Sometimes you have to hit reset
We’ve prototyped the circuit, built the software, and flashed the microcontroller. Everything should be working correctly, but it just looks like a pile-of-parts and wires. Now we need to make this more permanent and finished.
For a refresher, please see Part One of this series. Continue reading “Garage Parking Assist – Part Two”
Ever since I outfitted my truck for the Zombie Apocalypse, parking it in my garage is something of a pain. The front and rear bumpers have lengthened the wheelbase so I only have a few inches of margin – if I drive in too far I’ll hit the front wall, and if I don’t drive in far enough the garage door will hit the spare tire and refuse to close.
For years I put up with this until the hassle overcame my laziness factor. I could have hung a tennis ball from the ceiling, but I’ve got a pretty cool garage “man cave” and a dangling tennis ball isn’t cool. Plus, I’ve got some geek cred I need to maintain, I can build it myself, and more importantly maybe this can teach/inspire someone else along the way.
I’ve organized this into a two part series. Part one will give you some background info, instructions on bread-boarding (prototyping) the circuit, and getting the software flashed to the circuit. Additionally, I’ll point out some of the more important details in the software and give reasons why this was done.
While you might see some of the electronic equipment on my bench, don’t let that stop you. All you need is a multimeter, and you don’t really need that unless stuff goes whacko. Start with a simple breadboard and hookup wire. If you decide to make this more permanent, I’ve included links to “perma-proto” boards. These look just like the breadboard you are using, but you can solder stuff to them. Continue reading “Garage Parking Assist – Part One”
A peep I used to work with that is wicked smart asked for tips/pointers on product management. I decided to put my thoughts up here as this might help more than my peep.
I’ve worked in a bunch of shops, and these are two tips that can become a big differentiator for you… Continue reading “Product Management: 2 Tips to Differentiate Yourself”
The openspot by SharkRF is a digital radio gateway that allows you to use your d-star, dmr, or c4fm radio worldwide. What I liked about it the most is it is simple – plug it in, do some simple configuration via your browser, and you can start talking around the world on a little portable handheld radio. Afterward the success of that excitement, I decided to tear it down to see what it was using under the hood.
For a refresher, I decided to host my own WordPress blog on the AWS cloud. This gives me an opportunity to get “hands-on” with various technologies and tools. I was interested in running containers at cloud scale to see if this simplifies stuff. Please check out Cloudy with a Chance of Containers for an architecture diagram and the decisions that drove the design.
While this should have been relatively straight forward, AWS usually has little gotchas where you think you need to make a change “here,” but you really need to change something “waaaaaay” over there. I’ve documented the various gotcha’s and solutions so hopefully you don’t have to feel the same pain. Continue reading “AWS Gotcha’s – WordPress in Elastic Container Service”
I was chatting with someone the other day about stuff- let’s call him Dude. Dude was talking about how one group of peeps thought Dude was just awesome, but another group of peeps thought Dude wasn’t so awesome. Dude understood he had a perception problem, and wanted to address it. So I told Dude my story about art. Continue reading “Be True to Your Art”
I write a lot to help organize my thoughts. But most of my notes are either in a journal – there’s still something special about using a pen and paper, or in Word docs. This creates a couple of problems – it’s hard to search, and I’m the only one to benefit from this effort. Blogging is my way of sharing some of my ideas/thoughts that might help others, and to also make it searchable for my own needs.
Since this blog isn’t intended to be a revenue stream, I am not going to worry about site-optimization, pushing traffic, and all the other internet/ecommerce type stuff. My goal is to keep things simple and the costs manageable. The quick/easy would be to spin up a virtual machine, load it with a LAMP stack, install WordPress, and be done. That’s what the super-basic WP hosts offer. But then I was thinking what if something I write somehow really hits a cord with peeps? This solution would crumble with traffic, plus it would be fragile. Time to distribute it.
I’ve wanted to host a blog for a bit now, and was leaning towards using a WordPress host. I’ll pay them a little fee, my small little blog gets on the ‘ole Interwebs, the hosting company gets the headache and I get to focus on writing about stuff.
However, with the easy access to cloud technologies and architectures, this would be a lost opportunity. I’ve had to build and run an ecommerce platform before and it’s work. Even if you automate a lot of stuff, you still have the operational issues such as having to work thru a bad patch, preventing malicious traffic, scaling traffic, browser differences, etc.
I don’t want that level of a headache, but I figure I can create a site that can be highly scalable, fully automated, but at a basic wordpress hosting price point. I’ll write up the details and gotcha’s in a future post.