After over a decade of professional robotics experience, I realized I could illustrate my history through the robots I’ve worked on.
Continue reading My History through RobotsCategory: Blog
General blog entries
Headlight for elBoda
My primary transportation is an elBodaBoda electric assist cargo bike from Yuba bikes. It’s a great bike and a real car replacement with cargo and passenger capacity. The electric system comes with a tail light but no head light. It does however include an auxiliary power output that supplies 6V whenever the tail light (and control panel back light) is switched on. So I headed down to my local makerspace and quickly whipped up a headlight.
User serviceable parts inside: Replacing a smartwatch battery
When my Toq smart watch stopped accepting charge, and I was told I wasn’t eligible for a warrantee repair because I received it as a gift (seriously Qualcomm?) I figured I might as well try repairing it, or at least finding out what was inside.
Continue reading User serviceable parts inside: Replacing a smartwatch battery
Guidelines for writing code for the ESP8266
Espressif’s ESP8266 WiFi SoC is an increasingly popular chip for Internet of Things projects, both hobby and professional, because it combines a capable MCU with a WiFi radio in a single chip for an amazingly low cost. It’s received a lot of attention in many blogs but I wanted to give a little bit more technical depth on the MCU architecture and my best practices for programming it. There are some idiosyncrasies which have to be taken into account when programming to get the most out of the SoC.
Continue reading Guidelines for writing code for the ESP8266
Article in Circuit Cellar Magazine
I have been published in Circuit Cellar magazine:
Trends in Custom Peripheral Cores for Digital Sensor Interfaces
Speaking at Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley
I will be presenting at the 2015 Embedded Systems Conference in Silicon Valley on Custom Soft Cores for Digital Sensors on FPGAs which will be an introduction to easily creating custom communication soft cores to reduce resource use and speed programming of FPGA based sensor hubs interfacing with digital sensors.
Robot Garden Cited in Entrepreneur Magazine and Peter Diamandis’s BOLD
Robot Garden has been cited along with Robot Launchpad, and Grishin Robotics in Entrepreneur Magazine and in Peter Diamandis’s business book BOLD as a part of the robotics startup ecosystem: Continue reading Robot Garden Cited in Entrepreneur Magazine and Peter Diamandis’s BOLD
Internet from Space Forever?
Combining some of myfavorite topics, the end of the world and crowd funding hardware we have Outernet. A project promising to provide a low bandwidth but continual loop of the most important Internet content (as decided democratically) from space received with a solar powered satellite receiver / WiFi access point to access it. They also plan to provide real-time updates on natural disasters and political events by uploading from a few control stations. Sounds great but is it real?
Waterproof hardware lacking waterproof firmware
Designing a smartwatch, making it waterproof is a no brainer. The Qualcomm Toq does an elegant job on the hardware, with only capacitive buttons and inductive charging, there’s no need for any kind of wholes in the body. But I was surprised to discover that the firmware isn’t waterproof. When the watch is immersed or gets many water droplets on it as a pictured above, it interprets each droplet as a touch and the UI goes crazy, paging through menues etc. Crushed under this erroneous touch spam, it crashes and locks up pretty quickly.
Lesson: Always test everything and remember to waterproof your firmware.
Fixing the ¢2 of plastic that broke my microwave
The door on my microwave oven suddenly stopped latching securely and the internal switch that detects the door being closed ceased to register. My wife and I were annoyed because this seemed like a very inexpensive cheap part of the microwave breaking and taking our a rather expensive appliance. So, time to fix it ourselves.
Continue reading Fixing the ¢2 of plastic that broke my microwave