Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino

It’s been a while since I took the old Arduino out, blew the dust off it, and yet again attempted to make something.  We’ve had a love/hate relationship, as I’ve sometimes struggled to overcome my knowledge deficits, but more on that later.

I was prompted to revisit the world of Arduino when I was recently delighted and intrigued, to be contacted by Seeed Studio, to feature their Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino on this blog.  I accepted their offer of a free beginner kit in return for this blog post….

Arduino Altimeter

This is a revisit to the CanSat project to share some tips on how to use a simple MPX4115A pressure sensor as an altimeter.  In a previous post I shared how to set up the sensor to detect ambient pressure, so now that we have that data, how do we estimate our altitude?

Store Files on your Android Phone with Linux

Take your files on the go with Android and Linux.  In this howto, I’ll show you how to easily attach your phone or tablet to your Linux PC and transfer files.

Software Testing: How much is enough?

At a recent job interview, a colleague of mine posed the following hypothetical for the candidate. If a software bug was only reproducible five percent of the time, how many tests would be required to prove it was fixed?

Having just recently read Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise“, I recognised this as a problem that Bayes’ Theorem could be used to provide some insight. As a result I decided to analyse the issue.

Weather Watching

For Christmas 2013, my good wife, knowing the geek that I am, gifted me a personal weather station.  I was delighted to receive it, and had it up on-line in no time, and it’s been happily chugging along for over a year since.  I’ve always intended to write about the set-up, so today I’m going to tackle that…

Accessing Custom APIs on Microsoft Azure Mobile Services

Needing some REST – 78/365 by Sergio Alvarez, on Flickr

For my current project, I’m developing a Restful Web API using Microsoft Azure Mobile Services. These APIs are intended to be consumed by a mobile application, which is being developed in parallel by another team. On the server side, we’re doing our best to design the system along Restful best practice, so we’re using HTTP methods as appropriate, e.g. POST, PUT, PATCH, GET, DELETE, etc.

We recently ran into an integration problem, as our mobile app development team couldn’t access any APIs using the PUT method. This is the story of how we resolved this issue…

A Better Time-lapse Photography Script

My first attempt at a time lapse script came up a little short.  That script was intended to be quick and dirty.  In order to make it easier to use, I’ve written some improved scripts.

How To Take Timelapse Photos with Raspberry Pi

As part of our CanSat endeavours, we are going to use a Raspberry Pi to do some time-lapse photography as we descend after launch.  In order to do this we’ll need to configure our Pi to do this automatically.  Read on for a description on how to do this.

How To Measure Air Pressure with Arduino

Continuing with our series on CanSat, we discuss how to detect atmospheric pressure using an Arduino Uno R3 and an MPX4115A Pressure Sensor.

Temperature Sensing with Arduino

As part of the CanSat Primary Mission, we need to measure temperature.  For this our starter kit has given us an Arduino Uno R3 micro-controller, as well as some resistors and an NTCLE101E3 NTC Thermistor.