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.) 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… …into this… …using nothing but MS Paint. I can also put down an entire box of MSG in a Biskit Chicken in a Biskit. But that is for another day. 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. 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.

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.

Stay tuned.

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: 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… 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. 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. 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. 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: 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 | https://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.

I’m back on the command line…look out… So, I am still poking away at various ways to interface between the bash and various web components. This stuff is still shaking out of my Twitter to CLI to LCD project. I have been using some of the usual suspects (wget, python url libraries, etc) in an effort to find one that is best suited to sniffing and parsing html info. I have found that writing to serial is the most fail-proof means of mashing around data quickly, so that is my inspiration. Anyhow, I was horsing around with curl on the command line. It turns out, that spoofing user agents is pretty simple to implement. Take this two-line one liner for instance: swantron@Dell15:$ x=10 swantron@Dell15:$ for (( y=1; y<=x; y++)) ; do curl –user-agent “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)” swantron.com ; doneIn a nutshell, this is acting to snag this site ten times, with credentials indicating the machine is running Windows 2000 and MS Internet Explorer 5.1. The success is indicated by my server statistics: Before: After: Not too bad. I am considering using this as a testing tool for my site. Messing around with PHP and CSS…I can put together a quick regression using some legacy operating systems and browsers to make certain that I can still snag my content. Granted, the example setup may seem like gross overkill, but as those stats indicate, I do see quite a few requests from ancient machines. Makes you wonder.. Anyhow, this layout is in need of some serious testing. If anyone is interested in a copy, drop me a line. Cheers.