Our home heating system sucks!

Partly it’s the up-to-temperature problem where centrally located thermostats register that all is well while some rooms are still cold – or vice versa and the boiler/furnace runs pointlessly.

Home Automation Server #2

I have now split up the various functions of my home automation server software and found a great replacement for the sonos API functionality that I’d previously developed.

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 …