#hackspace meetup success! Several people came to our monthly meetup on 2/24, our first meetup with a hardware project. This guide was used to complete the firmware flashing and assembly/soldering. Please note it’s a work-in-progress for a future formal workshop and edits/improvements are being made regularly. Some people had never…
Continue ReadingAuthor: mv
Events have started!
#hackspace sessions (in person!) are underway. See our events page for details and RSVP http://hackspace.io/events check twitter as well for news and nerd posts
Continue ReadingSmart Bulb? Smart Switch? Smart….Lamp?
Smart bulbs are great. Change colors, change brightness, turn on/off from phone. But then it happens. Someone turns the switch off and the smart bulb is unavailable. Dang. I fundamentally believe that automation/smart-home stuff shouldn’t impact usability — if there’s a switch, it should work as it is intended to. …
Continue ReadingNo toy ever really dies…
My daughter has a much-loved teddy bear with a voicebox inside that says a prayer when it’s squeezed….at least…it did until one day it stopped working. In our house, it’s the general expectation that everything can be fixed. My daughter told me the bear wasn’t working, and expected me to…
Continue Readingsmart home contest winners!
Our upcoming @_kernelcon_ workshop (more info here) is all about locally controlled smart-home stuff (#nocloud). The plan all along was to use @home_assistant and @snips to have our newly modified smart plugs be 100% controlled, and voice enabled, without using any cloud services. I was going to pull my snips…
Continue ReadingKids + snowday = #hackery
It snowed this past weekend. a lot. #snowday today. Thanks to @snapcircuits, my son (4 yrs) and daughter (5yrs) decided they would work on launching some indoor projectiles. After a discussion around batteries (more = better) the kiddos decided we needed to try to hit the ceiling fan. What followed…
Continue ReadingNerd Christmas!
Boxes of supplies for Kernelcon arrived yesterday
Continue ReadingPreparing for #kernelcon
We’re leading a workshop in the hardware hacking village at kernelcon later this spring – https://kernelcon.org/con Supplies arrived today! So many boxes…what could they be? OH! Smartplugs that connect to an unsecured public server — yay :-\ We’ll be leading a session on disassembling these things, soldering up an interface…
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