Bluetooth Smart Target (Game)

Chris Greening (@mrbananas) has been working on an exciting project to bring web UIs to IoT devices – more about this later. He has been up to stay with us in Edinburgh for a few days and we’ve been working on a small demonstrator for his tech. We decided to build a BLE target suitable for a hacky sack throwing …

Does a Raspberry Pi need a UPS to avoid SD card corruption?

In the past I’ve had trouble with corrupted SD cards when power was removed from a Raspberry Pi without shutting down the OS. But this failed attempt to build a UPS for the Pi has, as a side effect, tested powering down and back up over 50 times without a single failure. So are SD corruptions a thing of the past?

.NET Micro Framework Web Server Unreliability

I have built a couple of home-automation devices using the Netduino Plus 2 and, until fairly recently, was pretty happy with them. Certainly the process of development using the .Net MicroFramework is really excellent – it is nothing short of miraculous to be able to debug embedded code in a desktop environment. BUT neither of the devices was totally reliable …

three ajax problems in my Phonegap app

I’m working on a Phonegap application to run on tablet computers on the walls in my house. I’d been making good progress and enjoying it – using CoffeeScript and LESS for the first time in anger and trying out Sublime (with some plugins) which I’m also very happy with.  But yesterday I started on what I thought would be the …

drawing straight lines with a Polargraph

Well, I have been busy with other things but hankering to get the Polargraph I got as a kit from Sandy Noble to plot lines as straight as possible.  The process wasn’t as simple as I’d expected for quite a number of reasons including, as often seems to be the case these days, an overestimation of my ability to remember …