TechnologyIQ

The Raspberry Pi has been a runaway success since its launch in 2012, and each year since then has brought us a new Pi board or Pi-related piece of kit to tinker with. In fact, the number of accessories now available for the Raspberry Pi is vast – which is great for Raspberry Pi fans, but less so for the unfortunate journalists tasked with putting together Pi-related gift guides each year. While the Raspberry Pi makes a pretty good gift by itself – the latest Pi 4 Model B comes in at a very respectable $35 – a new piece of Raspberry Pi kit for the Pi lovers already in your life could make the perfect stocking filler for the coming festive season. Read on for our favorites. Read 12 great gift ideas for Raspberry Pi fans in 2020 via TechRepublic An interesting link found among my daily reading

Historical Technology Books - 70 in a series - The Edison Papers, Folder 45 "The editors of the Edison Papers produced descriptions for each of the folders listed below. These folders can be found in the Thomas A. Edison Papers Digital Edition. They generally include the names of companies, persons, technologies, publications, countries, and other subjects that are important or of particular interest in that group of documents (although some folder descriptions in the early years are quite spare). They also often reveal background information about or relationships between people, companies, governments, and other institutions."   Download this entire publication from Archive.org in a variety of formats Find more books on Bookshop and Help Indie Book Stores!  

Vacuum Dragster Uses Syringes For Propulsion via HackADay Atmospheric pressure is all around us, and capable of providing a great deal of force when used properly. As Otto Von Guericke demonstrated with his Magdeburg hemispheres over 350 years ago, simply removing air from a chamber to create a vacuum can have astounding results. More recently, [Tom Stanton] has used vacuum to power a small 3D-printed dragster. In the dragster build, a typical plunger syringe is plugged at the end, and the plunger pulled back. Atmospheric pressure acts against the vacuum, wanting to push the plunger back towards its original position. To make use of this, a string is attached to the plunger, causing it to turn a gear as it moves forward, driving the rear wheels through a belt drive. With the correct gear ratio on the belt drive, the dragster is capable of spinning its tires and shooting forwards at a quick pace. Read Vacuum Dragster Uses Syringes For Propulsion via HackADay

What Autopilot can do for you: A sailing boat does not have an engine and cannot go along a programmed path from harbour to the beach, then to the fishing spot, turn around the Lighthouse and back, all itself, it cannot. Whole work is done by the Sailor, we have to understand it at this point: trimming sails, take under control weather and the wind source/speed, harden or release ropes, mind other boats, decide direction and steering... When the Sailor decide for a break, let say just 10 seconds or up a few minutes (the famous "tea time"), he switches Autopilot on. In a cup of seconds its GPS acquire position, speed and direction of the boat and is able to mantain the direction (route). The steering system, a stick connected to the rudder, usually moved by the expert Sailor hands, now is under control by Autopilot through the Stepper Motor connected to it by pulleys and ropes. Read Autopilot for Sailing Boats (Automatic Steering System) via Arduino.cc An interest

Historical Technology Books - 69 in a series - Coloring Book "A metamorphosis of creative copying" - Xerox   Download this entire publication from Archive.org in a variety of formats   Find more books on Bookshop and Help Indie Book Stores!  

These Are Some of the Best Citizen Science Projects You Can Join With Just Your Phone or Laptop Maybe you’ve never noticed, because they don’t get a lot of hype but there are hundreds and hundreds of citizen science projects that you can get involved in. These projects range from tagging space observatory photos to transcribing documents that are centuries old. You don’t need any special skills or qualifications to help advance the cause of science, just a laptop or a phone. We’re indebted to a number of citizen science websites for collecting these projects—check out Zooniverse, SciStarter, AnecData, CitizenScience.gov, and Wikipedia (of course) for some more inspiration. There are hundreds of projects you can get involved with at any time, all contributing to worthy causes across the planet. We’ve collected some of our current favorites below. Read These Are Some of the Best Citizen Science Projects You Can Join With Just Your Phone or Laptop

Are you still writing notes on paper and sticking them to the fridge like it’s the ’80s? Well, if you are, and you read this site, you’d probably like to upgrade to something a bit more 21st century. And, thanks to robot maker [James Bruton], you can leave your old, last century, message taking behind as he has a tutorial up showing you how to build an internet connected e-paper message display board. And, if you have a Raspberry Pi, an e-paper display and adapters just lying around doing nothing, then this project will cost you less than the buck that paper and a magnet will cost you. Sarcasm aside, this is a pretty nice project. As mentioned, the base of this is a Raspberry Pi – [James] uses a Pi 4, but you could get away with an older, lower powered model as well. This powers the cheap(-ish) e-paper display he found online, which comes with the necessary adapters for the Pi, as well as a python library to write to the display. [James] uses a Google Sheet as the cloud storage for

Zoom said earlier this week it would lift its standard 40-minute limit on free video chats for Thanksgiving Day to make it easier to spend time with friends and family virtually on the US holiday. Given spikes in COVID-19 cases nationwide and various new and existing restrictions on interstate travel, this year’s Thanksgiving will be an unprecedented affair likely involving a mix of in-person and virtual hangouts using videoconferencing software like Zoom. Read Zoom to lift 40-minute meeting limit on Thanksgiving for longer family hangouts via The Verge An interesting link found among my daily reading

 Historical Technology Books - 68 in a series - Apollo Guidance Computer - Raytheon Company (1965)     Download this entire publication from Archive.org in a variety of formats   Find more books on Bookshop and Help Indie Book Stores!  

An API is like a magic box. We send data — in a specified format. We then get data back — in a specified format. This magical box is simply a script kept on a server. It acts as a gatekeeper — we tell the gatekeeper that we would like to know, change, or delete something, and the gatekeeper will (hopefully) perform the action we request and let us know how it went. Fortunately, APIs are generally very well documented and follow the same usage patterns. The vast majority of Web APIs use the representational state transfer (REST) structure — which sounds far more complicated than it is. Read Getting started with Python APIs via The Next Web An interesting link found among my daily reading

Issue 30 – HackSpace Magazine writes about eight ways to build your ideal Internet of Things (IoT) network. Many Arduino-compatible boards can connect to the internet in some way, but in order to make them useful, we need something for them to communicate with. Fortunately, there’s a wide range of tools for you to use to make this easy. Here, we look through our eight favourite IoT back-ends that we can use to make our online Arduino projects really useful. Read HackSpace magazine Issue 30: 8 ways of building an Internet of Things via Adafruit An interesting link found among my daily reading

 Historical Technology Books - 67 in a series - A Rudimentary Treatise On Clock And Watch Making With A Chapter On Church Clocks (1850) by John Whale     Download this entire publication from Archive.org in a variety of formats   Find more books on Bookshop and Help Indie Book Stores!  

  “The Algorithm” is impenetrable. It’s mysterious, it’s all-knowing, it’s omnipotent. Except that it’s not.  An algorithm is a simple concept that, today, has many complex manifestations. Algorithms’ central and opaque position at the heart of social networks like Facebook cause some to view algorithms in general with a sort of mystical reverence. Algorithms have become synonymous with something highly technical and difficult to understand, that is either an arbiter of objective truth, or, on the other end of the spectrum, something wholly untrustworthy. But when people refer to “the algorithm” — whether Facebook's or another tech company’s recommendation algorithm, or just “algorithms” in general — do they really know what it means? Judging by how widely the term is used and misused, most likely not. As Mashable embarks on our exploration of algorithms, we wanted to get something straight right off the bat: What is an algorithm, anyway? Mashable spoke with Pedro Domingos,

Like most other events over the last eight months or so, Blizzard’s BlizzCon didn’t go ahead as usual. Tens of thousands of fans would have attended. Instead, they'll have to make do with an all-digital replacement in February: BlizzConline. Unlike with BlizzCon proper, though, you’ll be able to stream the whole event for free.  At BlizzCon, only certain aspects are free to watch, including the opening ceremony (at which Blizzard tends to make major announcements about its games) and at least some of the esports events. For everything else, including developer panels, cosplay contests and the closing ceremony, you’d typically need a virtual ticket, which cost $50 last year. Not so for BlizzConline. Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said in a fireside chat video that “We want it to be a big virtual celebration, so BlizzConline will be free to watch and engage in." Read Blizzard's virtual BlizzCon will be free to watch via Engadget An interesting link found among my

  Spot, Boston Dynamics' dog robot, ok quadruped, is impressive, but expensive. It seems the maker community can't wait for the price to fall. Now we can all build our own SpotMicro. Various people have put together small demo robots that mimic Spot, but the effort is very great and they don't seem to get much beyond simple walking - and sometimes not even that. It's difficult. I'm not trying to be dismissive. However, things got quite a bit easier when Deok-Yeon Kim posted 3D printer files to Thingiverse. Suddenly you could print out a SpotMicro, add some servos, a servo controller, a processor and sensors and you could concentrate on programming it. This is still a difficult task, but nothing like having to start from scratch designing your own mechanism. Read Now We Can All Build A SpotMicro via www.i-programmer.info An interesting link found among my daily reading