As Joe Rogan says: Hello friends! If you’re wondering, today is a Wednesday. The family and I have been thrown off of our normal routines per social distancing, so it’s getting hard to remember what day it is—I’m certain I’m not the only one. I’ve yet to miss a deadline because of this, so I suppose the various electronic calendars I keep at the ready are doing their jobs!
Embedded Computing: Access Your Raspberry Pi via SSH
This seems simple to me now, but connecting to a Raspberry Pi over WiFi was definitely not for me a year ago. To help shortcut your learning process, I go over some of the details on connecting to your Pi via WiFi, static IP addresses, and using an IP address scanner in this post on Embedded Computing. I think it could be a very helpful article for people starting out, so I’m glad I got to write it.
I also wrote an article about 4 types of industrial robots there, drawing on my experience in factory automation.
Livestream: Clearcrawler Tele-Hands-On
Usually I do a separate post when I come out with a new video. As this one was live streamed, it’s certainly not as refined as my others, so I thought I’d just list it here. In the video I show off my ClearCrawler, and talk about its ancestors and the development process. I think it went fine, other than the feed dropping out at one point for whatever reason. So if you want to see a long-form discussion on my creations, here you go:
Hackaday is doing a sort of virtual conference/series of meetups, so they invited me to participate, which was awesome. You can see other events that may be of interest on this calendar.
Hackster.io: Beeeess!
I thought this bee monitoring setup was especially clever. It uses two PCBs stacked on top of each other, with female headers between the two that separate the bees into rows for counting with IR sensors.
In other clever application news, this magnetic time plotter is actually built using both 3D-printed parts, and parts from a 3D printer. Talk about using all of your resources!
Tindie: Soil Monitor
After a bit of a hiatus, I’ve started doing a bit more for Tindie’s blog. Here’s an article I wrote about the SoilWatch capacitive moisture sensor. Pretty neat, and actually a subject I’ve been researching for another project/projects.
Twitter Highlights:
In Twitter/other news, I ordered a TinyHawk II Quadcopter, which will be my first foray into FPV, and my first time flying a quadcopter in a few years. Thanks to Pat Regan for finding a place to buy one—a little hard to find even before the current situation with Covid. Or perhaps I should blame him for sucking me into yet another hobby?
I also thought this picture of my dog Evie—who appears on my videos occasionally—on St. Patrick’s day was great.
Final Thoughts: A P95 Mask
Weird story, you may know that N95 masks are in short supply these days. I was looking through one of my old CNC videos and noticed that I actually had a respirator up on the wall in my old house. I hadn’t worn it in a while, but wondered if it was still around, and after poking around under my router found two (different) P95 masks (like N95, but oil-resistant) under the table that I’d forgotten about.
I’m not sure what the lesson is here, beyond that you shouldn’t forget where you placed stuff, and that having personal protective equipment available is generally a good thing. Anyway, stay safe out there!