At 8:20a (in 35 mins) I'll be joining my @oshwassociation pals to talk about Open Hardware!! Come hang

App idea: PINTR

Find local 30+ year olds in your immediate area to share a weeknight beer with because 16oz cans are too big

My friend, @chipperdoodles, has launched their Crowd Supply campaign! https://www.crowdsupply.com/chipperdoodles-chippydootles/anwaar

If you're interested in badge life and want power delivery figured out for you, consider backing this project and creating your own faceplate as a great starting point.

@penguin86 She does most nights but that's a pretty new development!

Unexpected data leakage: I threw a BME680 in kid's room so we can keep better track of temps as it gets colder. This is derived from the gas sensor. Can you guess when we left our daughter in bed and when we went to go grab her in the morning?

I've had very good experiences with the common I2S (INMP441) and now PDM (MP34DT01) MEMS microphone modules, but I am left wondering: are there no unidirectional (or at least, more directional out-of-the-box) small, embeddable mics?

I have absolutely no idea what this is going to do to my server but if you would like your own command line virtual pet, simply run:

ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -p 2222 tamauser@guydupont.com

@teotwaki I think you could save some money using LoRa, but you'd still need some kind of LoRa -> Internet gateway (assuming you want to make the info publicly accessible) so I dunno if makes it any better/simpler

Disclosure - Particle sent me the Tachyon to try! It's been really great, but I am not required to say that.

The xiao boards are not the most energy efficient out of the box (im using circuitpython so I have limited ability to fine-tune), but with the long sleeps I'm still looking at an average pull of <1 mA during the day, and lower than that at night. I shouldn't have to charge those 18650s very often!

And the tachyon is critical here because of the built-in cellular. My wi-fi does not reach the basement! And since the tachyon is more than capable of doing all the audio classification, it only needs to send tiny payloads out of the laundry room.

After a successful read, the tachyon tells the xiao exactly how long to sleep for before it wakes up to record again, so I can save battery in situations where I know the room is not busy (overnight, for now, but could add some kind of human presence sensing later?)

The Particle Tachyon is sitting hidden in the room, and runs a script that scans for those advertisements. It connects via BLE to any of my xiao boards that it finds, reads the audio data and saves it with some metadata for processing. I have a separate script that monitors the database, classifies each audio sample (DRYER_RUNNING, WASHER_IDLE, etc) and then updates the little web page.

Since I don't own the machines, I cannot modify them in any way. And I was asked not to use any kind of inline power sensing. So instead I'm using magnets to stick a SEEED xiao nrf52840 sense to the side of each machine - super low power and great built-in sensors.

I have each xiao board wake up once a minute, record a sample of audio using the onboard mic (which is a few mm away from the machine) and then serve up a BLE advertisement for ~10 seconds max.

A rare practical project from me. I live in a building with ~16 units and we all share 2 washers/2 dryers. Very annoying to go all the way down to basement just to find out they're in use. So I'm putting together a low maintenance, non-invasive monitoring setup we can all use 🧵

@RobeeShepherd oh yuck!

@RobeeShepherd I haven't gone that deep! What happens? Just slow?

spent a bunch of time with Docker Compose for both work and non-work the past few weeks... and I really love it. I tend to do a bunch of "full stack" stuff that I run locally.

example - we have device logs that we occasionally need to dig through. We keep them compressed in cold storage. Used DC to make an app that pulls a device's logs, loads them into Loki and then serves up Grafana. Can share with the team easily without deploying anything. completely stateless.

Every time I start a vole project & experiment with using this font for headings etc, it reminds me that it’s the best thing I commissioned for the site, the late Mushybees did such a lovely job drawing the letters https://vole.wtf/raybees-font/

@mattround I love it so much