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?

Testing SD Cards with Linux

While on holiday recently, my wife bought a 32GB micro-SD card, which she intended to use in her tablet.  Since then, it has been giving various errors, so I thought I should take it and verify its quality.

In order to test the card, we’re going to run three tests:

1. Access Speed, to assess the card Speed Class.
2. Drive Size, to assess if the reported size matches the actual size.
3. Data durability. to assess that data written can be read back reliably.

Manage Passwords and Keep Your Sanity

In life, I wear many hats.

I am a Software Engineer, so I know what leaps we have to go through to keep your data safe, when it’s on our servers.  We do our best to keep things simple for you, but we can’t do it all.  As such, having a good password is what we expect of you.  Doing this keeps us, and you safe(er) from data breaches.

But, it would seem you’re not keeping your end of the bargain:

So what makes a good password?  Longer is better.  Multiple types of characters (letters, digits, special characters, etc.) are better. Not based on a dictionary word. So on, and so forth.  What are you left with.  Phrases that are unrecognizable as ‘human’.

I am also a consumer.  Setting different passwords for each account is also recommended, as a breach on one won’t lead to a breach of another.  But who has time to generate (and remember) these complex password for every site one visits?

I feel the pain on both sides of the equation.  Passwords suck!

I am also an open-source advocate (some might even say zealot).  So until the boffins in the lab come up with something better than passwords, I can heartily recommend KeePass Password Safe.  This is a nifty bit of open-source software that will help you manage your passwords.  You can run it pretty much everywhere you can run software.  It saves your passwords to an encrypted file, and helps you generate strong, complex passwords.  When you need to use them, just copy-paste them from the KeePass application to your browser or other application.

Go forth and continue to enjoy your computing experience, but help keep us all safe by using strong passwords.  Using KeePass will help you keep them strong and unique and best of all, maintain your sanity.  Just don’t lose that password file!

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.

Weekend Project: Open Source Media Centre

I’ve been running a Raspberry Pi connected to my TV for a while now, and I’ve been using Rasbmc, a version of Kodi (formerly XBMC) quite happily.  I decided since I had a spare Raspberry Pi, I should do the same to my second TV in the lounge.  Setting this up and pointing it to my media files from the office shared drive, means I can now watch Game of Thrones while my wife catches up on her soaps.

Using this setup can get you a cheap media centre (small enough to hide behind the TV). Read on for setup instructions …

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…

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.