I2C LCD

I am done with buying cheap LCDs and trying to make them work. Last week I found an I2C LCD on ebay (named something like YwRobot LCM1602 IIC Arduino compatible) and I figured since it only needs a couple of wires to be used, I can give it a try. And it worked great!

Well not quite from the start, since I thought it needs 3.3V but after I switched it to 5V, it worked like a breeze. The library I used is LiquidCrystal_I2C (I found it here) - it is not compatible with Arduino 1.0 but I still have 0022 installed so no problem. Apparently, there is another library named fmalpartida/new-liquidcrystal that works with 1.0 but I haven't tried it yet - it looks like I would need to remove the library that comes with Arduino 1.0 and replace it with this one, I may try it someday.

Connecting to the Arduino is very easy:

GND to GND

VCC to +5V

SDA to analog pin 4

SCL to analog pin 5

The next step is to use this LCD with my Raspberry Pi but if I understand this correctly, the LCD working at 5V and the Pi I2C pins working at 3.3V I need to be careful, I think I will wait until this board is back in stock at Adafruit.

Raspberry PI WebIDE

Adafruit is awesome!

This is my first post about my Raspberry Pi - so what's up with the subtitle? Well, we all know it already. Really, if you ever ordered something from Adafruit or if you asked for help or if you followed the tutorials or the newer Learn section... you know I'm right. And when the Raspberry Pi was born, Adafruit was one of the first sites with tutorials and help and even a new distro that made life a lot easier for beginners in Linux like me. And if all this was not enough to convince you, here is one more: the Adafruit Raspberry Pi WebIDE. I don't know when they find the time to do all this but I am so grateful they do.

I delayed installing the WebIDE for a few days, thinking that being a Linux newbie I will mess it up for sure. But when I followed the Installation and Getting started steps in the Adafruit learning system, all was so very easy.

When I first got my Pi, I was able to do some simple stuff like make an LED blink (Raspberry Pi Spy site helped me a lot - Thank you!) but now with all the cool libraries the WebIDE comes with I can finally start to really learn Python and hopefully make some cool projects! Thanks, Adafruit!

Talking about learning Python, Learn Python The Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw looks to be an awesome book.

And a final note and big thanks to Getting Started With Raspberry Pi blog: the info here helped me setup a VNC server and this made it accessible using raspberrypi.local:5901 instead of using the IP.

Got My Servo Workin'

I wanted for a long time now to get a servo and to make it work with Arduino and I finally did. Got a couple servos from one of my favorite places, Pololu, read a bit on how to make them work with an Arduino here and here, loaded this sketch on the Arduino and done - it worked from the first try!

Big thanks to all the resources I used and Pololu for offering great parts at good prices!

Android: Music in the cloud

I use both Amazon Cloud player and Google Music player on my Android phone, each having its good (Amazon's lock screen player is a lot nicer, Google keeps track of played and thumbs up/down) and bad. But one thing I just discovered will make me use Google's player a lot more from now on: I just found a way to "sync" my playlists directly from the web client. Maybe it is a known feature but I just figured it out so it's new to me.

To do this, create a playlist in the web player. Go to the playlist on the phone and check Available offline - all songs in the playlist will show up on the phone next time you sync. Nothing earth shattering up to here. The cool thing is that if you now go to the web player and add/remove songs to/from the playlist, next time when you sync, they will be added/deleted on the phone as well. Very simple and obvious but also very powerful.

I used to download my Google Cloud music, added it to iTunes and sync to the phone using the awesome iSync. But now there is no more need for this. I will keep syncing my iTunes music via iSync but the Google Cloud music will stay only on the cloud.

As far as I can see, Amazon doesn't have this feature; well, you can set it to automatically download all your purchases to the phone but this is not the same, I just want some songs, sometimes old ones, not all the new ones. Overall this means I will be using Google's player a lot more from now on.

As a side note, I am using the paid version of Rocket Player by the same authors as iSync and love it. Too bad it doesn't play Google Cloud songs. But someday it will and then I will sync the playlists as I just said but not use the Google Music player anymore, Rocket has so many more features.

Coolest use of NFC

A while ago I got a Nexus S and one reason was that it came with NFC. I am not sure I want to use it for wallet type application but there are other things to do with it. There are a lot of great apps in the Android Market that make use of NFC but the coolest one I found is Touchanote (website; app). This app works in conjunction with Evernote (app) and it basically can "store shortcuts to your notes on NFC tags to be able to access your content when and where you need it with the touch of your mobile phone" (quote from the website). The company also sells NFC tags for the lowest prices I found on the web (outside of wholesale) and they also send you a free tag just to try it out if you send them your idea of how you plan to use it. I have a free tag coming my way soon but I couldn't wait so I bought a couple tags and tried it out.

I have a few possible applications in mind but the one that I ended up doing was a very simple one yet very useful (for me, at least). I created a Shopping list note in Evernote that I can edit from my phone and also on the web interface, used Touchanote to write the link to this note on a tag, put the tag in my wallet and when I get to the store I tap the phone to the wallet (which is still in my pocket) and voilà: the shopping list pops up on my phone. How cool is that?!

Thanks a lot, Touchanote for such a cool and useful app!

My first useful project ever - a night light

Following a simple idea like the one on Evil Mad Scientist I was able to build my very first useful electronics project - I know it is really nothing but for me it was a breakthrough. For more explanations about how this works, please visit the link above, they do a great job of explaining it all.

I had around a string of LEDs that work when powered by only 3V so I was able to replace the LED in the diagram with a full string of them; packed tight in a glass bowl they actually look pretty good.

BAFAB week - mission complete

Actually, double mission complete because I bought books for 2 friends...

I spent the lunch today at a local bookseller's (Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore) and got a bunch of used books - 2 friends from work picked a book each so here it is my BAFAB week deed.

BAFAB week

I totally forgot about BAFAB week but luckily the counter in the sidebar reminded me about it just in time because it is this week! Need to get on with buying a friend a book...

Geocaching Statistics

Looking at a fellow geocacher's profile earlier today, I noticed he had a lot of stats posted, really cool stuff. Found out he was using CacheStats to generate them. I downloaded it and installed it and gave it a try: all I can say is *awesome*! It is free but you can donate money via PayPal if you like it. And I bet you will, it is the best geocaching stats tool I've seen.

Why did this blog change?

For a while, I tried to have separate blogs for my hobbies: books and ebooks, microcontrollers (Arduino and TI's MSP430 mostly), LEGO Mindstorms and geocaching. I keep these blogs mostly for myself, to have a place where I can come back to if I need to remember the title of a book I liked or some cool microcontroller project and LEGO robot or geocaching tool; if this info helps somebody else as well, it is just an added bonus.

Lack of time to update all these blogs and the fact that all of them boiled down to the same thing: one of my hobbies, made me decide to gather all the posts about these subjects into one blog. I hope this is OK with everybody - each post will be labeled so if you end up reading my posts, you will be able to filter through them easily.
Thanks for reading!