TechnologyIQ

See all the 2017 Gift Guide Entries 18 BOOM 2 Wireless Bluetooth Speaker and other I have a smaller bluetooth speaker that I specifically was gifted for kitchen use. I love listening to podcasts and music while I cook and the little speaker did a perfectly good job. That said, due to the noise of running water, food processors and others, it would be nice to have a speaker with a bit more oomph. The BOOM 2 series of speakers is just one such speaker, but it was included in many other gift guides on the internet and will likely be my, more powerful, replacement for the kitchen and garden.   Insanely good, loud 360degree sound with deep bass Portable design so you can bring the music anywhere Waterproof*, shockproof, designed for adventure (* IPX7 rated waterproof up to 30 minutes and a depth of one meter) 15hour battery life and 100 ft. Bluetooth wireless range (Actual battery life will vary with use, settings and environmental conditions. Rechargeable batteries have a limited...

See all the 2017 Gift Guide Entries 16 CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit | Douglas E. Welch Holiday Gift Guide 2017 For the technology lovers in your life — whether young or old — give them the power of exploring programming and computers in many forms. This kit gives you everything you need to get started with your Raspberry Pi today! Want to create your own interactive Internet of Things devices? Add-on the SunFounder 37 Modules Sensor Kit V2.0 to give you temperature/humidity sensors, LEDs, components and detectors of all types. Includes Made in UK Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi3) Model B Quad-Core 1.2 GHz 1 GB RAM On-board WiFi and Bluetooth Connectivity 32 GB Micro SD Card (Class 10) - Raspberry Pi Recommended Micro SD Card pre-loaded with NOOBS, USB MicroSD Card Reader CanaKit 2.5A USB Power Supply with Micro USB Cable and Noise Filter - Specially designed for the Raspberry Pi 3 (UL Listed) High Quality Raspberry Pi 3 Case, Premium Quality HDMI Cable, 2 x Heat Sinks, G...

See all the 2017 Gift Guide Entries While I was intrigued by the Amazon Echo , I couldn't really make a case for buying one. That said, when a friend offered me their Echo Dot, which they didn't want, I quickly jumped for it. I had been wanting to play around with the technology and see what it could do. So far, for me, the Echo Dot has been used for listening to music from Pandora.com, providing weather and commute traffic info for my wife and sun each morning, game playing with Jeopardy, Lie Swatter, Sing Quiz and Screen Test Movie Quote Quiz and it also interferes with the Etekcity switches and Hook I mentioned earlier in the Gift Guide. I have been very happy with my Dot and, knowing what I know now, I probably would spend my own money to get one -- perhaps to expand Alexa into other parts of the home. The new Echo Plus looks neat due to its added capabilities as a smart home hub for many available systems. 09 Amazon Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Dot You can save a few do...

This week in Maker Update, a zoetrope and a fidget spinner make a baby, an SLS printer from Formlabs, a Raspberry Pi weather chamber, component carnage, and a tiny OLED Pi screen. Our featured Cool Tool is the Hakko FX-901 cordless soldering iron. This is the Hakko FX-901 portable soldering iron. It runs off 4 AA batteries that you can swap out really fast with this removable cartridge design. I use rechargeables in mine and I get over an hour of use out of it before I notice the temperature drops. Alkaline batteries will run hotter, but not last as long. Read Maker Update: Hakko FX-901 cordless soldering iron via Cool Tools An interesting link found among my daily reading

See all the 2017 Gift Guide Entries 07 Etekcity Wireless Remote Control Electrical Outlet Switch and Hook Automation Hub hook-hub I added these RF remote-control switches to our house a few months ago and been very happy with my choice. They install easily, work well even between rooms with many walls separating them and helped me clean up a lot of clutter that had sort of grown organically in the family room. We had several light switches that were connected, replaced, moved, and hard to access, but these outlets provide a handy remote interface to everything now. You can even connect these outlets to your network and use your phone or Amazon Echo to control them, if you add a wifi-to-rf bridge to the network. That might just be the next step for me. In fact, using the Hook device below, I can now control any of these outlets via my voice through my Echo Dot, via my iPhone using the Hook app, programmatically via IFTTT or programs I have written myself. Very cool and very useful...

Since so many people order their gifts online and ahead of time, I’ve decided to start my annual Gift Guide fairly early this year. This should allow you to find your favorite gifts — and perhaps recommend a few of your own wish list items to your friends and family — with enough lead time to assure they arrive in time for your holiday celebration, whichever holiday it might be! See all previous Gift Guide Entries Anker PowerCore 10000 This is the external battery I have carried in my bag for almost 2 years now. I don’t think I have ever completely ran out of power unless sharing between my son and I when we are traveling together. This battery is a great peace of mind when you aren’t sure when you might see a power outlet again and can make some quick friends when their phone has gone dead at a critical moment. A tool I would not be without! — Douglas   The Anker Advantage: Join the 10 million+ powered by our leading technology. Remarkably Compact: One of the smallest and ligh...

My version of a similar, first project, with an Arduino Yun used a local OLED display to show the information, but having a Blynk dashboard would be pretty cool, too. I did have something like this using Ubidots , but haven’t played around with it much. Perhaps I can modify it to work this way. — Douglas This story began 2 years ago when I originally backed a Kickstarter project called WeatherPoint - a circuit which plugged into your android phone and displays various atmospheric variables such as temperature, pressure and humidity. After waiting far too long for the project to materialise and deciding that I still wanted this functionality on my phone, I set out to design my own. Read Simple Environmental Monitoring via Explore all projects Get You’re Own Particle Photon * A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs An interesting link found among my daily reading

This paint opens up some interesting avenues of thought for new projects you can create. How would you use it? — Douglas <span id="mce_marker" data-mce-type="bookmark" data-mce-fragment="1">​</span> Bare Conductive is small studio in London that makes conductive viscous black paint. It's carbon-based, which makes it quite affordable to experiment with. The studio has seen a growing community use its paint to make a variety of surfaces come to life. Their favorite? An artist used it to turn his paintings into musical instruments. Read You can draw electrical wires with this cheap conductive paint via Mashable! An interesting link found among my daily reading

If you re looking to get started with Raspberry Pi here is an excellent beginners tutorial that take you through setup all the way up to using the GPIO pins to control objects through the web. — Douglas Welcome to the Raspberry Pi Workshop for Beginners! Here you'll be able to follow along with our series of bite-sized videos that cover everything you'll need to know to get started with your Raspberry Pi, and start making awesome projects. My name is Michael and I'm an electronics enthusiast with particular interest in embedded electronics. As we progress through the workshops, you'll find helpful material next to each video - these could be code snippets, commands to issue, circuits to build, or links to other resources. To follow along with the workshop you'll of course need a Raspberry Pi and a few other bits and pieces. These are: A Raspberry Pi (I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B) A micro SD card (8GB or larger, class 10 preferred) A power supply to sa...

Tinkercad is a great, free, 3D modeling tool that can be used to design 3D printable objects and more. -- Douglas Tinkercad, the web-based CAD program, is a great gateway for new designers to learn the basics of computer-assisted design. Those basics get a little more powerful with the announcement of new features that allow users to do everything from integrating electronics to exporting to Lego.   The announcement, which happened today at Maker Faire Bay Area, specifically gives educators and casual users the ability to save their custom designs to their toolbar, allowing for intricate creations to be recalled instantly and used repeatedly between specific builds. It also adds two embeddable electronic circuits — an LED throwie option for light-up projects, and a vibro-bot function for jittering movement. This feature will place cavities for the components into your design; when you 3D print them (Tinkercad already has a simple export function for 3D printable files), the...