Posts

Showing posts from October, 2016

Elementary OS

Image
"Elementary, my dear Watson"..... A fast and Open replacement for Windows and MacOS.  Interesting. CLICK HERE to find out more.

The next few months of play

Image
Toys for me to work on over the next couple of months:  Raspberry Pi 3 C programming... Combine Arduino, webcam and a Sherman tank with WiFi capabilities.... and finally, insert some radio equipment and motor into this boat, so it too can be controlled over the internet, etc.... also put a load of sensors on everything to capture data and feed back to Node-Red IoT services. If you have any other/extra ideas of what I could do with these, please feel free to let me know :-)

World's biggest IoT online conference for developers

Image
If you are not up to much on Saturday/Sunday October 29/30th, get online and join in: " IoT With The Best second edition is a two-day online conference tailored for developers wanting to explore IoT deeper and enjoy an interactive empowering experience while connecting with peers from all over the world.  Join from wherever you may be, the world's top IoT experts to get inspired and learn from their tech talks and masterclasses.  Explore the hardware, software, data and services behind IoT. With The Best is the biggest Online Conference Series for developers. Join 100 IoT experts (CEOs, CTOs, Architects, Researchers and Devs) for exclusive tech talks, live coding and demos on sensors, smart grids, smart homes, smart cities, intelligent transportation, connected devices and wearables. Go further and benefit from 1-to-1 mentoring sessions with the speakers. " CLICK HERE

CAN-Bus Arduino shield

Image
After receiving my Can-Bus Arduino shield & cable from ElecFreaks (very fast P&P!), having a little play around with some C code and then soldering the pin legs on, it was time to give it a little test run in the car.  I chose the 2016 Mercedes c200.  Why? Well, it was the nearest :-) ( I had an old DFRobot Romeo knocking around, should really be for robot programming, but it does the job ) Hmmm...... well, after a little bit of fiddling I managed to start reading some data and boy, is it chatty! Somewhere in the end of that file are the codes from the Drivers side window going up and down. Next step, isolate the ID codes and the commands and replay them back to the car.... (or just identify which ones give me some useful information) CLICK HERE to see some C Code and it working for REAL!

Hack the things.....like a car

Image
Some of you might know that I've been building a custom car ( for what feels like an eternity ) and I have kept it really basic with no modern technology at all.  ( Hey, I've seen some of the code you guys (and myself) write, I'm not trusting that in my £100k car! ). Here's a photo of earlier in the year, minus lots of things, working brakes being one of them, hence the custom low-loader delivery truck: Check out the ongoing journey at the website CLICK HERE So whilst I keep Lil'Merc nice and dumb, I do have an MG F, a Subaru Sambar and a shiny new Mercedes c200 company car, that has LOTS of new technology. I went through a cycle of getting various OBDII bluetooth devices for the MG F, only to find that is was built 6 months before that technology was adopted and has a MEMS unit in it, which is not compatible. Sigh.  I even did some diagnostic work with this guys Android app to try and get it to work, with no luck.  So I did what I do best.  I

Finally......Code C on Raspberry Pi (book)

Image
Well, you could have done this previously ( of course ), but is is sooooooo nice to see that this has become more mainstream. If, like me, you have played around with Arduino ( for many many years! ), then you most likely were coding in C.  Then the Raspberry Pi came out and everyone was excited, yay! it was a mini-Linux 'puter that could do stuff with GPIO pins ( or not ), but a vast majority of the code you found was for Python. Begrudgingly, I did actually use some Python to control my Maplin robotic arm from a web page, which worked and the code did make sense.  But, and this is a big BUT, I don't know, maybe I'm old skool, I just didn't LIKE coding in Python.  It felt like Perl ( now who remembers that nightmare from the early 2000s!!! ), it allowed you to do a lot of stuff and you could hack stuff together, but come back in 6 months time and you were none the wiser.  Don't even think about picking up code from someone else! Anyway, I digress, through a

Be a nerd and have fun

Image
I was invited to do some work at the new IoT Watson offices in Munich : Highlight Towers After work, I was invited for a meal...I was told there was an interesting guy who was going to join the team.  Anyway, due to some error with the restaurant booking, I had the pleasure of being on a 4-person table with John Cohn for the entire evening. I'm not sure who was the geekier / nerdier.  As you can imagine, Arduino's, MQTT, Pi's, Robotics, all-the-IBM stuff and a ton of other stuff was talked about and laughed about.  It was a great evening and helped me to realise, I should stay as I am and not "become what management structures" think I should be. Continue to have fun and actually do that rare thing: ENJOY what you do.  If you do not, stop doing it, do something else.  I know I have fun & actually enjoy what I do. Look forward to some "fun" postings over the next year - rather than "an IBM sales blog" (as a good Friend recently

JavaScript Speech Recognition...in 2kb!

Image
Yes, you read that correctly, SpeechRecognition in your web-browser from a 2Kb JavaScript library... CLICK HERE to try out a sample web page CLICK HERE for GitHub Oh, did I mention that it can also be used by your ARDUINO! That is pretty darned awesome.... (and here's a video of some chap coding with it in AngularJS .  all very simple)