brainwagon

Yes, my fascination with cheap computing devices continues. I’ve got two bits on order at the moment. First is the Pine A64 from Kickstarter. This one won’t be showing up for a while, but seems to be a pretty nice piece of kit. You can think of it as a competitor for the Raspberry Pi, […]

My weekend experiments lead me eventually toward flashing nodemcu, a Lua based firmware that runs on the ESP8266. Having a simple programming language (albeit one I’m not super fluent in) is very cool, and enables a whole bunch of nifty experiments. While reading up, I encountered the acronym MQTT again. From Wikipedia: MQTT (formerly Message […]

In the telescope making world, we call the first time that a telescope is used to look at the sky “first light”. I’ve decided to call the first time I load some code onto a new development board “first electrons”. A few weeks ago, when I did a video that illustrated some of the bucket […]

I’ve got a weak spot for cheap, programmable hardware. In my junk drawer I’ve got a collection of Arduinos, Parallax Propellor boards, a couple of STM32 based ARM boards, and several Beagle Bone Blacks and Raspberry Pis. Today, another entry arrived: the WRTnode. I’ve only had it out of the box for a few hours, […]

Last night, I met with Nanode creator Ken Boak and Chris Jefferies from tinajalabs.com at Cafe Actual in Berkeley for the inaugural IoTBayArea meetup. IoT groups are already going strong in many cities like London, Amsterdam, and NYC, but now that Ken is operating here in the SF Bay Area, he wanted to get a […]