Alfred's musings

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:

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..

One of the things that energize me most, is to deliver a compelling and memorable presentation to a large audience. When Amit Singh (Google, President: Enterprise) recently referred to these Forbes tips , I thought it's worth forwarding them, as I think they serve as a great reminder how to deliver a great speech. (This picture was taken at Aalborg, Denmark. I can recall the moment... pausing... and having the audience attentively wait in anticipation. What fun!) And it also reminded me of some of my worst speeches. Many moons ago (and when I still had no grey hair) I delivered a keynote at a Gartner Symposium on Collaboration, where I woefully misunderstood the brief, and prepared a sales pitch instead of an industry analysis. And to make matters worse: As I realised I'm going down, tried to redeem my poor judgement with some lousy humour. Oh dear! Right - let me get back to prep from my presentation later this week in Madrid!

I've just had the fantastic opportunity to meet with two young and very talented people that friends at Telegraph is coaching. I just love coaching people: It's such a rewarding experience to help someone develop! And hats off to teachers who do that day in and day out (when paperwork and red tape allows). Thanks for your time today, Jennifer and Ross!

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

I've been an early Spotify fan, and recently presented on behalf of Google , sandwiched between Apple and Spotify Executive presentations in Denmark. But... I had to call good bye to Spotify some time ago when I've moved over to being 100% on the web, loving my Chromebook. (I've been using Grooveshark since then.) Today, a friend told me that Spotify is back... and there is a browser-only version of Spotify that works fine on my Pixel or Chromebox. And I'm writing this post while listening to some cool notes... Thank you Spotify!

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