#“This week’s Tech Miscellany. It’s a cracker.”
- Espruino got funded and hit all the stretch goals. Hurrah! JavaScript on a microcontroller for a pittance. Going to be fun playing with this stuff. It made me realise that, along with the incredible ecosystem around the Raspberry Pi, how important the UK still is in technology. That Engineering culture hasn't gone away despite the destruction of the manufacturing sector since the 70s. It gave me a really nice feeling to see "Designed and manufactured with care in Sheffield" on the Pibow case. A pity we never managed to create a similar culture here in Ireland.
- Only 8 days left to back ARDUINO BASIC CONNECTIONS - THE BOOK. I've backed it. A really useful resource.
- I've been impressed recently by how easy it is to Airplay from a Mac to an Apple TV. Less impressed that it's all proprietary as usual from the borg. So I was very pleased to discover [a] XMBC/Raspbmc can act as an Airplay target and [b] someone has a beta of full Airplay mirroring to the Raspberry Pi.
- I've had three TP-Link routers die on me in the past few months. A variety of problems - losing settings, disabling security, LAN ports dying or random reboots. Yet my 7+ year-old WRT54GS keeps on trucking. So I'm done with the cheap Chinese crap for the important things. I just got an Asus RT-N66U Dual Band Wireless N Router with Gigabit LAN/WAN, 2x USB, IPv6, 8x SSID etc etc. So it's expensive Chinese stuff from now on :-) A few days in and it has worked perfectly with a strong signal and good throughput. A 3 year warranty gives me confidence too.
- Our audio setup for the TV facing the treadmill has been an ongoing challenge. Analogue audio from the Raspberry Pi is atrocious. Even using a HDMI-VGA adapter with an analogue audio port had a horrendous pulsating sound. This was all exacerbated by passing that through two amplifiers and then into a Lidl 2.1 speaker setup. But all that amplification is needed to hear audio over the sound of the treadmill. Given how much it is used, I finally got around to doing it right. So Raspberry Pi running Raspbmc connected by HDMI to LG full-HD monitor. Then headphone jack from monitor to all-newMicrolabs FC330 2.1 speakers. These speakers deserve all the good reviews they get on Amazon. Very heavy, great value and massive sound with 56W output. Highly recommended. No more pulsating noise, yay.
- I tried out Google Coder on the Raspberry Pi last week. My initial excitement faded quickly when I realised you need a PC as well as an RPi to use it. So it completely misses the point of the Pi. Add to that the fact that the examples you are supposed to learn from are things like Asteroids in HTML5 and the whole thing seems wrong-headed. Re-done as a pure RPi project with examples that normal people can learn from and it could be an amazing educational tool. Extra snark: Impossible to find the site directly via Google search due to its generic name.
- My latest DX.com impulse purchases. 3V to 5V booster. USB LiPo charger. 3.3V Arduino Pro Mini. Tilt switches. Accelerometer. Another ultrasonic sensor. 3000mAh Lipo battery. I have a nice setup between the Lipos, charger, booster etc and various Arduinos/RaspberryPis using these JST cables for common interconnect.
- Looks like it's going to be a 3 Arduino + 2 Raspberry Pi Halloween. Starting the work this weekend. These things will be central to it.
- Camp Coder Dojo in Clonakilty on 16/17 November. Should be a blast.
- Tried to use OpenSignal API yesterday but the data returned isn't that useful. Lat/Lon of nearby masts would be awesome info.
- Loved the idea of Modkit when it came out. Scratch-like approach to programming an Arduino. But not obvious what is going on with project. I tweeted them last week but no response. Not clear what the $50 gets you. Seems too high to me.
- Scratch for Arduino (S4A) has a new web-site. I enjoyed this a few months back but they never replied to my enquiry about getting it running on the Raspberry Pi. That would be a killer combo.
- Roku 1, 2 and 3 now available to Irish and UK punters. I think I'll finally bite the bullet this weekend.
- 9 hrs of Pink Noise on YouTube. Incredibly effective at drowning out conversations. Non-distracting. Try it on a train etc. Failed to download using my usual tools to use offline.
- T-Mobile G1 announced 5 years ago today. Mine still chugging away (4 years, 9 months later), waking me up every day. Amazingly, the App we got built way back in 2007 (the very first Irish Android App and one of the first reviewing Apps globally) still mostly works on my SGS4.
- USB Condoms are a great idea. Connecting your phone to an unknown USB source is the tech equivalent of using a glory hole.
- Nodeschool.io looks like a good way of learning Node. Going to try out over the weekend.
- If you are using those cheap 4WD RC car kits from many electronics sites (I got ours on DX.com) and you want to control them with an Arduino and an Adafruit Motor Shield, then you have to do the trick of adding 3 capacitors to each of the cheap motors. This solved a huge number of the problems I was having with my daughter's RC car.
- Heimcontrol.js is a home automation system using Node.js and Raspberry Pi. It does a lot of stuff I was hoping to play with so it may be a shortcut for me. Project seemed dead but got a ton of online attention recently and I see the Git commits have started again. Excellent stuff.
- One big downside of using cheap Chinese knock-offs of Arduino is the provenance of some of the components. One device I got gave an error in the Device Manager in Windows no matter what I did. Eventually I discovered that it uses a dodgy clone of a Prolific USB-Serial chip and the original chip manufacturer has modified their drivers to detect the clones and refuse to work with them. Perfectly reasonable behaviour by them and serves me right for trying to go ultra-cheap. The workaround was of course to use older drivers but long-term I'll just avoid some of nastier end of the market.
- One of my funnier Twitter account registrations in the 2007 landgrab was @rse. Still makes me snigger. I've suddenly started getting notifications for people using that in tweets. Love the fact that they are. Sadly I lost the account in late 2007 when I set up a script to auto-tweet once a week to "keep the account alive" because I believed some fool who told me you could lose accounts if you didn't update them. Of course it was detected as a bot and I had a ton of accounts suspended. I'm an idiot.
- Still loving Parcel Motel. Saving me a fortune in shipping from all those Amazon sellers who won't do Free Supersaver shipping to Ireland.