I while back I played with setting up an android dev environment. It was annoying. I ended up throwing my hands up in the air and forgot the whole thing. Now I’ve got a project that needs android, and I’ve had some requests for certain android apps. So, I’ve acquired a Nexus 7 for dev [...]
I’ve been building/making/hacking hardware projects for a long time. As I’ve done that, I’ve really benefited from online shopping for parts you just can’t find locally. Also, it’s hard for the guy at the store to wonder what the hell you’re doing with that thing that he can’t find in his catalog. So, last year [...]
I updated my thermostat to one of these. It’s made by Homewerks (Home depot sells a filtrete branded version.) It’s not as cool as the NEST, but it’ll do the job of controlling a furnace/AC. The interesting part of this device is that the wifi interface can be cloud managed, making it possible to control [...]
Recently I started working on an electric bicycle. Financially they’re quite viable and the performance you can get out of today’s batteries is finally worth the effort! In my research, I ran across a build log by a interesting fellow named greyborg. He makes custom bikes (in Croatia I believe) and has done some steller [...]
Ok, so it’s been a week since I installed the SMS interface. I took the car out to Winter Park for a week of sliding down the mountain and gave the system a real world test. (Tried it from my hotel room while the car was outside) and it worked! I just gave it another [...]
I whipped up a clean schematic for my current version of the SMS responder. I left out the iphone dock connector because I used a breakout board – and really, it’s easier that way, you can cable over to the iphone. Click to view the entire schematic – my blog trims the images (I don’t [...]
A quick update on the SMS remote start using my old iPhone… It works! I can now start my Subaru outback via SMS command from wherever I am. I used an older Arduino simply because I wanted a quick and dirty 3.3v source for the iphone to arduino serial interface. The perfboard has a tip120 [...]
I’ve built a perl script to enable SMS remote start of my car. The script checks the SMS database for new messages and if the message meets the criteria, it will send a command out the serial port, log the event and send a reply sms for confirmation. Everything is done in perl! My script [...]
I’m working on a new car controller. It’s based on aftermarket remote start, a jailbroken iphone and some open source hardware. This post covers setting up the iPhone for that use. It’s really just a nice, cheap (if you have it) script-able serial telemetry platform. iPhone jailbreak notes: I used an iPhone 3g, downloaded 4.2.1 [...]
Quite a while ago, I spent quite a bit of time messing around with car pc’s. I was never truly happy with what I had. However, on my new car, I’m adding a pair of roof mounted LCDs and an iphone/ipad video cable. NO MORE DVDs in the car! Since storage space is fairly limited [...]