Lawyer, writer & author, medical education consultant, and enthusiastic self-taught maker.
USB
As most readers of this blog probably know, there's a limit to how much current you can pass through a Raspberry Pi. When used with a WiFi dongle, mouse and keyboard, a connected Hard Drive or external webcam can be all too much - so it's
Arduino
A couple of months ago, during a visit to foreign shores, I picked up an 8x8 LED matrix. What caught my eye was that it was about three times the size of matrixes I had at home - so anything displayed could be viewed from much further away. It was
charger
One of the first posts to appear on this blog was Amir's very informative description of the workings of the cell phone power supply (charger). In passing, he mentioned AWG (American Wire Gauge). This post aims to explain its significance in a little more detail. Amir described using
ESP8266
It's vacation time, and like everyone else, I wanted to protect my home while I was away. I don’t have a dedicated alarm. (Prospective burglars please note - I’m back now and, the house is heavily fortified!) I did have a few Raspberry Pis and SD
raspberry pi
Of the six Raspberry Pis that perform various tasks around my house, two of them are dedicated Kodi boxes. For more than a year I’ve had exemplary performance from both. Suddenly, about a month ago, one of them stopped working. There had been no power outages, no refreshed addons,
Raspberry-pi
My Web Cam Can't See We've all been there. We install a web cam, march off to our screen to check what it sees, then come back to make adjustments. Of course, we're never really satisfied; there's always something more interesting happening
ESP8266
Update July 2020 - if you're interested in creating a mailbox notifier that'll work on regular AA batteries literally for years, take a look at my latest post here. This blog was originally posted in June 2016. Feel free to read on, but there’s a