Disclaimer: I have two baseball games in which to play tomorrow. Play well, FWIW.
I am spending my night watching ‘Ask an Engineer.’ Getting my nerd on (well, FWIW.)
+1 beer (at least)
Support Lady Ada / Adafruit via purchasing the type of stuff you see on swantron.com…she is one of the good guys. Have a nice weekend…
My skill set is so sufficiently awesome in the design realm, that I can turn this…
crop == gizzard
wattle you have? (A: a whole bunch of MSG)
If you, unlike me, are shopping for a web designer, take the following into consideration.
Whether you are building a new website or having an older one redesigned, it is likely that you will need the assistance of a web designer. If you spend some time browsing the internet, you will soon discover that there is a significant difference in those websites which have been professionally designed and those that haven’t.
Nowadays, if you want your business to get noticed then hiring a reputable web designer is a necessity. So how do you go about choosing one?
Firstly you should do your research on potential web designers or web design companies. You will find that Southampton web design agencies may work in a completely different way to a web designer in Dorset. Therefore, it pays to look around and not necessarily just in London.
You need to enquire into their previous work and ensure it is similar to the standard you are after for your own site. It is important to remember that your website should not just be a copy of previous work, so look at more than one example to ensure that the designer is capable of catering to individual client needs. You also need to research into whether this work was delivered in a timely manner. It is all well and good receiving an incredible design for a new website, however if it is going to take 3 years, you may need to reconsider. The majority or web designers will have a portfolio and this is a great way to judge their work and their professionalism.
Client testimonials are another way in which you can compare designers. Be wary about these testimonials as it is possible to make these up, so it is important to follow them up and actually speak to previous clients to gain further information. For example if you are contemplating a web design Bournemouth agency, you may wish to speak to a range of their clients to gauge an understanding of how they work.
My enjoyable night of programming my IOIO slowly devolved into a digital multimeter-needing mess.
bad lab
Either I am reading the spec sheet incorrectly, or this thing is wonky. I have implemented a pull-up resister, and *should be pushing 5V. In reality, I am seeing 3.8V…something is amiss.
Back to the drawing board.
I am one coding session and one EE session away from having a pretty cool project to post. In the meantime, I am making some progress with the IOIO.
+1 a bunch of wires
Eclipse and I are still having our issues, but the ADK is becoming less Greek to me. The next project should shed some light on what sort of possibilities IOIO presents.
I shot a video of one of my debugging tests. I eventually will be using an ‘open drain’ setup, in order to get 5V output, but am doing some testing at 3.3V. I hooked up an old speaker that I salvaged from a CRT tear-down to my test pins, to verify that my Android App was working.
Hit the jump to view said vid…
Continue reading
It is a prudent exercise to step back and look at the state of technology with an objective eye from time to time. It is easy to get wrapped up in the frenzied pace with which tech progresses, and lose site of the end-goal, end-user, etc.
After all, this would have been the bee’s knees not-too-long ago…
kicking it old school
Fresh off of a few recent battles with my web host, I am looking into current options for application hosting. I would love to have my own server up and rolling, but do not want to be married to Bresnan/Optimum for up-time. My best bet, still, is cloud hosting…like it or hate it, that is the case.
My needs are simple. A few sites and a relatively small amount of data; I need a basic web host. I can manage my stuff easily, but the same would not be true (at all) for a business, for example. Imagine trying to do VoIP, host email servers, maintain remote databases, and whatever else. All, while remaining secure…not an easy task.
The light at the end of the tunnel is that there are some very good options in the application hosting realm. I found some good info in the above links…Spirinet seems to be one of the best. Take a look.
I need either a camera, or a backup Android for dev. I’m shooting for the later. For real though…cash for a used Droid X. Anyone know of a good marketplace to pick a used one up? I’ll entertain offers at joe[at]swantron[dot]com. You know you want an iPhone…
Here is the motivation:
messy lab is messy
I had to swing the laptop around to snap a picture of my Monday-Funday effort for this week. I need to snap (shoot maybe?) a video of my IOIO work, but I find myself in want of a micro SD card. Both of my 2GB cards are at the office, and my IOIO Android app is sitting happily on my Droid 2′s memory card. For the loss. Loss like the Droid X’s battery tendencies. Really, get rid of that phone. It is awful…I will be doing you a favor by taking it off of your hands. The screen is too big…hard to fit in your pocket, etc. Cash.
I’ll get a vid up tomorrow. Fear not.
I am still horsing around with Google+ on my Droid 2. A few posts back, I lambasted the Instant Upload feature. The whole idea of tossing geo-location-having pictures onto Google’s servers seems awfully odd to me.
As this feature is ‘featured’ in Google+’s Android app, I figured I would play around with it some more, in order to gauge its evilness. The jury is still out.
It does work as intended. I snapped a few pictures of my fancy breakfast in my cubicle, with the Instant Upload activated, with the Battery Uploads selection…
+1 delicious
Surely enough, once I plugged my D2 into the charger, it began to sync/upload. Within several seconds I was notified of my complete upload to G+. So, while I am still unsure of the impacts of this feature, I am impressed by its function. Google’s devs hit the ball out on the park with this one, in regards to pure functionality. Especially, as the Android Facebook and Twitter apps are rough at best. Hats off.
Expect a full review of G+ in the near future.
Five Volts are so 2010. I’m all over this three and three-tenths Volts stuff.
here we go
Don’t call it a comeback. I blew the dust off of my IOIO board, and am ready to do some 3.3V stuffs. I have already deduced that my PowerSwitch Tail won’t relay at 3.3V, but will make a switching noise and fire the on-board LED. Lesson learned. I guess I had better get serious with my EE…this is a circuitry step up from the Arduino without a doubt.
Expect a project and some code soon. I am going to make something work.
I created a Google+ account last week, in order to kick the tires a bit. I am going to hold off on a full review until I get some circles going, test the group video chat functions, etc.
I do want to mention one puzzling feature that Google has built into this thing.
Instant upload.
I don’t get it.
plus one google plus
This makes for super easy uploading of images to your profile. Android phone…cellular radio connection…there you go. This app will run a cron job to dump your photos to your Google plus profile. The default setting is to allow this when you set up the Google+ Android app, with all new photos dumped to a private (non-shared) folder on your G+ account.
I opened up my settings and let this one rip.
plus one intrusive
It took about 20 seconds for that picture to show up in my private folder. Cool implementation, but pretty impractical.
Issues I have with this:
* Increased data usage. Especially as unlimited plans are goners.
* Battery nukage. One more thing to kill -9.
* Location data. Real time seeding a DB with your lat/long.
* Duplicate media. Primarily for deletions…two is worse than one.
* Neccessary? USB cord…bluetooth…MMS…physical media…email…
Suffice to say, I will have this ‘feature’ disabled. Stay tuned for the full review, and holler if you would like an invite.
I got tired of poking around with LCD drivers with my Arduino. Time for a quick project to mix it up…staring at a surge protector always puts 120V on my mind. As it turns out, I tore apart an old humidifier a while ago on my ‘workbench.’ Monday night is Katie’s reality TV night…time for something sweet.
Investigating duty cycles on this plastic fan:
fan hack
I figured that I could horse around with my PowerSwitch Tail, and make it somewhat mimic a PWM 5V setup. I was curious how long I would have to ‘pulse’ the switch with juice to keep the fan constantly rolling. I started with it fully on, and kicked my ‘active’ duty cycles lower until I reached a nearly-continual state of motion. Pause for Arduino code snippet:
/*
PowerSwitch Tail Template
-
120V AC Driver w/ LED indicator
-
Joseph Swanson
2011 | http://swantron.com
*/void setup() {
// declare pins (13, 7) for writing
pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
pinMode(7, OUTPUT);
}void loop() {
// Fire relay / LED
digitalWrite(13, HIGH);
digitalWrite(7, HIGH);// Configure for “on” time
delay (50);// Kill relay / LED
digitalWrite(13, LOW);
digitalWrite(7, LOW);// Configure for “off” time
delay (950);
}
Pause for a small small-video break:
As that code and vid indicate, 1/20th of a second is all it took to keep the fan rolling, with 19/20th of a second idle. Not bad. Not sure what the takeaway is, but that is something to mention.
Put that knowledge somewhere safe, provided the question of humidifier fan duty cycles should spring up.