Category: Tech
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How Kerning Could Save Your Life
As someone who buys electronic goods from China on a regular basis, I am used to looking closely at the CE logo to check how close together the letters are. For my buying habits it doesn’t matter. I’m dealing with low-voltage stuff. The worst that could happen is a component might overheat and cause a […]
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Home Automation PoE with Arduino – in praise of DIY PoE!
Disclaimer First up I’d say in any professional environment there’s no way I’d recommend anything but “proper” PoE, that is to say 802.3af or PoE plus. For DIY home installations, however, we can do things differently. And I don’t mean “substandard” by any means. Rather we can do them in a more tightly-spec’d way, we can […]
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The spec for the ultimate home control panel
A number of months ago I became obsessed with the idea of controlling my room lighting using knobs in the wall. Crazy, I know 😉 Seriously though, most lighting automation systems do not use rotary controllers (i.e. knobs), but rather you have to keep your finger on a button until the desired light level is […]
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Arduino and code efficiency
The thing I love about programming for Arduino is that, unlike programming in most other environments nowadays, you are forced to think about memory footprint, memory allocation, and how your code relates to the hardware. That’s great for people like me who don’t really consider themselves coders at all, because “perfect code” is less about […]
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Arduino, MQTT, OpenHAB and the Ultimate Room Control Panel
Little demo video of the project so far below! My idea for a room control panel came about after seeing the vastly expensive options on the market, and because we are building a new home! I love the brushed stainless steel precision-cut panels they offer – so I plan to make my own. Not […]
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A world of home automation opening up
So I became pretty obsessed with home automation. You know, the type where your home detects you walked through the door, turns the lights on, and says through the speakers, “Hello Mat, did you have a nice day?” Actually the above, whilst it sounds a bit sci-fi, is something I already tested out in my […]
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Arduino – the beginnings of a journey
Warning: geek post to follow. Anyone who has been unlucky enough to know me over the last 3 weeks will realise my obsession with all things Arduino has got out of hand. From the initial buzz of realising “I can do ANYTHING with one of these things” to the late-night shopping sprees with Amazon sellers […]
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How To Touch Type (for beginners)
Today I came across my old website which is hosted on the University of Manchester Compsoc server. I had an account on this server since I studied Computer Science at Manchester which was in 1999 (before I gave it all up to read music instead). I can’t even log on to my account, but I’m […]
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How to configure your NTL 250 to work with wireless
If you are merely browsing this blog, don’t read the below. It’s dull as dogs. This is for incoming google searches. (Hint. If you actually want to configure wireless for your NTL 250 cable modem, skip to the far quicker and superior “Option B”.) This blog is for the benefit of anyone who might be going […]