evening I have set up SSH so I can execute commands from my tablet. First thing I did? Yup, fire up Firefly
Have you got your Raspberry Pi yet? If so, what have you done so far?
This is not a new document, but is one I wrote in 2007 after qualifying for a 800km unicycle race in Nova Scotia. After a hard drive crash in 2009 I thought this had been lost forever. I have recently managed to recover a load of files from this drive, including my write up as a Word document. I’ve decided to publish it here to share with you lovely internet people and hopefully reduce the likelihoods of loosing it again.
It was over 30 years ago that I first learned to solve the Rubiks Cube. Then 15 years ago I learned to solve it all over again. And recently, I’ve learned that learning to solve it is still good fun!
Read on to find out how this little twisty puzzle has featured in my life…
A few years ago, I walked passed a shop in London that sold a Duct Tape Wallet Kit. For about £15 it included a few lengths of duct tape pre-cut to length and some instructions. My interest was piqued but not enough to leave me with an empty wallet. Instead I invested in some Google time and a £4 roll of tape (which would have done around 20 wallets!) After about 4 years it was looking a bit battered and worn, and I had a few ideas to improve on my first one.
This time I made it with camera at the ready. Read on to learn more…
Like so many of you out there, I love listening to The Minutes podcast. Even the starting jingle gives me a smile because I know there is an hour of happiness about to arrive in my ears.
I’m sure you can imagine how delighted I was delighted to hear that the theme tune had been turned in to a ringtone. Yay \o/ However, the official download from here http://theminutespodcast.tumblr.com/post/15228052921/the-minutes-ringtone is in a .M4R format, which is fine for all the iPhone junkies out there, but not any good to most of the other 74% of mobile phone users.
So, if you like your ringtones in a good old MP3 format, I’ve converted it for you and you can download it here; Minutes Theme MP3 Ringtone
On Android, long-click then save link, then play it in the standard music player app, menu > set as ringtone
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