I have been having a little fun with the new MakeCode Arcade platform. I am excited to see what other people can do with it so I have been figuring out some basic game play stuff with my own game. Now I give you Princess Cake Eater!
This is a mini quest game complete with an NPC, obstacles, and even a bad guy. Try it out and let me know what you think. Continue reading Playing around with Make Code Arcade
Last weekend I decided to build a monitoring system for the planter boxes on my deck. I wanted to collect data on soil moisture and light levels from at least two of the 4 planter boxes. The issue is that I don’t have a place to plug it all into and I want to log the data using Google Sheets so that I can graph everything.
So I grabbed a solar panel, whipped up a voltage regulator, connected a rechargeable battery and that took care of the battery. For the microcontroller I used a Particle Photon, mostly due to it’s abundance of analog read pins, and connected a Spark Fun soil sensor with an added photo-resister for light readings. The Photon reads the analog value of each sensor and adds a new row into my Google Sheets doc via IFTTT. After the data is sent the Photon goes into deep sleep mode every 10 minutes. This makes it so that the sensor sips power and can easily last using only solar power.
So here is the Data:
My next step is to collect enough data to flag events that I want to be notified about. Like when the water level gets low enough to were I should water my plants, or when my plats are about to die due to extreme dryness. I can also see how much daylight a particular box is getting so I know what plants need to go where. If I had access to a water outlet I could have that automatically water the garden, but for now my water bucket works well enough.
For those of you that know me, I am kinda big on the ESP8266 WiFi enabled chip for IOT. I do use the Arduino IDE for coding these chips and have integrated aspects of automatic setup much like consumer IOT products use. The one thing that has been tricky is in setting up things like MQTT feeds and even the MQTT credentials on setup. Continue reading One Step Closer to Plug and Play ESP devices
For quite a few years I have tried out many devices for smart homes and lived with them to figure out what works most consistently. For myself, there is also a need for things to share information and allow for automatons that use complex logic. An example of this is that while I do want my lights to turn on when I get home, I only want them to do so if it is dark outside and at a brightness that reflects the time of day that I am getting home. This kind of automation requires many devices to share information across my network, but some devices make that process easier than others. With that in mind, here are my recommendations on smart home devices that play nice with each other. Continue reading Top Smart Home recommended devices
So this is happening tonight…
It is using an Adafruit 32u4 Feather microcontroller with a program that sends keyboard commands over USB. It works quite well and I have plenty of pins left for more stuff.
This tutorial will walk you through setting up a string of colorful holiday lights that connect to the internet. The lights can display many types of animations and colors based on information sent to it using Adafruit’s IO service. Once connected and programmed, IFTTT can be used to set date triggers as well as change animations based on your GPS location, the weather report for the day, and even when you are getting a call from your mother.
The hard stuff is already done and with just a bit of soldering and a few code edits, you will be deep into the beast known as the Internet of Things. Continue reading IOT Holiday Lights
I have been helping out with a project that will be featured at the Bay Area Maker Faire. This will be my first time there and I am super excited about it, but the deadline is tight. So yesterday I designed the structure for the display, prototyped it in cardbourd, then cut out all of the main supports on the CNC. I was there until 2am, but the parts look amazing and the fit is tight and solid.
The chalenges for this is that it all has to be flat packed for shipping, assembel quickly, and survive many potential shipments. So this is my solution.
Tomorrow I should have the basic structure built and will start installing electronics.
I have been working on trying to get my servo powered robot, Hack-e-Bot, working with the MicroBit so that younger kids can program it’s basic movement to navigate through an obstacle course. I now have custom blocks that can be used to control any servo powered robot using Pin 0 and Pin 1. Continue reading Micro:Bit Servo Robot
