Ever want to see that last iPhone message without checking your phone. It is actually fairly easy to create a secondary message display using an Arduino, BLE, and an LCD display to conect to the Apple Notification Center Service on your iPhone.

Overview

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Update: I have updated instructions for installing and using the recently released Babel 6 with org mode. I use emacs org mode to keep notes including code nodes that support inline execution. It is convenient for keeping useful code snippets, as well as experimenting while taking notes. Because of features like Org + Deft it is really easy to find the sweet spot between keeping coding notes organized but also easily searched. [Read More]

I have started testing the ESP8266 as an inexpensive WiFi enabled IoT device platform. I will added specific how-to notes later but wanted to capture a few items from my initial experiments.

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One of the challenges I have had in handing out prototype devices is keeping the software up to date. Solutions like resin.io do a nice job of deploying bundler images onto devices like the Edison. The primary issue I had was the overhead of pushing bundler images around when the only thing that was changing was the node app. It seemed easier to just use git and npm to handle the updates. I may go the resin.io route later, but this early in dev and testing the git route seems simpler.

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I changed my desk out for a workbench and am very pleased with the results. I made the switch for two reasons:

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I am using an accelerometer in my most recent device to capture gesture and orientation information, as the device itself has no traditional user interface. Since the device is running a node.js app to capture data and push it to a cloud service the first prototype required a quick solution to getting data from an MPU.

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I have been building a few prototype devices with the following parts:

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I built a handful of prototype devices using Intel Edison boards to hand out to testers, but one challenge is each tester will bring the devices to their own Wi-Fi environment (home, work, etc).

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We are down to one car, as we can walk/bike to about anything we could possibly need including caltrain and light rail. So the garage is now empty of cars, and filled with toys. While playing ping pong one day I decided a beverage table would be nice in the garage, but something that could also serve as a work surface in a pinch. Something to put some tools on, etc. I wanted it to be something that could be folded out of the way when not needed, and something that didn't cost a lot since I wasn't sure if it would really prove useful. Sort of a prototype 1 of a collapsable work surface concept.

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