Adventures with Arduino!

Posted on October 30, 2011 by John

A few weeks ago I got bored and decided to pick up an Arduino. I’m still working to figure out what to do with it, but my thought right now is to at least explore using the Arduino to do the following:

Build an automated gardening system (Garduino)
Build an automated drink mixing system (Beerduino**)
???

Not very original, I know, but I’m hoping that I can improve things a bit and make them work better for me.

That said, as I start diving into these projects expect a number of posts relating to Arduinos, Physical Computing, Gardening, etc. to start popping up.

** – I know this has been done, but searching for “Beerduino” doesn’t bring up quiite what I was looking for. I’ll update this if I can find the source later.

VirtualBox and Fedora 12

Posted on March 8, 2010 by John

As part of a project I was working on I decided that I needed to set up a sandbox development environment running Fedora 12. Since I didn’t have a bunch of spare hardware available (and didn’t want to buy VMWare), I decided to set up a virtual machine using VirtualBox. I went ahead and set up a machine using both Windows and Mac OS X as the host operating system, but I recorded the Mac install. If you’re interested, here is a YouTube video showing how:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad_-yV-Dw04

iPhone Development

Posted on February 14, 2010 by John

After hearing stories about success in Apple’s iTunes App Store, I decided to learn how to develop for the iPhone. I picked up a few books, but none of them really worked for me as I was looking for a incremental project-based approach. (Also, I didn’t know Objective C. That turns out to be problematic)

So anyways, I figured if I was going to have to figure out my own method for learning development, I might as well write it down. To that end, I now present:

Learn iPhone Development

New WordPress Plugin!

Posted on February 10, 2010 by John

So in building one of the projects I recently started, I ran into an issue where I couldn’t insert tabs into wordpress posts. It isn’t really a problem in most cases, but when you’re trying to copy and paste properly formatted/spaced code it matters. I traced the error back to a TinyMCE plugin and created a WordPress plugin to disable the offender.

If you need something to solve this problem take a look at: http://www.optictheory.com/tinymce-tabfocus-patch/

New Site

Posted on February 8, 2010 by John

With a new year comes a new site. I’m currently working on a handful of projects each of which will get it’s own subsite, but as those projects get going I needed some way to tie them all together.