Recap: "Forever Sensor" at the RI Mini Maker Faire

On Saturday, Rith and I loaded up the car, and took the 30 minute ride down to Providence, RI for the 4th Rhode Island Mini Maker Faire!
During the faire, I had chance to explain the concept of the mystery box, and the rooster call it kept making.  The younger and artistic audience really like the concept of a digital rooster, and the engineers truly appreciated the technical hurdles or the DIY perpetually-powered wireless environmental study project.
At first, the customized Android Tablet, 2 deep cycle marine batteries, the Arduino, the light sensor, the temperature/ humidity sensor, the solar panels and Pelican...

How to build a DIY perpetually-powered wireless outpost

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=_ZY_d-CL0t0

Earlier this week, I had a mystery box of electronics and was looking for something to do with it. Thanks to Bryan from New Zealand, who asked about creating a wireless farm monitoring outpost…

The idea of a perpetual power supply comes up now and again, mostly in the context of a remote outpost. Naturally, the idea of creating mesh networks in the wild and digital dead drops appeal to my inner Bourne, but that’s a story for a different day.

This project is really broken out into two parts: the perpetual powering, and then doing something useful with...

Powering my Raspberry Pi with the BeagleJuice, 2nd Gen Battery

My Raspberry Pi finally showed up today! Naturally, an unboxing event was in order…

I haven’t gotten around to setting up my SD card yet, but I just wanted to see if it would power on with the BeagleJuice sitting on my desk. In theory, it should work, since the BeagleJuice outputs 5V from each of the 2-pin molex connectors.

I took the micro USB cable that I spliced last week and plugged it into the Raspberry Pi…

…then I connected the other end to the BeagleJuice.

And voila! The Raspberry Pi powers on, as indicated...

What project should I do today?

Chris and I were kicking around a few ideas on excuses to get out of the office and work on some interesting projects while we’re at it. I’ve personally gotten quite a few emails for some cool projects, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone.

As a huge fan of The Ben Heck Show, as well as Ladyada’s Ask an Engineer, I thought some kind of interactive weekly Youtube show might be a fun experiment that could also get some local Boston makers involved as well. It also solves the $1,000,000,000 question (that I wake up to...

How to build a high-tech prototype faster than it takes to build a 30-story hotel

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY

I stumbled across a video recently that I thought was pretty amazing. It’s a time-lapse video of a 30-story hotel that was built in 15 days.

Mind you, this wasn’t a shoddy structure. It’s designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake, along cutting-edge energy efficiency features. How’d they do it? (The longer story from Businessweek is here)

We make 93 percent of the building in our factory. The basic block, a “main board,” is 3.9 meters by 15.6 meters (12.8 feet by 51.2 feet) and includes everything from water pipes and ventilation shafts down to floor tiles,...

3 Useful Things to Know about the BeagleJuice, 2nd Gen

I got a few very good questions about the BeagleJuice, 2nd Gen from earlier this week, so I thought I’d answer them in post form.

What are the specs on the I2C pins on the BeagleJuice?

The I2C pins (GND, Vext, SDA, and SCL) are exposed for custom headers or wiring. After bugging Chris several times, he decided to just draw me a schematic instead. The range of operation is 1.8V to 3.3V. Currently, there are drivers coded for Android/Linux and OMAP, but it could be hacked to anything that talks I2C.

What else can I power with the...

Introducing the BeagleJuice, 2nd Generation: Laptop-Grade Power Management for the BeagleBoard

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=aobklEGVFwM

Last week, I took a trip through some of the battery boards and power management systems we created for the Arduino, BeagleBoard and Amber. The development of the 2nd generation BeagleJuice was inspired mostly by requests for a “standalone Amber backpack”.
Sort of…I took a little artistic license with the picture above! The Liquidware Amber power supply and BeagleJuice, 2nd Gen were both built with advanced power management principles in mind.
(Edit: I got a few questions about this - the BeagleJuice, 2nd Gen comes with the standard 5V barrel jack cable to charge any 5V device that fits the jack, like...

3 Portable Power Management Systems For Development and Prototyping

This post came about when we  asked Keith about the difference between the battery setups we had, and whether it was possible to pull the Amber battery pack off, and use it for other things. [Cue flashback music…]
Lithium Backpack for Arduino
About 4 years ago, we started with the basics of power management: the Lithium Backpack. For that, it was mostly around form factor and simplicity, which was great since the Arduino has both analog and digital capabilities. If it let me take my Arduino project around, I was happy. A single-cell system, it had 4 pins - +5V, +3v3, GND, and Status....

5 Reasons to Use a Custom Android Tablet

There’s two sides to every coin. In the last post, I talked about instances where I usually recommend that people use an off-the-shelf tablet or smartphone device for their custom applications. The primary principle being keeping things simple, I recommend developing portable apps wherever possible, and avoiding potentially time and cost intensive hardware turns and development. But sometimes a custom (Android) tablet is required, and it’s worth knowing when to recognize these instances, and follow the path of least resistance.

It’s why the Liquidware Amber exists. We designed it for internal use, and use in engineering projects. It saved...

5 Reasons to Customize an iPad (or Samsung Galaxy, or any off-the-shelf Android tablet)

Since the Liquidware Amber officially launched back in May, I’ve gotten a few more questions about tablets, that usually go along the lines of:

“I’m building a special application for [my company]…can I just use an iPad/Galaxy/off-the-shelf tablet? Or should I use the Amber?”

As much as I could be self-serving in answering that question (mwahahaha!), the real answer is that it depends. The more targeted question to ask is:

“If I just build an Android or iOS app, without hardware accessories, does it get the job done?”

There’s a bit of a gray area, and a lot of instances...