TechnologyIQ

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed an administrative complaint with the federal government after a US citizen was detained at the border and forced to unlock his iPhone SE. Aaron Gach, an artist and activist who was holding an exhibition in Belgium, was subjected to interrogation by US Customs and Border Protection upon his reentry into the country at San Francisco International Airport in February. Gach was forced to unlock his phone, and in doing so the ACLU says CBP agents violated Gach’s constitutional rights, specifically his Fourth Amendment right protecting him from unlawful search and seizure. Read ACLU says demanding US citizens unlock phones at the border is unconstitutional via The Verge An interesting link found among my daily reading

Heat shrink tubing is such a small thing, but it can make your projects more robust as well as better organized. Learn about all its uses in this video. — Douglas Here’s this week’s Maker Update, featuring the best DIY projects of the week. (Show notes here.) As usual, I have a Cool Tool review included. This time, it’s heat shrink! Of all the things I have in my electronics toolbox, nothing gets my kid more excited than seeing me use heat shrink on a project. The stuff is like magic, plus there’s usually fire involved — so that’s a bonus for him. Read Maker Update #32: Heat Shrink Tubing via Cool Tools * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Another great tutorial on using Stepper motors in your Arduino projects. - Douglas Read Arduino Basics Intro to Stepper Motors #Arduino via Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! In this video we take a look at very low-priced, but still very popular stepper motor, the 28BYJ-48. This 5V stepper is very useful in low-torque and medium torque applications where precise positioning is required. We are using the ULN2003 driver IC to control the board along with the “Cheap Stepper” library. You can download Cheap Stepper here:https://github.com/tyhenry/CheapStepper. * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Interest in biohacking grows every day. What man/machine interface could you make with this component? Share your ideas! — Douglas The EMG detector is a bridge between your muscles and microcontrollers, the sensor gathers small muscle signals and then amplify and filters them to produce an output signal that can be recognized. You can add this signal into your control system. Note: The sensor cannot be used for medical purposes.In standby mode, the output voltage is 1.5V. When detect muscle active, the output signal rise up, the maximum voltage is 3.3V. You can use this sensor in 3.3V or 5V system. Read Seeed EMG Detector via coolcomponents.co.uk * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

An amazing free-roaming, ocean buy with tracking information. Is this something your STEAM group could put together — together? — Douglas Put a message in a bottle and toss it in the ocean, and if you’re very lucky, years later you might get a response. Drop a floating Arduino-fied buoy into the ocean and if you’ve engineered it well, it may send data back to you for even longer. At least that’s what [Wayne] has learned since his MDBuoyProject went live with the launching of a DIY drift buoy last year. The BOM for the buoy reads like a page from the Adafruit website: Arduino Trinket, an RTC, GPS module, Iridium satellite modem, sensors, and a solar panel. Everything lives in a clear plastic dry box along with a can of desiccant and a LiPo battery. Read Arduino Trinket | Hackaday via hackaday.com * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among

I often find myself assisting my college professor wife with her online classrooms using Blackboard, Moodle and others. This also has me often thinking about putting together my own online courses. Google has made this much easier by providing everyone access to their new Classroom service.  Poking around in it the other day, it seems very similar to other online classroom products I have used and could provide you with an easy method of hosting your own educational projects -- Douglas Google is opening up its Classroom educational service to allow anyone to create and teach a class on its platform.  The web-based tool works across devices and Google says it can be used to help manage classes for adult education, hobbies, and after school programs.  Classroom should come in handy for people who want to do more than just post tutorials on their blogs and YouTube channels; they can add resources, post tasks and assignments and interact with students as they progress through l

Lego seems to be the “gateway drug” for so many makers and I couldn’t help highlighting this amazing kit. The sheer size and number of bricks included in this model are mind boggling. Even better, you can get your own version to build. The Saturn V was the THE rocket of my child hood and I watched many of them launch on TV with all the Apollo missions. It brings back some amazing memories— Douglas To this day, the Saturn V remains the largest and most powerful rocket NASA has ever blasted into space, which is perfectly reflected in Lego’s new Apollo Saturn V model. That model stands a full meter (over 39 inches) in height, with the Apollo lunar lander, lunar orbiter, and astronauts, hidden away inside. The set started life as a Lego Ideas submission by builder saabfun, who quickly achieved the 10,000 votes from fans required for Lego to consider it for production. It was eventually approved, and while the final version of the Apollo Saturn V looks quite a bit different than saabfu

Another IoT (Internet of Things) board to check out. Lots of features. What are your favorite IoT boards and projects? I'm looking to collect and share as much information as possible as I work on my own IoT projects. -- Douglas Mediatek Labs has launched a new IoT development, which on the surface looks similar to LinkIt Smart 7688 board, but the internal design is quite different as the MIPS processor and Linux OS, have been replaced by Mediatek MT7697 ARM Cortex-M4 processor running FreeRTOS, and beside WiFi, also includes support for Bluetooth 4.2 LE. Read $14 LinkIt 7697 Bluetooth 4.2 LE and WiFi IoT Board is Powered by Mediatek MT7697 ARM Cortex-M4 MCU via CNXSoft – Embedded Systems News An interesting link found among my daily reading

Hmmm, might be an easy (and relatively cheap) way to play around with Tor and learn a bit more about this anonymizing service. -- Douglas Adafruit’s Onion Pi is a Tor proxy that makes your web traffic anonymous, allowing you to use the internet free of snoopers and any kind of surveillance. Follow Adafruit’s tutorial on setting up Onion Pi and you’re on your way to a peaceful anonymous browsing experience. Tor is an onion routing service – every internet packet goes through 3 layers of relays before going to your destination. This makes it much harder for the server you are accessing (or anyone snooping on your Internet use) to figure out who you are and where you are coming from. Read Onion Pi makes your web traffic anonymous via Open Electronics * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! An interesting link found among my daily reading

Interested in combining the power of Arduino with the long running technology of HAM Radio? This book is a great place to get started. — Douglas Building on the success of Arduino for Ham Radio, this book — More Arduino Projects for Ham Radio — includes 15 completely new practical and functional Arduino projects for the ham shack. This time, we branch out to use some of the newer Arduino variants and devices. Each project is complete and functional as-is, but room has been left for you to add personal touches and enhancements. That’s part of the fun of the Arduino and Open Source communities — building on the work of others, and then sharing your designs and innovations for others to learn, modify, and improve. More Arduino Projects for Ham Radio starts by building a solid foundation through descriptions of the many new Arduino boards and add-on components, followed by a collection of practical ham radio-related projects that showcase a wide variety of applications. There is some

I am amazed -- day after day — with the cool things being done with Raspberry Pi computers. This project uses an empty Altoid tin (favorite recycled item of the makerspace set), 3D Printed enclosures and a Raspberry Pi Zero to make and ersatz Gameboy (and more). A great build as well as and interesting toy to play with after you build it. — Douglas 3D printing enthusiast Sudomod has just validated the elaborate and undeniably stylish Altoids mint tin via one slick Raspberry Pi project: the mintyPi 2.0.With the help of some precisely modeled 3D printed parts, the maker has managed to turn an empty Altoids tin into a fully functioning Raspberry Pi game console. The outcome is an absolutely cool and handsome mini game console. Read MintyPi 2.0 is one of the coolest 3D printed Pi mods via Open Electronics Learn more about Raspberry Pi Find more Raspberry Pi Kits, Books and Board on Amazon An interesting link found among my daily reading

It is amazing (and a bit concerning) how many of these old computer systems I remember — and actually used. I spent some time the other night browsing through this with my 19-year-old son just to show him what the “state of the art” was in computers and technology when I got started. — Douglas Read The Old Computer Museum is a portal to the captivating past of vintage tech via The Next Web An interesting link found among my daily reading

I admit it. I’m a font junky. I have more fonts than I know what to do with, but here are 10 more to check out. — Douglas Everyone loves a freebie. But there are so many new free fonts being released nowadays, it can be hard to keep track of them all.  To help you out, we’ve rounded up 10 of our favourite new free fonts of 2017 so far. But if none of these float your boat, check out our list of free font resources and you’re sure to find what you’re looking for. Read 10 new free fonts for 2017 via Creative Bloq An interesting link found among my daily reading

A great project that makes the unseen — seen. I love projects like this as they reveal something that can’t easily be seen in real time or real space. I would imagine you could use this project as a base for many other projects, too. — Douglas How to Make a Unique ISS Notification Pin via Internet of Things – Adafruit Industries An interesting link found among my daily reading

I love poking around in Google Earth, both to re-visit places I have been and also to explore places I might never visit. — Douglas Google pushed out a big update to Google Earth for Chrome and Android today. Alongside a snazzy new look, the new version adds guided tours, 3D maps, a random button, and lots more. Read Google Earth Gets a Huge Redesign with Guided Tours, 3D View, and More via Lifehacker An interesting link found among my daily reading

I remember these days. In college I was able to use one of the first 128K Macs although I was mainly an Apple II user at the time. In 1989 I purchased my first Mac Plus and I have been mainly a Mac user since then. This brings back some memories both pleasant and not of those times. (LAUGH) — Douglas Along with its duties of maintaining copies of important news, literature, scientific information, and old MySpace pages, the Internet Archive also loves to create emulations for you to fiddle with inside your browser. Today, the lovable non-profit organization has made it easy for you to relive the glory years of the early Macintosh like it’s 1985 all over again. There’s something about the black and white interface of the original Macintosh computers that’s timeless. Sure, it might remind people of the Reagan-era but it is such a pleasing design that one could easily imagine it being a minimalist OS mod for people who want to simplify their user experience. Diving into the Internet

Learning is an amazing thing. I try to learn something new everyday on the “Today I Found Out” web site and YouTube Channel are a great way to do that. While I understood some of the basics of how LEDs work, this article provides an in-depth analysis of all the complicated things that go on inside and LED even though it seems simple on the surface. Dive into the inner workings of the LED and more on this excellent web site. — Douglas Today I found out how an LED works.  An LED or “Light Emitting Diode” is basically as the name describes; it is a special type of diode that is specifically optimized to give off light, usually in the visual or infrared spectrum, as electricity is passed through it. A diode is a special type of semiconductor that has many uses.  One of the principle uses though is to control the direction of the flow of electricity.  The most common type of diode does this by using something called “p-n junctions”.  This is just a fancy way of saying “magic”. 😉 Read