Devices: 'Dumb' Home, Home Screen, Raspberry Pi Zero, and More
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Android Authority ☛ How I built a fully offline smart home, and why you should too
As someone who grew up with a dial-up [Internet] connection, I get anxious at the thought of any always-online product or service. My smart home is no different — I rely on it to automatically cool the room when I return home, light up my closet when I open the door, and match the color temperature of my lights to the sun’s position. Why should any of that require an [Internet] connection? That train of thought is exactly what led me to build a fully offline smart home that doesn’t hinge on any third-party servers whatsoever. And here’s how you can do it, too.
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Arne Bahlo ☛ My Home Screen in January ’24
Every month, I’m sharing my current home screen.
This is the one for January 2024. Notable changes since my last post in December: [...]
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Raspberry Pi ☛ EKORA streamlines cardiology care with Raspberry Pi Zero W [Ed: Digital Restrictions (DRM)]
Dr Robertson realised that you can save and send information in an encrypted form using Raspberry Pi, satisfying the NHS’s security protocols. The pair developed the EKORA box to take the place of the successive small strips of paper that would otherwise be generated by a thermal printer integrated into a ruggedised laptop reserved solely for this purpose. It’s a much more compact and low-power solution, and is sturdy enough to be wiped down for infection control.
Raspberry Pi Zero W here essentially pretends to be a flash drive, and the EKORA box can simply be plugged in to the special pacemaker programmer/reader laptop. The code for the device has been developed and tweaked over time using feedback from the medical staff who use it, and no specialist computing knowledge on their part is required to operate it: once the Zero W inside has booted up, the device appears as a flash drive connected to the pacemaker programmer laptop. They can then save the data to it, and the data is automatically encrypted and securely sent over the network to the EKORA server.
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Hackaday ☛ Brand-New PCB Makes Replica TRS-80 Possible
If like us, you missed out on the TRS-80 Model I back when it first came out, relax .With this brand-new PCB that’s a trace-for-trace replica of the original and a bunch of vintage parts, you can build your own from scratch.
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Hackaday ☛ Pico-Sized Ham Radio
There are plenty of hobbies around with huge price tags, and ham radio can certainly be one of them. Experienced hams might have radios that cost thousands of dollars, with huge, steerable antennas on masts that can be similarly priced. But there’s also a side to the hobby that throws all of this out of the window in favor of the simplest, lowest-cost radios and antennas that still can get the job done. Software-defined radio (SDR) turned this practice up to 11 as well, and this radio module uses almost nothing more than a microcontroller to get on the air.