Our middle son needed a new scooter but had been hanging on to his mini-micro he outgrew 18 months ago because he loved it. We’d suggested a bunch of new ones but didn’t get any uptake. I found an old broken Mongoose sticking out of a ditch on an evening lockdown walk. The front wheel […]
Hardware/Firmware
Carbon Neutral Flights, From Home
Christmas 2020, what to get the woman who has . . . . had a year of disappointment and cancelled plans? This was a hard year, lockdowns, home schooling, home working, self-isolation, fear, sickness, we all had a lot to deal with. Like a lot of people we had to cancel a foreign holiday which […]
Interpreting Agile for Hardware / Software / Firmware Programs
In 2014 HP Labs kicked off a major program called ‘The Machine’. Our mission was to redesign the defacto computer architecture that has been in place since Von Neumann first imagined it in the 1940s. The data explosion has placed this architecture under extreme pressure. We needed to not only think about the fundamental computing […]
Colour Mimicking Lights
Following on from the Bluetooth controlled LEDs I wanted to see if I could get a string of WS2812B lights to react to their environment. I selected the Adafruit TCS34725 colour sensor because a) it was well documented, and I didn’t want to mess around too much. I found some code samples by duct soup […]
LEDs controlled by an Arduino and Android
As part of something bigger I’m looking to build I put together a prototype of a WS2812B LED strip being controlled with an Arduino and an Android App via Bluetooth. If you haven’t come across these WS2812B LEDs, they are cheap as chips, easy to program via a micro controller and can produce 16 million […]