Author Archives: ForToffee

ToffeeBot

OK, so not quite the Sheldon Virtual Presence Device from Big Bang Theory but who knows…. maybe my next version?

I have had various bits of robots floating around for a while now and never actually pulled them all together. I’ve made both a Scratch, and a PS3 controlled, Pibrella powered bot which I must blog about one of these days. I also built one from LEGO motors and a SN754410 H-bridge a year or two back, but the motors were old (20+ years) and it didn’t get far. Continue reading

A #CheerLights Virtual Christmas Tree

What is #CheerLights?

Cheerlights is a IoT based light control system, originally intended to allow social media to dictate the colour of festive lights around the world.


The current cheerlight status

How does it work?

Put the word Cheerlight and a colour in a tweet and you’ve just told light systems around the world the colour they should show.  On the website is a list of the currently supported colours.

On the back-end there is a feed aggregator which exposes a JSON, TXT or XML API. Continue reading

Word Clock with a Unicorn

A few days back I saw this article about a Word Clock that had been built using at ATmega328P and an 8×8 LED matrix. “Cool” I thought, I have bi-colour one of those in the “toy” box, I might have a go at that.

Around the same time, those pesky pirates Pimoroni were having their #yarrbooty twitter competition. I was fortunate enough to win a few rounds and decided to spend some of my booty on a Unicorn HAT and an A+. The Unicorn HAT is an 8×8 matrix of very bright RGB LEDs.

And low, the Unicorn Word Clock was born Continue reading

Inventing with the IoT – Extension Task

If you have not read Inventing with the IoT – Workshop go do so first, otherwise this will make less sense than usual!

As I said in my previous post, I never actually worked with the IoT code before the workshop, so I downloaded it and combined it with my PiDuino code from earlier this week.  As a result I have an Internet of Things NeoPixel ring.

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IoT NeoPixel ring being modelled by Babbage

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Inventing with the IoT – Workshop

CamJam has a lot to answer for; mainly the evaporation of my evenings this past week. During the jam I helped run the “Inventing with the Internet of Things” workshop, I had no idea what it was all about as it was a last minute thing but I know enough Python and the principles of networking to bumble along. The workshop was run by David Whale in conjunction with IoTic Labs

@whalegeek & @geeky_tim demonstrate the "Internet of Things"

@whalegeek & @geeky_tim demonstrate the “Internet of Things”

Continue reading