#“DisplayPort to DVI to HDMI to VGA to Monitor - And it works” Yesterday I got caught out in a meeting by having an MBP and a DVI adapter whilst the customer had a VGA projector. Luckily someone else saved the day with a proper Windows laptop with a VGA port :-) For giggles I just tried daisy-chaining a bunch of adapters I’ve collected from various Chinese sources over the last two years. »
#“My Pebble watch just fits, in every way.” I have hovered over the Buy button on the Pebble site more times than I’d like to admit. But I always stopped at the last minute. $150 is a lot of money for a watch when you haven’t worn one in years, even if it’s a “Smart” watch. The dreadful reviews of the RunKeeper App didn’t help, since that was going to be my main use case. »
#“Our first Arduino Christmas Turkey” Take one turkey, an oven with the temperature markings rubbed-off, a food thermometer with a broken probe and you have a recipe for either incineration or salmonella. Enter an Arduino Uno, a K-Type thermocouple, a sample MAX31855 IC, some dodgy soldering from a few weeks ago, an Adafruit library and a Sparkfun LCD and you get this: All rustled up in 15 minutes. Code and circuit to follow. »
#“Slightly obsessing about the Doctor Who theme music” I watched a superb Culture Show documentary on Doctor Who last week. Several people really stood out for me including Delia Derbyshire, the absolute genius who, at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1963,turned Ron Grainer’s simple tune into the iconic music that is burned into my brain since I first heard it around 1972, aged 4. I’ve just been wondering this week how she did it. »
#“Introducing the Bandon Bluetooth Button (BBB) using RN42 HID” TL;DR - A Bluetooth-enabled Button/Joystick to control music/podcasts on your phone whilst driving. One thing I find very dangerous in the car is changing tracks etc on my phone when it’s in its screen mount. It’s impossible to do so without taking your eye off the road even for a second. And it’s illegal in many countries. I used to love the steering column controls for the old car radio but they don’t work over A2DP or AVRCP Bluetooth to my phone which streams to my Lidl car stereo. »
#"[No Longer] a Product and Support failure by Adafruit with the Bluefruit EZ-Key" UPDATE: Incredibly fast response and resolution from Adafruit. Feel free to ignore my negative post below. But still some good tips for any biz about handling product change and support. Back in? with Adafruit. I’ve been working on a simple-ish project recently which required Bluetooth comms between some hardware and a phone. I’ve had lots of success with those cheap HC-05/HC-06 modules from China and made some progress with a Slave module. »
#“Adding a realtime clock to the Raspberry Pi and the Sweetbox II” I got one of these $3 RTC modulesa few months back and I finally set it up this weekend. It simply has a battery-backed clock so when your Raspberry Pi (or Arduino) boots up, it has the correct time immediately. For a network-connected Pi, it’s not really necessary as you can have the time updated regularly via NTP but not all Pis spend their life connected to the network. »
#“The very real danger of cheap Lithium Polymer (LiPo) batteries and accessories” We’ve all heard the horror stories of phones exploding in people’s faces and it turned out to be due to aftermarket cheap LiPo batteries. TBH I’ve always pooh-poohed that stuff and figured they had been doing something stupid with their phones. I was wrong. When my wife moved from iPhone 4 to iPhone 5 recently, she discovered [a] the iPhone 5 battery life is awful and [b] of course her Mophie battery pack case wouldn’t work due to the new connector. »
#“A Tech Halloween mainly made of fail” This year I decided to be completely out of character and start Halloween preparations over a month ahead of time. The plans were ambitious to put it mildly. Vampires flying along guidewires, 10 feet in the air. Screaming skeletons jumping up out of bushes. Creepy crawlies automatically lowering on the heads of trick-or-treaters. You get the idea. The reality was that almost everything took 4x as long to do as expected and I killed more tech trying to test things than actually survived. »
#“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. »