So, as you might know I bought heavily into the OnePlus 1 when it first came out. It was a great phone.
That being said, every phone since then has been… lacking, in my view.
A few days ago, OnePlus announced the OnePlus 5. In my view, the OnePlus 5 is close, but not close enough.
In the ongoing saga of getting our remote door buzzer system done, we have reached a major milestone: I’ve put the components on a prototype stackable board (as opposed to the quick prototype side board). This meant a lot of soldering and a lot of wiring to figure out. It was a very strange process, but Dan gave me a hand to me and we figured it out slowly but surely.
So, we’ve now got a working prototype built. It does the following bits:
Bits still pending:
After doing some research on how to best accomplish a bunch of these tasks I stumbled upon an awesome library that is taking care of a lot of the heavy lifting for me: Blynk.
So, first of all let me state for the record I had 3 Grande House Margaritas this evening, one of which was a Coronarita, and I may be a little incoherent at this point.
Down to business: we have a working prototype alpha of the Remote Building Entry Unlocker. It doesn’t do anything fancy. If you push the button at the door, it rings the buzzer, lights up the unit, and then unlocks the door. Woo!
It is a little more complex than one would expect, since the Arduino can’t sense above 5v, and the door panel is 12v. Also the Arduino native ports can’t really trigger a relay coil off anything not the 5v rail (though I suppose I could have just used a pin as ground with a toggle on that, but it’s neither here nor there).
Here’s the build and code.
Sooooooo last night my roommate and I started talking about ways to make entry/exit of the apartment easier, and I brought up Smart Door Locks. This naturally led us to a discussion of how we could get someone into the actual building so we could then let them use the Smart Door Lock to get into our specific apartment.
He mentioned it would be cool to have some sort of remote control for the buzzer/intercom system and I said it’s so funny you say that because I’ve been thinking about that too. I said, it’s probably a simple wire jumper that triggers it.
Well, I was right. And now I have a new project to work on. 🙂 This will be an on-going series, because I think this is fscking awesome.
Pic not relevant to the discussion, admittedly. >_>
So, I’m a bit behind on posts this month because of dealing with landlord and contract negotiations, as well as studying for my boat safety certificate exam. Sorry about that!
Today we bring the question about apache and auth: why is it peculiar?
So, today at work I was working on a mileage tracking webform (more on that another day). I took a brief break to clear my head, and stumbled across a very interesting tweet.
I, of course, did not bookmark it at the time because I thought it was a trivial question and a trivial answer.
In which Mike tries to figure out a solution to a problem and ends up making it much, much worse.
All because I didn’t follow best practices.
Because I’m a dolt.
A fast learning dolt, but a dolt nonetheless.
Hey, but this time it isn’t a rant!
That’s because I’ve gotten somewhere!
Where we left off last time, I was having problems with the damn thing failing after the last SysPrep phase, after customizing the image.
We learned something and we have a solution and a working dealie!
Without further delay, here’s what I did.
So, at work we have to track our trips to various sites via a mileage tracker Excel sheet. It’s all very 1990’s and kind of silly to me. The thought was: what if I could build a website that could do it for us.
Well, I’ve started figuring it out conceptually and now I’m sort of stuck. I find when I’m stuck it’s best to write things out and figure out where I’m getting tripped up. That’s where you come in, blog-o-sphere (can we still use that word? Is it ok? Hip? And what not? IDGAF). Help me out.