Author: neilwebber
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User Interface Rant
I have one of these: You get it from these guys: https://bt.tn/ It is, in fact, the simplest internet user interface in the world. It’s just a big red button with WiFi. Without doing any programming you can set it up to send an email, a text, tweet, interface with IFTTT/Zapier, etc. And if you are…
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Traffic Light shows Air Quality Index
I recently saw this project: Traffic Light Shows Internet Status at the “WTH” (whiskey tango hotel) website and decided it would be fun to build. So here we go. I found the same traffic light available on Amazon: http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IX73BGW I decided (of course) to make a few changes to the project: I used a BeagleBone Black (BBB), simply…
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Geeking out even more with Pythagoras and Lego triangles
In case my previous musings on lego triangles weren’t geeky enough for you, here’s some more. 60 degree 3-7-8 / 5-7-8 math In my prior note I pointed out that you could construct an exact 60 degree angle with a 3-7-8 or 5-7-8 construction, such as this one: The blue technic beam is the “7”…
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New versions of www.numerousapp.com API libraries
Released new versions of both the Python and Ruby interfaces to the Numerous APIs. This update allows you to call write() with the “only write it if the value changed” feature and just ignore any exception that comes (when the value hasn’t changed). This is probably a more common usage pattern. So now, for example,…
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Arduino JSON Web Server
I wrote a small program to implement a web server with a JSON/HTTP interface for accessing I/O pins on the Arduino. Of course to use this you have to have an Ethernet shield (wired or WiFi) on your Arduino; a standard bare Arduino by itself has no network interface. But if you have the shield,…
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Arduino and Numerous, with help from IFTTT
Here’s one way to connect an Arduino to a Numerous metric. The best solution would be to port the Numerous API to the Arduino; however, there is a footprint problem especially with SSL: there is only 2K of RAM on a standard Arduino. I could not find any Arduino ports of SSL (which is required…
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Neil’s Notes
I host my own site at www.neilwebber.com separately from wordpress.com; go check that out
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Lego Technic Triangle Geometry
Time for some fun with Pythagoras! Lego tends towards rectangular constructs, but sometimes we might want to make triangular connections. Technic beams especially lend themselves to this. Right-angled pythagorean triangles are fairly easy to construct. Here’s a 3,4,5 triangle: Notice that when you build it you build it as 4,5,6. That’s because it’s the distance…
neilwebber 