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 […]
A machine is a device that does something useful, right? Well, what about if the thing it does is useless? Well, here is my useless machine
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 […]
A while ago I started logging temperatures to Pachube via a Nanode. For the most part this works fine, but sometimes something breaks and I might lose a few hours or days worth of data. It might be the Nanode that’s gone down, or Pachube, or (most likely) my Internet connection. So I decided to […]
If you have seen my previous blog entry, you’ll know I have been playing around with an ATtiny85 for an upcoming project (more on that later…). Using an Arduino (or, in my case a Xino from Ciseco) is easy enough, but when a sketch needs lots of tweaking to fine tune it, it means the […]
One of the most appealing things about the Arduino and ATmega328 is their size and simplicity. After working with desktop and server computers for years I just loved how a small little chip could be programmed easily to achieve things that I cannot get a full blown computer to do. I have never been a […]
I’ve been working on a few Arduino projects recently that will hopefully result in varying levels of home automation. The effect so far has been to stick a box here, plug this in there, and dangle a wire from over there, with a general haphazard (with emphasis on the ‘hazard’ bit in some places!) outcome. […]
As regular followers of the blog will know, I love Arduinos and all the stuff they can do. Those that know me will also know that I don’t love Christmas, particularly the seasonal decoration stuff. So this project was a nice mix of the two! I decided to make myself some Arduino powered Xmas lights […]
This week I… Built a Xino Basic for Atmel as sold on http://shop.ciseco.co.uk This is sold as a kit that anyone with even the most basic of soldering skills can put together. This is just about the cheapest way to get an Arduino compatible board that fits the standard Arduino shields. It also boasts a […]
I’ve been messing about with Arduino derived micro controllers, and have been looking for a way to get them to send simple messages to and from each other. Something simpler than TCP/IP (which requires special hardware and relatively large libraries to run it), but more generic and flexible than just connecting an output pin on […]
A couple of days ago I got a Xino board like this one. Not is this about the cheapest way to get an Ardunio compatible microprocessor, but it has the benefit of a nice little prototype area on board too. So, although it fits standard Arduino shields, many simple projects can be completed on just […]
A decent multimeter is great, but there’s times when you just want to have a quick check to see what signals are high, low or neither. A logic probe is ideal for this, but the cheap ones are about £15+, so I decided to build my own. For less than a quid!