Category Archives: Electronics

Tweet-A-Watt: Beyond the Twitter

As I’ve written before, I really like the idea behind Adafruit’s Tweet-A-Watt project, which uses a modified Kill-A-Watt box and an Xbee transmitter to create an inexpensive home energy monitor. I’ve been running one 24/7 for over a year, and … Continue reading

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Netduino: Ordering Off the Menu

The source code for this article can be downloaded here: LightControllerWithMenu.zip. This is the 5th in a series of projects for the Netduino and Seeed Studio’s Grove Starter Bundle. The first four articles in the series were: Netduino Enters the … Continue reading

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Netduino: Here Comes The Night

This is the 4th in a series of projects for the Netduino and Seeed Studio’s Grove Starter Bundle. The first three articles in the series were: Netduino Enters the Grove Netduino: Time and Weather Netduino: Let There Be Light As … Continue reading

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Netduino: Let There Be Light

This is the 3rd in a series of projects for the Netduino and Seeed Studio’s Grove Starter Bundle. This installment is intended to create a plant light that automatically switches on and off at a pre-set time of the day … Continue reading

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Netduino and Analog Input: Look Ma, No Breadboard!

If you carefully compare the photos in my first and second posts about the Netduino, you may have noticed a couple of things: Before – After – There is no longer a mass of wires on the breadboard connecting the … Continue reading

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Netduino: Time and Weather

Note: The source code for the project described in this post can be downloaded here. This post is a continuation of my “Netduino Enters the Grove” article.   Building on the project in that post, I’m going to make the … Continue reading

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Netduino Enters the Grove

Note: The source code for the temperature LCD program described in this article can be downloaded here. I recently received one of Seeed Studio’s new Grove Starter Bundles. Since many others will put GROVE through its paces using an Arduino … Continue reading

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Surviving the Twitter OAuthcalypse with Tweet-A-Watt

When Twitter recently made the OAuth API mandatory for 3rd party applications, the resulting OAuthcalypse silenced the tweets of a lot of code. Among those affected was Adafruit‘s innovative Tweet-A-Watt system, which interfaces with a low cost Kill-A-Watt monitor to … Continue reading

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Shed watts while you sleep

Continuing with my Kill-A-Watt experimentation, I decided to look at the power consumption of my PCs.  Specifically, I wanted to check a few things that I had assumed to be true, but never actually verified: Putting a computer in sleep … Continue reading

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kitsrus Introduction to LCDs – Part 2: Hello Internet

A little while ago I wrote about an electronics kit from kitusrus that interfaces an LCD to a PC through its parallel port. Like all kitsrus stuff it was fun to build, and the instructions included with the kit do … Continue reading

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