Once the Arduino board had a Bluetooth module attached, it was time to make it talk to another device.  We chose our Nexus Ones– Android 2.2 powered smart phones.  Briefly, prior to Android 2.0, Bluetooth support in the Android OS was really awful and generally not worth bothering with.  Even today, it’s still kind of read more »

For some time now, I’ve contemplated the possibilities of smarter home automation.  There’s a lot of focus on low level protocols for home automation– X10, ZigBee, etc.  These are often called “high level” protocols, which they sort of are from the point of view of, say, an electrical engineer.  But they’re not high level for read more »

I’ll be at the Maker Faire Bay Area 2010.  More details available here.

I dropped by Halted and GreenEmotor. Allen Chen had a lithium battery pack ready for me, so I went home and tried to charge it. Unfortunately the charger blew up the moment I attached it to the battery pack. Not quite sure what happened there, so instead I took the pack of 8x 3.2v 12ah read more »

I had about an hour before noon to work on the bike, so I put the batteries in the battery “boxes” (actually just the frame from an old UPS) and used a motor cycle tiedown to secure the batteries to the frame. I wired the motor up to the batteries. I used my dishwashing fluid read more »