Smart systems, makers and technology
When ordering my Original Prusa MINI way back in April this year, midst the Corona crisis, I did not anticipate the 4 months of inpatient waiting time. Prusa Research stopped the shipping of 3D printers during the Corona crisis, to produce the urgently needed face shields for hospitals, which stands for Josef Prusa’s innovative personality. […]
Telegram is a great way to receive home assistant (HASS) smart home automation information directly pushed to your Android or iPhone. By creating your own Telegram bot you get a lot of flexibility on sending home automation messages or even images from your security cameras to your mobile phone. The first step of attaching a […]
As a dedicated Home Assistant user for years now, I came to write an ebook covering all the important topics around home automation and tinkering your own Esp32 based sensors and actuators. Home Assistant is Open Source, written in Python and a lively community maintains over 3000 custom made components that allow you to control […]
Over the last months, I became more and more addicted to Home Assistant (Hass.io) and MQTT low cost wireless sensors. I was already familiar with several home and industrial automation systems that all come with a certain hardware (and price) and build upon a completely proprietary software stack. So long story short, I was searching […]
On my last trip to San Francisco this year I visited the California Academy of Sciences where i was immediately fascinated by a tiny robot called Ozobot. Ozobot looks amazingly cute and is able to perform a lot of magic that ultimately teaches your kids how to program by using a visual programming language thats similar […]
MobileVNC offers a tiny footprint VNC server software solution for the different Siemens Simatic HMI touch panels. No matter if you operate a large fleet of Simatic HMI KTP400 Comfort Touch Panels that run on a ARM CPU processor or a Simatic HMI TP700 on x86 (486) Intel CPU, MobileVNC will offer good native performance. Since its […]
Save the date for the European Maker Faire that takes place from 3 to 6 October in ROME, Italy! Massimo Banzi, one of the inventors of Arduino, is promoting and hosting this cool Make Event in October. It will be the perfect event for meeting the community of DIY activists and Makers all over Europe. […]
e-ink display in rough outdoor usage scenario, image source: http://www.eink.com Since the first commercial appearance of e-Ink Displays around the year 2008, a large collection of cheap e-book readers, such as the Sony PRS505 or Amazon’s Kindle, were successfully introduced on the consumer market. As the e-Ink technology became mature in this field of application, […]
Google’s Project Glass, the implementation of an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD), has gained a lot of publicity over the last months. Recently, Google published some additional promotion videos that should demonstrate the benefit of these head-mounted transparent see through displays. Project Glass introduces the recording of personal activities in first person perspective, comarable with […]
This Arduino controlled Chess board set tangibly connects two players with each other from anywhere in the world. To combine physical interfaces to intuitively control virtual environments gives users the possibility to control all kinds of digital technology without much background knowledge. The combination of tangible artefacts with digital content is called ‘Tangible User Interfaces’. […]