Part of my project involves having a doorbell, I figured a simple doorbell whereby a visitor just presses a button and then it rings/ notify whoever is it the house, That's not really creative in my point of view. So I then decided why not have a doorbell that not only rings when the button is pressed but also tell you someone is at the door and then sends you... [Read More]

I have considered to use a combination of an Arduino Uno and RPi for my Home Automation Project. After vigorous research(Googling of cause) on how I am to interface the two, I came to a conclusion that using I2C was the best option as compared to using UART(which required Logic Level Switching as the RPi runs on 3V3 and Arduino on 5V), or as compared to USB communication. The idea... [Read More]

Phase 3: Quad Relays controlled via/on webserver [sourcecode language="c"] /* 4 parallel Relayes and Arduino with Ethernet Shield */ #include <SPI.h> #include <Ethernet.h> int led = 2, led2 = 3, led3 = 5, led4 = 6; byte mac[] = { 0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF, 0xFE, 0xED }; //physical mac address byte ip[] = { 172, 18, 30, 197 }; // ip in lan (that's what you need to use in... [Read More]

Phase 2: Temperature monitoring logged on webserver. [sourcecode language="c"] /* Web Server A simple web server that shows the temperature using an Arduino Wiznet Ethernet shield. Parts list: 10k Thermistor Breadboard/Veroboard 10k resistor Arduino ( I use UNO) Arduino Wiznet Ethernet shield The Thermistor Circuit: AREF---+3.3V----Therm----A0(Arduino)----10k res---> Gnd Better Readings: When doing analog readings, especially with a 'noisy' board like the arduino, we suggest two tricks to improve results. One... [Read More]

Phase 1:I have been procrastinating on creating a home automation system until I decided to dedicate a few of my hours to this project. I have decided to use an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi combination. The idea is to have the Arduino running all ADC calculations and sensors as the Pi is not equipped with an ADC, and use the Pi as logger and dashboard using apache2/graphite or something... [Read More]

Very good read

I have been spending quite some time learning python for the past few months from text processing to game development using simplegui. And I must say for a person that always thought in C, I find Python completely straight forward and an easy but high level language. As my journey to Python continues, This weeks project was a memory game. Although it does have a couple of bugs in it,... [Read More]

When it comes to serving media content within your local network, a NFS share is way better than Samba/CIFS share in terms of speed and resource usage. If you have a XBMC box to watch TV shows and movies from a central server then a Network File System (NFS) share should be the choice for a media source. It only takes a few minutes to install and configure NFS server... [Read More]

I create scripts on a day to day basis, and I eventually got bored of manually creating scripts from initial phase everytime, hence this master of scripts. [sourcecode language="bash" wraplines="false" collapse="false"] #!/bin/bash # BASH script to generate BASH scripts # Created by Mpho Mphego echo "What do you want to call your BASH script?" read RESPONSE echo "#!/bin/bash" | tee ~/tmp/$RESPONSE.sh echo "# Filename:$RESPONSE.sh" | tee -a ~/tmp/$RESPONSE.sh echo "#... [Read More]

That feeling when, your program compiles and runs like it should... So last week, was a pong game challenge, need I say more. Here goes nothing. [sourcecode language="python" wraplines="false" collapse="false"] #http://www.codeskulptor.org/#user38_5WtyGnsPgb_0.py # Implementation of classic arcade game Pong try: import simplegui except: import SimpleGUICS2Pygame.simpleguics2pygame as simplegui # To run simplegui in idle python, install SimpleGUICS2Pygame module # download module : https://pypi.python.org/pypi/SimpleGUICS2Pygame import random # initialize globals - pos and vel... [Read More]