There is a significant amount of helpful information on the web to help you learn, buy hardware, and have fun in the home electronics/IoT/maker space. I've been playing around in this area in my spare time for a couple of years and have gone from not knowing much about hardware (I'm more of a software guy) to having several devices around the house that I rely on day to day. And my hobby drawer is stocked with new things I'll be experimenting with in the year future.
This blog is going to have the kind of articles I would have loved to read, descriptions of what I've built, explanations of what's worked and what hasn't worked for me, along with links to the online information I've found most useful.
By way of background - several years ago, my imagination was captured by the Raspberry Pi. I got it to boot and suddenly had a full Linux box at my disposal - a Linux box that cost $35 and wasn't a machine that I depended on for anything important. So I could experiment with it and if I hosed the operating system or even fried the hardware somehow, no big loss. After all, it was only $35.
I had vague goal to build a robot with it at some point, but I'm not a hardware guy. It wasn't clear to me how to go from running Linux on a credit card sized computer to having something that could move around the house. So the Pi sat in a box for about a year and gathered dust.
Eventually I ran across the Raspirobot Board. (I have version 2.0. Version 3 has been released). From a maker's perspective, the nice thing about that board is that they take care of the hardware for you. You plug it into the Pi and it exposes ports for switches, a range finder, motors, and includes a couple of LEDs. So after I got that, it was mostly a software activity and no longer a hardware problem. I was in business.
I've branched out from there. I'm playing around with cameras, microcontrollers (ESP8266 at the moment with more on the way), various kinds of sensors, AWS, Bluetooth off-the-shelf lights, Lua, Python, 3D printing, and various ways to make it all work together reliably. I now have a number of devices I've designed and built that I depend on daily. I also have a reasonably specific idea for another robot (more on that in a later post).
This blog is going to have the kind of articles I would have loved to read, descriptions of what I've built, explanations of what's worked and what hasn't worked for me, along with links to the online information I've found most useful.
By way of background - several years ago, my imagination was captured by the Raspberry Pi. I got it to boot and suddenly had a full Linux box at my disposal - a Linux box that cost $35 and wasn't a machine that I depended on for anything important. So I could experiment with it and if I hosed the operating system or even fried the hardware somehow, no big loss. After all, it was only $35.
I had vague goal to build a robot with it at some point, but I'm not a hardware guy. It wasn't clear to me how to go from running Linux on a credit card sized computer to having something that could move around the house. So the Pi sat in a box for about a year and gathered dust.
Eventually I ran across the Raspirobot Board. (I have version 2.0. Version 3 has been released). From a maker's perspective, the nice thing about that board is that they take care of the hardware for you. You plug it into the Pi and it exposes ports for switches, a range finder, motors, and includes a couple of LEDs. So after I got that, it was mostly a software activity and no longer a hardware problem. I was in business.
I've branched out from there. I'm playing around with cameras, microcontrollers (ESP8266 at the moment with more on the way), various kinds of sensors, AWS, Bluetooth off-the-shelf lights, Lua, Python, 3D printing, and various ways to make it all work together reliably. I now have a number of devices I've designed and built that I depend on daily. I also have a reasonably specific idea for another robot (more on that in a later post).
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