Devices and Hardware: OPNsense, Purism, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, SparkFun, and More
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Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ OPNsense is not for my router :(
OPNsense is FreeBSD based system for network routers. With web interface, packages, monitoring, firewalling etc. Just like OpenWRT but not based on Linux.
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Purism ☛ Opportunistic Word Completion
The above uses a spell checker (hunspell) so it helps to correct words but does not necessarily “predict” them. However since the system allows for multiple completers we have some more: [...]
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Celebrating young Coolest Projects creators at a London museum
Visitors to the Young V&A museum in London can be inspired by some of the incredible creations young people have showcased at Coolest Projects.
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[Old] Alan Byrne ☛ Making my own Bed Sensor
I recently created some “bed sensors” for my smart home that detect if one of us, or both of us, is in bed. I use a couple of pressure mats that detect when weight is applied to them, and stuck then under our mattress at around hip level and these tell my Home Assistant home automation platform if someone is lying on top of that part of the bed.
I originally thought that these would be more of a gimmick, than actually useful, but this turned out to be totally wrong! These now form an integral part of my smart home and I use them to not only trigger certain automations, but also prevent other automations from running if someone is in bed. For example, I don’t want the ceiling lights coming on in the bedroom if someone is in bed having a sleep!
This article shows you two ways I went about making one of these bed sensors. If you want to see the full end to end build process, check out my video about it!
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Raspberry Pi Pico makes sure your Christmas tree never goes thirsty
The Pico here had already been set up with MicroPython code for a previous project – it was running code to flash a red LED. The practical dad added extra code to read the data from a moisture sensor, making the LED flash when the water in the reservoir has run out. But he also wanted to get the green LED involved. He wrote some more MicroPython to make Pico show a green light when the program is running correctly. If he sees that lit up, he can rest assured that the Christmas tree is not going to go thirsty.
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Ken Shirriff ☛ The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
The chip is a custom HP chip from 1977 that provides an interface between HP's interface bus (HP-IB) and the Z80 processor in the floppy drive controller. HP designed this interface bus as a low-cost bus to connect test equipment, computers, and peripherals. The chip, named PHI (Processor-to-HP-IB Interface), was used in multiple HP products. It handles the bus protocol and buffered data between the interface bus and a device's microprocessor.1 In this article, I'll take a look inside this "silicon-on-sapphire" chip, examine its metal-gate CMOS circuitry, and explain how it works.
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Press Gazette ☛ How can news media bounce back in 2024? 18 leaders share their insights
Five chief executives, four editorial leaders, four digital bosses and three revenue leaders were among those to answer Press Gazette’s call for predictions for the coming year.
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ROS Industrial ☛ RICA Community Meeting Puts a Bow on 2023 Developments
The ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas hosted a fourth quarter end of year Community Meeting that highlighted recent develoments and upcoming events for 2024.
Matt Robinson led off the meeting with programmatic updates and some of the findings from the recent roadmap workshops and highlighted that a roadmap revisit at the ROS-Industrial open source project level would be coming for 2024. Furthermore, updates on training, with a proposed schedule was shared along with the announcment of the ROS-Industrial Consortium 2024 Annual Meeting.
The 2024 edition of the RICA Annual Meeting will take place March 27-28 and include demonstrations and lab tours. There is also the oppportunity to consider some hands on workshop time and surveying of the membership will take place early in 2024 to nail down specific events and Annual Meeting content. The event listing will continued to be updated as details are firmed up.
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Arduino ☛ The user’s heartbeat controls this drum machine
An Arduino Nano board detects the user’s pulse through a Pimoroni Pulse Sensor. It plays drum samples (or any audio clips) loaded onto a SparkFun WAV Trigger module. Battle wired the sequencer switches in a keyboard-style matrix, which reduces the number of IO pins required to just the number of rows plus columns instead of one pin for every switch. On each beat, the Arduino checks the switches and then plays the corresponding drum samples. Finally, Battle crammed all of that hardware into an enclosure with 3D-printed decoration that makes the device look like an oversized heart.