If you’ve been following my blog, you know I’m working on an internet-of-things project, having fun and learning a lot. The latest milestone was getting my first PCB (Printed Circuit Board), which was very exciting. I previously built a circuit on a breadboard for controlling a 12V solenoid over the internet with a Raspberry Pi.… Continue reading My First Printed Circuit Board
Apple controls development for its iOS platform much more stringently than Google or Microsoft do for theirs. To publish to the Apple app store, you have to be a vetted apple developer and develop on an App OS. There is currently no way to develop, compile, and submit for publication an iOS app on a… Continue reading Create an iOS Native App without a Mac
This post covers how to update the WiFi settings on a Raspberry Pi via a Bluetooth connection from a mobile application. I used Cordova on an Android device, but this should be applicable to all platforms with some minor tweaking. First the code that runs on the Pi in node: The required libraries are bleno,… Continue reading Update RPi WiFi Settings over Bluetooth
I arrived on Feb. 26, 2020 in Hanoi for a consulting project. Of course we already knew about the novel coronavirus by then, but this was before it was officially named covid-19. There was less than 20 reported cases in the United States before I left, and I don’t think it even registered as a… Continue reading Being Abroad During a Worldwide Pandemic
Continuing from the previous post Setting Up Raspberry Pi as a Bluetooth Low Energy Peripheral, today I’m going to talk about controlling the Raspberry Pi’s general purpose inputs/outputs (GPIO) once a Bluetooth connection has been established. You may want to revisit the previous post and make sure your RPi is broadcasting before continuing here. From the… Continue reading Controlling Raspberry Pi IO over Bluetooth
Another year has come and gone, and we’re starting a new decade. I always like to take a moment to reflect on the previous year. I did a lot of firsts in 2019, including: In January, I design and printed my first 3D part using OnShape and a Polyprinter. 3D printing is so cheap and… Continue reading Hello World 2020
Ah the internet of things. So much possibility. One of my first lessons in developing internet-of-things (IoT) devices was that people don’t like sharing their WiFi passwords. This creates a problem for connecting IoT devices to the internet. The standard solution these days seems to be to use Bluetooth. The first thing to know about… Continue reading Setting Up Raspberry Pi as a Bluetooth Low Energy Peripheral
As a quick side project, I recently decided to make a toolbox out of HDPE. The toolbox was designed to hold a set of Tormach tools and have a locking mechanism to provide some security in the shared makerspace where it resides. Using inspiration from this video, I mocked up a rabbet-joint box design in… Continue reading Working with HDPE
It seems like my side projects are getting more and more challenging, and this was one of the most challenging yet. It seemed simple enough: drive a solenoid with the GPIO of the Raspberry Pi – something that could be useful in a myriad of internet-of-things applications – and a natural progression from previous projects:… Continue reading Controlling a 12V Solenoid with a Raspberry Pi
I’ve been doing website development for some years now and grasped advanced JavaScript concepts relatively quickly, but the one thing that alluded my understanding for some time was how to get things where you want on a page with CSS. It was a mental block for me to overcome. Here’s how to think about it… Continue reading Website Positioning and Layout with CSS
