Alfred's musings

Summary: Atmega328p is the brains of an Arduino and could be used on it's own. 1) (Once only) Burn bootloader 2) Program is by plugging into your Arduino Uno board 3) move to breadboard by just providing power and an external clock. Have your favourite blink program running for £3. Detail: I'm hooked on Arduino. It allows me to have a touch pad (made of foil) to toggle my LED strips in my house on and off, to have a laser trip-wire in my front garden, control my heating and provide a cool flickering-fire effect night light to my kids... but with only one Arduino board, I can only do one of these at a time. First, I got excited about Arduino at <£20. But many times <£20 is still a lot. Then I got excited about the <$10 Arduino , and ordered a few (due for delivery very soon, I'm told). And then, thanks to a Google-run electronics course, I discovered what many others know already. You can have all the benefits of a micro controller without an Arduino.....

I've got a big plan to build a all singing & dancing lighting (& automation) system for our new home, and decided to use Arduino to act as controller unit (with lots of IO). I got hold of an Arduino board, and within a few hours of playing with it, I've got my own code on the Arduino now switching on/off a couple of relays based on other sensors. Next, in order to control the lighting from a tablet or phone, I wanted some way to address the Arduino via an IP network, some JSON API or something. One option is to get the Ethernet shield for Arduino, but as it was as expensive as a Raspberri Pi, I opted to buy the Pi. In again less than two hours of playing, I've got my RPi up and running with an Apache web server that I can interact with. The point is this: In under a week elapsed time (including shipping!), just spending a few hours in the evening in front of the TV, with no prior knowledge of Arduino or Raspberry Pi or even any prior Linux experience, it was eas...

So, as mentioned before , I've embarked on building a custom home automation solution. Why? Because I can't find anything that will do all I want it to do. So, by having a custom solution that can talk GPIO, Serial and Ethernet... and possibly a few extra bits via GPIO (such as IR, RF, Zigbee and more), I can also hook in Hue and EasyHome and more... I'm glad to report that I'm making good progress. I've got the bare bones working: My Arduino can switch things on and off, dim things and follow instructions. It's the core brain in my set-up. It does some of the switching through some opto coupler relays, and I can later do more like IR and RF, and have some LEDs connected through PWM to do dimming. But because it does not talk natively to the outside world well, I'm using a serial interface to a Raspberry Pi (via USB). And on the Pi, I'm running Apache and I've built a simple API that will allow me to call it via commands like http://pi/switch.p...

It's no secret that I'm Arduino crazy. And I've got (and need) a few. One I bought from Farnell  for about £17. Then I learnt how I could build my own on a bread board , and then I just finished a soldered version on protoboard yesterday. The DIY route is cheaper... and the components probably cost me about £10, plus several hours of labour. But the cheapest and best option, was this Indiegogo "$9 Arduino" . It's my first experience of putting my own, real money in some crowd-funded project, and the results are stunning: On 26 July, I paid $22 for two Arduinos, and the promised delivery date was 20 September. The campaigned got 14x the backing planned (target $12k, actual $164 401), yes delivered on time, and increased the value to me (because of the greater backing received) by adding more goodies for free. And the kit works as expected, so I'm super impressed. This certainly would not have happened without a really dedicated project manager ...

Next up, following from the Homopolar motor , is the banana clicker. This is a great way to impress your audience at any presentation, so I'll now need to find another trick... but I'll share this with you for your pleasure... just don't tell anyone until you've used this to impress your next audience. Instead of using a fancy clicker to advance your slides, use your banana. How? In short: buy this  (or one of these ), plug it in, connect banana and impress. In a bit more detail (and cheaper set-up): An Arduino has a USB plug, and can pretend to be a computer USB keyboard if it is running this program . (You could buy or build your own Arduino, and just download the open source code...) The code effectively looks for conductivity between connectors, and when it measures conductivity, it sends the "key press". A banana conducts (providing you hold on to the other (ground) wire... or you can hook it up to ideally a steel lectern). Other fruit wor...

Tada! I've got my Raspberry Pi measuring and storing temperature data in Google Cloud SQL. And I'm pretty excited that it was possible (even simple) for a simple soul like myself. For context: I've been working on automating my home with home-grown technology, mostly Arduino (or Atmega328) based, but got more and more frustrated with the pain to connect these different Arduinos to get it anything close to "smart". So, I recently turned my attention to Raspberry Pi: The cost and complexity of Arduino + networking (of any sort) quickly exceeded the price of a Pi. In moving to Pi, I decided to also build my stuff around OpenHab because it gives me the abstraction I'm looking for to deal with the many different things I want to control. It also gives, for free, Android and Web UIs to help control things. But the action above does not leverage OpenHab yet. BTW - My electricity bill is extortionately high (because of poor home insulation and design), so...

I remember Bill Gates on stage at a Microsoft employee conference talking about the progress in computing power, and how he envisaged that the humle Windows CE (or Pocket PC at the time?) could power everything... He had a Windows CE phone device with an external keyboard and TV screen, which basically was a sub $300 "computer" for emerging markets. And he mentioned (probably before 2000) how satellites could potentially run off Windows CE. How sad (for Microsoft) that they did not capitalise on the opportunity they had then. Where they just too early, or where the execution and focus just not there? (I also remember saying that Google and phone would never work :) ) I've been dreaming of sending a phone into space, but it's been done so many times , that I'm not sure just replicating it would be much of a challenge... I'm hunting for that special twist that will make it much more interesting. More seriously, NASA is now doing it too ... powering a sa...

It can't be any surprise to any of my friends that I love the point where electronics and the physical world collide. And robotics is part of this. Hence my Arduino controlled heating at home , my banana clicker , my HTTP light bulbs ,  CAT6 Christmas lights  and cyborg stories . So, you can't imagine how excited I am to see some public rumours (I don't have more Google Internal information *yet*) on what Andy Rubin is up to now. Automation. So - as a tribute to Andy and an early "Merry CHRISTmas" to you all, here's another Biehler invention... just for fun, inspired by a singing dog in a shop window nearby. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVVr-anPES0 For those interested (really?) in the tech behind it... it's deadly simple. Now I can formally claimed that I've shared some of my (not so) dirty laundry on YouTube :) If only I can get that robot to sort out the socks, find the missing ones and put them away...

I'm running a class on Arduino at Google for Googlers... and this came in very handy today in remembering which pins are which... printed to Avery 7x2 labels. End result looks something like this: