This past year, I found myself helping to organize a Survivor weekend, with some pretty tricky advanced robotic needs. I was pretty sure it could all be done, but had a fun technology journey to get there. This is a hard project to capture with a "do it yourself" style...
After upgrading my Smart Mirror from a reflective film mirror to a glass two way mirror, I thought it would be interesting to attempt a (semi) scientific comparison between the two types of mirror. This test involves taking a bunch of pictures and rating the mirrors on a few categories....
Halloween is one of my favourite holidays of the year. One reason for this is that it's totally optional and low stress. People can get exactly as in to it as they want. I'm also really intrigued by the perseverance of belief that there are supernatural forces at work. No...
This post starts with two facts: 1\. I have a penchant for killing plants. 2\. People in Holland grow things really well indoors. After reading about how well things can grow indoors, I started thinking that maybe automation was my path to healthy plants. So I decided to build the...
This post is a about vision enhancement platform called The All-Seeing Pi that I have been working on with my friend Dan, who is blind. People who are blind rarely have no vision at all though, and in Dan's case, he still has a little bit of sight in one...
In a previous post, I showed how you can build a smart mirror with an Alexa voice assistant on board. The MagicMirror software and Alexa voice assistant were both hosted on a Raspberry Pi, but unfortunately there was no obvious way to get Alexa to control the smart mirror, or...
Materials 1. Computer Monitor. Buy used and look for cable inputs that point down or sideways instead of straight out. 22" recommended (I used Acer AL2216 ) 2. Video cable. Whatever fits your monitor (I used HDMI to DVI adapter) 3. Raspberry Pi 3, 16GB Micro SD Card, 5V Micro...
I want to document this project, as it is one of my favourite projects to date. This took place about 4 years ago while I was working at the Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC). One of ICHEC's projects at the time was creating demonstration for the BT Young...
My trusty RPi3 twitter bot server "starkiller". So let's say you've got a twitter bot that you want running 24/7, but you don't want it running on your personal system. What you need here is a server, which is really just a dedicated system. Note, if you're looking for a...
Amazon did something really cool. They made their Alexa voice assistant code open source and cross platform. That means instead of buying their Amazon Echo to get a home assistant, you can simply install it on any system you want. It's actually a fairly straightforward project, especially if you've setup...