- Perfect Ten
Great piece at Daring Fireball about the impact of the iPhone. - Inky pHAT a Tri-Colour EPD Display for Raspberry Pi
Gorgeous little display. They have 2 or 3 other sizes coming soon. Due to the 3 colors and how it works, it does take about 15 seconds to refresh the screen, but would be cool to use for things that don’t refresh often. - Do You Raise the Average?
Different way of looking at your social circle. Do you help balance out the group of people you hang out with? - Whole-body Aerial Manipulation by Transformable Multirotor with Two-dimensional Multilinks
Drone that can change shape while flying. - Who Has Your Back? Government Data Requests 2017
Perfect score for WordPress.com! - GE Appliances develops an ultra-fast pizza oven: 2 minute rapid bake
Two minutes?!?! - Real-Time Elasticsearch Indexing on WordPress.com
Our users perform actions which trigger the indexing of 75 million documents per day! - A riptide swept away a Florida family. Then dozens of beachgoers formed a human chain.
People can be amazing when they work together. - 20 Examples Of The Mandela Effect That’ll Make You Believe You’re In A Parallel Universe
No way! We definitely never said Berenstain.
Rolling Shutter
This video came through my YouTube subscriptions.
I don’t recall ever hearing about rolling shutter, so I also watched the other video he mentioned to learn more…
I immediately thought of the times I’d captured an image out of one of a golf swing videos. Unfortunately I couldn’t find one of my own examples, but a quick Google search produced this one.
Now I understand why this happens!
Tropical Island Tango Ice Cream
A blend of coconut ice cream & pineapple sherbet with strawberry swirls.
Delicious!
I’m going to have to check out more from this Purple Cow brand, especially since it was only $2.50.
Grapefruit Shandy
I’m pleasantly surprised by this one. Might be my new favorite of the Leinenkugel Shandys.
Code with Microsoft for Beginners and Makers
It’s been quite some time since I’ve used any Microsoft products. They are really stepping up their game when it comes to makers and creating tools to teach people how to code.
Makecode (by Microsoft) is a site similar to Scratch. Both are great way for kids (or adults) to get started with programming. The powerful part is the drag and drop interface which simplifies coding. Instead of having to remember the syntax of a for statement, in the block editor you drag over a for block and fill in a couple of fields with the values for the variables. You don’t even need to buy a board to get started because the site has an emulator built right in.
Makecode has support for a bunch of microcontrollers aimed at beginners. Currently it works with micro:bit, Circuit Playground Express, Minecraft, Sparkfun Inventors Kit, and Chibi Chip. I selected the Circuit Playground Express for my example above.
They’ve also built a Visual Studio Code extension for Arduino, which is now open sourced. I downloaded VSC and installed the extension. I didn’t play with it very long, but it looks like it’ll be my new editor for Adruino projects. It does things that every programming IDE should do, like code completion, which the Arduino IDE still does not do. I also installed some Python extensions, so I’ll have to see how it compares to the Atom editor, which is what I’ve been using for Python programming.
The Range
Finally made a trip to the driving range. Resurrecting an old pre-shot routine seemed to bring consistent ball striking back. Hopefully it translates to the course.
Amazon Prime Day
Campfire Toasted S’mores Ice Cream
5v Relay Module – Part 2
A couple of weeks ago I built a 5v relay module, but realized the relay wasn’t sufficient for my needs. So I had to order a heftier one that could handle more than 0.5 amps of current.
I was under a time crunch and couldn’t wait for a 5 or 10 pack, which had longer shipping times, so I had to go with a set of 2 for $5.99. These are basically the same relays used in all of the manufactured modules you can buy for less than $5, especially if you buy multiple units.
I set up my GoPro overhead and talked through the build process of my new relay module. It was not a smooth process, because I finally messed up my wiring, which I’d been so proud of hitting a 100% success rate on first attempts when putting together circuit boards. I not only messed up, but I realized my mistake, and then fucked it back up after thinking I was right the first time.
I forgot to take any good pictures of the completed relay module this time around, so here is a blurry screenshot I grabbed from the video, showing the original relay module, the non-working version (which I’ll eventually fix up), and my final version. Similar to whenever I screw up and lose a bunch of code, I made it a personal challenge to turn out my best work on the redo. As you can see, my final version saved a lot of space.
Now that I’ve created my own relay modules, I won’t do it again unless I have specific requirements. Buying the same thing already made is a lot more time effective. It was fun and a great learning experience though. Here’s what the wiring diagram looks like spaced out on a breadboard. There isn’t much to it.
You can grab Fritzing files over on GitHub. Two things that helped me out a lot with this build were a video Homemade 5V Single Channel Relay Module Shield For Arduino, PIC, AVR and an article Turn Any Appliance into a Smart Device with an Arduino Controlled Power Outlet. Between finishing my build and writing this post, I also came across Arduino Controlled Power Outlet on Electronics Hub, which is a neat site with a lot of great circuits and tutorials.
There also ended up being a part 3 to this.
Shandy Sampler
I couldn’t tell you the last time I bought a case of beer, but I didn’t even know they made a Watermelon Shandy, so I couldn’t resist this sampler. I’ve never actually eaten a grapefruit, which makes me curious what the Grapefruit Shandy will be like as well.
