I was looking for a remotely controlled power strip. Actually, I was originally thinking about wired/Ethernet connected ones as I had seen in some data center setups. But eventually, I found those very cheap WiFi-controlled strips at Amazon (Cheap is always relative and try to compare those to their wired counterparts). But those WiFi-connected strips… Read More »
For the January 2017 meeting of the Home Brew Robotics Club (HBRC), I did a little presentation about my robots for the RoboMagellan events @ RoboGames. I did compete in that event for the last two years, and I’m working on my robot for the 2017 competition coming up in Pleasanton, CA on Apr 21-23,… Read More »
I know about the different FIRST competitions for quite some time. I even asked our kids about it a couple of times while they were still in school. But I guess, I was not enthusiastic or aggressive enough to get a team started:-( Since I joined the Home Brew Robotics Club mailing list, I saw… Read More »
I did not know how wide this would be publicized but since I made it into the official Oracle blog, I guess it’s OK;-) Yes, Oracle had a company based Mini Maker Faire;-) All the people I saw, had a blast. But unfortunately, I did not have time to take any photos. I was busy… Read More »
Our kids are off to college now but I could not stay away from the Science Olympiad fun. So I plan to play the Event Manager for the “Division C – Electric Vehicle” @ the San Joaquin County Event. That will be my first time to run an event, so it will be quite interesting.… Read More »
I found those nice little lighted costume horns @ the Adafruit tutorials. So I had to try to build my own pair;-) They were 3d-printed out of a nicely flexible filament called NinjaFlex. Playing with that opens a whole new area of potential uses. But first, the printer has to be able to handle it.… Read More »
OK, this took quite some time but some info to our entry for the RobotArm event for the Science Olympiad Division C. This robot is probably overkill for the event, but maybe other teams can find some interesting tidbits for the next iterations of the event. After our first attempt with the team of our… Read More »
Over the last couple of days we saw a big increase in SPAM bugs and SPAM comments in a Bugzilla installation. After the initial rush to stop that influx and clean up the mess, I took some time to look around and try to find some help to fight that issue at the source. Basically… Read More »
Our swim season is almost over, so here another post about my CTS console experiments. I tried to do two things for the scoreboard connection: Create a wireless link to the scoreboard. Understand the protocol enough to build my own example scoreboard. So far, I was only partially successful. I know the link is running… Read More »
Today’s post is going into a somewhat different direction. I was a tech-dad for our summer swim team, the Tracy Tritons, for maybe ten years now. My first extension was a little Ruby on Rails application to publish the meet information quickly to all the parents on a local WiFi network and on the internet.… Read More »