Last year I had the chance to travel to the wonderful island of Cuba with my friend Laura Berger for three weeks. Not having posted any of the pictures taken there I figured this post was long overdue. If you ever would want Cuba now might be the time as recent news is indicating that …
Brightness, Analog > Digital
One of the annoyances with my led clock has been that it is too bright during the evening. But, that can be easily solved by adding some kind of brightness control… This is the tale of that feature. So, brightness control. There’s an awesome digital light sensor that can give you resolutions up to 16 bits …
Podcast Tip: Radiolab
A friend of mine, Vincent Kriek, pointed me to this excellent podcast and after listening to a couple of episodes I’m hooked. Spending a lot of time in the car travelling back and forth between ‘s-Hertogenbosch and Den Haag it certainly entertains and educates. The podcast’s name: Radiolab. Before this, I used to listen to …
Led Clock Saga (Part 2)
After writing my first post on the clock many people remarked that it all sounded and looked nice, but there was no actual picture or movie showing the actual clock mode. So, without further ado, here it is in all it’s glory! The colors are fully customizable but in my setup blue is the seconds, green …
Led Clock Saga
Having moved into my apartment a while back one thing remained missing for a long time; a clock. It sounds simple but I wanted a rather large and eye-catching clock. Those turned out not to be cheap nor very innovative. This is the story of the quest for changing that, by making my own clock …
Blijdorp
Last weekend I visited Diergaarde Blijdorp, a zoo in Rotterdam. It had new baby polar bears which just got outside and also features a very nice aquarium called the Oceanium. The weather featured a very pleasant spring like sun and many animals were enjoying it as well. Unfortunately since it was cold some animals still …
ESP8266 under Windows
I recently got a Windows 8 tablet and sitting on the couch yesterday I realized it might be a good idea to install the Windows toolchain for making ESP8266 programs on it, along with Eclipse. Here’s the story on how to do it! The instructions are largely based on this Russian blogpost by Mikhail Grigoriev. A video …
Elasticsearch & Kibana on Ubuntu
For one of my personal projects I’ve been looking at Elasticsearch and Kibana for indexing and visualizing data generated by a wireless sensor node network, without restricting myself in future expansion of possible data sources or types. Elasticsearch is a flexible and powerful open source, distributed, real-time search and analytics engine. It gives you the ability …
RGB LED Matrix galore!
I’ve been an avid China shopper for a while now as they make incredible things to play with at home, for prices that can’t possibly be beat by any western manufacturer. There is the issue of quality assurance of course, but in recent times this has dramatically improved (or at least that is my impression). …
Installing the ESP8266 toolchain
Okay, some pretext on what system I’m currently using and on which these steps are based on. I’m running Xubuntu 14.04 64bit, the steps for 32bit or the normal Ubuntu may be a little different. There are plenty of guides out there that can assist with getting the toolchain up and running on those configurations. …