After years of planning, months of basic electronics and programming exercises he’s finally completed a project by himself with little help (but with a ton of pestering) from me. He came up with the idea during one of our idea sessions where he needs to write down and draw how his idea would work. This…
Category: Projects
28 Days Later
Built an automated, wireless, bluetooth enabled, battery powered counter to remind myself how long I’ve been working from home. Uses an Adafruit Feather nRF52 board and a panel of MAX72xx LEDs. After working from home straight for a month, I am reminded of how lucky I am. Working in an industry that gives me the…
Retro Pie MAXX
My son has been asking me to get him a Nintendo Switch so I decided to do the reasonable thing and built a 7 inch hand held console with thousands of games from NES, SNES, Sega Mega Drive, Game Boy Color and Playstation 1. Took apart the previous version that used a tiny 3 inch…
Everyone Knows: No Highs, No Lows, Bose Drivers Blows
I am not an audiophile nor am I a headphone snob. I am a cheap and practical person who wanted to see what all the fuss was about with these Bose active noise cancelling headphones. Of course being cheap meant I would never pay full price for a Bose headphone. So I scour the back…
Black Friday Super Cuts
Black Friday is upon us again so I was inclined to check out deals on new gadgets. As with any Black Friday season, you begin to justify why you need to buy something just because it’s on sale. This year, I had my eye on a new iPad considering how reasonably priced they are nowadays…
Tiny Keyboard + Phone Car Mount: Crazy? Genius? or Crazy Genius?
I have been trying to figure out a way to consistently blog during my commute to work. I have a 45 minute bus ride in the morning and evening. That’s an hour and a half every weekday I could use for blogging! I of course could just use my iPhone and the WordPress app to…
Pi2-D2: Voice Assistant Upgrade – Parkinson’s Law in Action
I noticed that the camera I had inside my Pi2-D2 fell out of its mounting. Not surprised though as it is literally held together with tape and cardboard (not kidding, literally). I decided to take him apart and re-mount the camera. I estimated it would probably take me around 15 minutes to take him apart,…
Fitbit Versa + Amazon Web Services API Gateway == Universal Remote
Using the Web Triggers app written by Jason Tomsic, I was able hook up my IR blaster Pi that controlled my TV and my Particle Photon smart lamp to my Fitbit Versa. I already have an Alexa skill, a Workflow (now known as Shortcut) on my iPhone and a custom Particle Photon universal remote that…
Capital One: What’s in Your Interview Process?
A few months ago I underwent the coding assessment process for a FANG company which to put it mildly, I did not enjoy. You can read more about it here. I also briefly spoke about the interview process on a separate post. To quickly sum it up, the experience did not make me a better…
Question Box: A Portable Hacked Google Assistant
I had the opportunity to talk to an Amazon IoT engineer about his views on how they can better support the makers, hackers and hobbyists in the IoT space. The IoT world is very young and brimming with opportunity for clever and creative ideas. Given Amazon’s wide install base of Alexa paired with their dominance…
Technical Insanities of a Mad Computer Scientist 