01/21/14

working with GPS and GSM on Arduino–Part 1 of 2 (SIM908)

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Part 1:  Getting the GSM working

One of the projects I’m undertaking is a remote GPS tracker for my vehicle.

True, you can purchase these in the 30 dollar range from Deal Extreme if you search vehicle trackers.  However, I did see questions regarding temperature and stability.  And one of the worries for me is the websites used for tracking are individually controlled by small companies in China (which could go out of business at any moment).

With that said, GPS and GSM combo units from popular sites such as SparkFun, AdaFruit or CanadianRobotics are likely to run in the 100$ area.  An alternative, is to use a unit such as a SIM908 module at ElectroDragon for 42$, which is a little more affordable and matches my cheap “I’m just learning, I’m going to break it, I don’t want to spend a lot on it” period in my arduino timeline.

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01/12/14

Building an Arduino Temperature Sensor with an LCD Display

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As part of my learning curve for open source hardware, and basic electronics.  This project wont take you very long, maybe an hour at most.

What this does is pretty straight forward, it shows the temperature in real time for both Celsius and Fahrenheit.  I’ve added some code to the Nokia, which uses the analogWrite trick (that is, use one of the digital outputs that has a tilde in front of it ( ~ ).  This will let you send a modulating frequency, which means you can make the LED (backlight in this case) brighter and dimmer.  The brightness of this display is controlled using the trimpot (potentiometer).

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01/12/14

Secure AntiVirus Pro 2.0.0.21

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Secure AntiVirus 2.0.0.xx has been submitted to AppWorld

I spent many hours recoding this to improve speed and reliability.  The biggest improvement is the ‘smartscan’ function, which allows the AV to ‘remember’ what files it scanned before!

Whats next?

Now that the release seems stable, the next big update will be a move from AS3 to Cascades.  During this move, I will be adding headless app support – keeping in mind it is going to take a while to finish the re-coding.  Just know, that I have been working on this app (its the hardest app in my portfolio to maintain).

Once we move to Cascades, the AIR code will be going to github as open source for future developers to learn :)
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01/7/14

Meggy Jr RGB

Recently, a friend introduced me to Arduino.  Rather, he’s been trying to introduce me for a while and I’ve just been too darned busy to play with it.

So, I took on some projects and spent some energy on it this last month.

First up, Meggy Jr from evil mad scientist.

Not really an arduino, it was a great way to warm back up to soldering and electronics.  The entire kit took about two hours to assemble, and requires some hand tools as outlined in the manual.  I went ahead and picked up a tool kit from SparkFun as my old soldering iron has seen better days – which is another interesting (albiet expensive) electronics company I have purchased from in the past.

At the same time, I also purchased an Arduino Esplora + TFT from CanadaRobotix – but more on that later.

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11/6/13

Website Outage / Website Revamped

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I have to apologize to everyone.  I am not used to having visitors and updates running from my website…

So today, when a dear friend complained about access latency problems on FileArchiveHaven – I decided to do the brash thing and upgrade the server.

Of course the transparent upgrade ended up taking longer than I meant…

However NOW we are on much better hardware :). I doubled the ram, capacity, CPU, and bandwidth.  So if you experienced a hiccup, I sincerely apologize.  But the change was worth it :) (993)

10/23/13

Gamepad Support, and Inflight Projects

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Anxiously wondering what I’ve been up to lately?

I’ve submitted a few sample projects to BlackBerry for BB10 (of course) which utilize both a custom on-screen touch engine (cool) and gamepad support (even cooler).

This includes a 360 snake game, a tank game, and a sting ray game.  Right now they are in beta testing phase, but slowly getting some traction.

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09/14/13

Privacy Policy

BlackBerry needs me to post a privacy policy, which isn’t a bad idea. My privacy policy is extremely simple and covers things no one else will provide you.

1. No information you provide to any of my apps is stored anywhere but on your device

2. In the rare event we store data in the future it will only be to sync your settings between devices and to allow you to recover passwords

3. If your information is ever found to be compromised – I will notify you and post on this website within 12 hours (its a disclaimer in case I’m sleeping)

4. All your information will be stored with the same due diligence I would use to store my own personal information (including my credit card)

5. At any time you can contact me via the link above in support and I will do my best to ensure to handle your request

6. We will not take any of your financial information. Nor will we ever ask for it. Google, BlackBerry and Apple collect this for us.

Cheers

Ed (537)

08/15/13

Secure AntiVirus Pro Submitted to BlackBerry

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Now first, I have to say, you do not need an Antivirus for your BlackBerry 10 phone.

Quite the opposite, your phone couldn’t be any safer.

But, some unnamed company has dominated the market by selling a crippled 10 dollar app.

What is a boy to do?

Well, first, there actually is a good reason to have an Antivirus on your phone…

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