This is How I Role

Actual picture of my first game box

There are lots of options these days for playing the beloved classic RPG, D&D.  They range from just picking up the starter kit and rolling dice on the dining room table, to running a full multinational, all-electronic, virtual table top, live stream with special effects.  I've spent some time evaluating the plethora options and settled on a setup that gets the tech out of the way, gives me the DM tools I need, and lets everyone have a fun experience.

Logging SmartThings to the Internet of Things

I got a SmartThings hub for Christmas. It does a lot of cool things, but it doesn't draw graphs for things like temp, humidity, etc. Well, I had to fix that, so this post describes that journey and, frankly, it's easy enough that you can do it too.

On Air Light for Streamers

For streamers everywhere, whether you are trying to prevent parental humiliation

or roommate intrusion, there needs to be some way to let your cohabitators know that you are on the air.

My kids, like many others dream of becoming the next top Twitch streamer or YouTuber.  After reading the Forbes article about the World's Highest Paid YouTube Stars who wouldn't!?  So of course we built something really cool and geeky to solve this problem.

How My Son Taught Himself Object Inheritance With Minecraft

Like every elementary school boy on planet Earth, my son has an unhealthy obsession with Minecraft.  Long ago he grew tired of building stuff and has been reviewing mods, creating texture packs, and figuring out the boundaries of the sandbox.

With the addition of command blocks and the expansion of the command language in recent releases he has been challenging himself to create new and exciting game play.

So what does this have to do with with the foundation topic of object oriented programming, Object Inheritance? Well, let me tell you a story...

My son wanted to make a friend that would follow him around and carry stuff for him in the game.  (Geek Benefit #3: We can make our own friends if we can't make friends.)  He started by creating a command block that cloned a mini armor stand and named it Timmy.  Timmy unfortunately was a rather boring friend because it just stood in one place and did nothing.

What to do? Well, there is a thing in the game that does follow a player around.  So my son decided to clone a dog.  He updated the command block to make Timmy always be where the dog was.  That looked weird so he made the dog invisible.  Cool!  Just like that Timmy has inherited the dog's AI.

But that was not enough.  Timmy needed to follow him around AND carry stuff. Minecraft Riddle: "What's mobile and carries a chest?"  Minecraft Answer: "A donkey."  So next he cloned an invisible mule and made it stick to Timmy too.

And poof, we now have a mini armor stand named Timmy that has the AI of a dog and the carrying capacity of a mule!

So instead of the boring "pet shop" inheritance example in the first C++ book I read decades years ago, he used the rather exciting example of Minecraft mobs to build his custom class, Timmy!  The armor stand has now inherited the class properties of the dog and the donkey. Okay, I know, it's not a pure example, but it was a very small step illustrate the concept.  And he figured it out for himself out as part of his fun. The best type of learning.

Like Minds Geek Fiction Now Available

Today Like Minds is finally published.  Like Minds is a near future science fiction thriller that includes AI, Augmented Reality, the FBI, and even a serial killer.  After working on the book for over a decade, I'm really excited to announce that the ebook version is available on Amazon today.

To read more about the book you can go to the official book page: http://likeminds.authorbenmiller.com/  and I'll post updates to the Facebook page as well if you like that kind of thing.

RasPi Softener Salt Level Monitor

If you can't tell from the fact that this is my first post in 2014 and it's March already that I am not one for routine tasks, then I'll tell you.  I'm not one for routine tasks.  More often then not, I get distracted or forget.  So when it comes to my water softener, I usually discover it's low after the black plastic spatulas all turn white.  So it's about time I did something about it.

I was inspire by the cool (and cheap) HC-SR04 distance sensors. They look like cool little robot heads and can tell you how far away something is.  I HAD to use one for something.

Johnny Five

The idea was simple.  Monitor the distance from the lid of the softener do the bottom and alert when the distance to too far.

QR Code Adventure

Here's a fun game that my kids enjoy.  It's a cool techie activity for holiday and vacation time that adds a little excitement and gets kids up and moving about.  I call it the QR Code Riddle Hunt.

Raspberry Pi Camera with Pan Tilt

I was inspired by +John Ellis's posting about his super cool garage security project to add more video and automation to my Pi projects.  He used a webcam in his project like I did in the Frankenfeeder project.  But I wanted to play with something new and hearing all the excitement around the camera module for the Raspberry Pi I thought I would take a look at it.
UPDATE: Step by Step tutorial version is online

Learning Moment and Science

We had a great family learning moment and experiment I thought I would share.  It was so simple to setup that if you have the parts, it only takes a moment.

Over dinner, my son (3rd grade) talked about a video they watched at school about a young girl who invented a flashlight that worked by the heat of your hand.  I later found the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CCGUMkcbjg.  Big congrats to her, way to go!

Frankenstein Update I

Just a quick update on the Frankenstein project.  It's been slow getting started, but this will be worth it. We wanted to do some proof of concept testing.  So we needed to get a peltier plate in to start working with it.  Well Digikey obliged and we now have this little guy to play with.

Peltier Plate for solid state cooling

Wind Chimes (Arduino, Raspi, and Magnets!!)

Arduino Uno Talking to Raspi via Serial

I'm going to do a quick post on another project I'm working on.  This is not complete yet, but I'll share my progress to date.

Here's the concept:
I'm building a wind chime that does not actually chime, well, acoustically that is.  Instead, it will allow me to play any sound for a chime instead of a metal or wood clunking sound.  I will capture the "striking" of a "chime" (yes lots of quotes) using analog sensors on the Arduino, and then communicate a command to the Pi via a serial line. I am using the Arduino for it's analog pins and its ability to sample incredibly fast.  I'm using the Pi to play sounds simultaneously (Nope, there is no simultaneous audio shield for the Arduino).  Pi audio is a longer subject worth of its own post. But the audio you hear in the video below will not be the finished product.

Frankenstein

Next Project!

We brainstormed a lot about what to do next.  There was even a brief deep dive into possibly building a self contained tomato growing cabinet for my basement, but alas the investments in this project just outweighed a hobby budget.  After a long hot weekend over the 4th of July, we finally landed on a beer cozy that keeps your beer cold.  A Franken-Stein!

These posts will be a little different than the post project Frankenfeeder as I will try to keep up with this as we go.  So far our concept is this:

• Use a peltier plate (a solid state component that moves heat from one side to the other when passing current) to cool the beer can in a beer cozy.
• Use a heavy duty 12/18V battery from an old drill set to provide the heavier amperage and voltages needed to run a peltier plate
• Drink very cold beer on hot days

Frankenfeeder Part III

Pi stuff and Reassembly

This is Part III, Part II is here.

The Pi and what you can do with it is a deeeeep subject.  I'll just stick to the highlights.  Turning on/off GPIO pins, high level Wifi and sundry, and the script.

GPIO Control

Wiring Pi by Gordon @drogon, is an excellent project for low level Pi IO control.  Actually his whole site is just pure awesomeness if you have the time to read.  Anyway, I followed the instructions on downloading and installing Wiring Pi on my Pi.  I've heard rumors this is included in the base distro now, but you might want to check your version of the distro to be sure.
With the wiring pi package there is a binary, the gpio util, that allows you to issue command line commands to see the state of the pins and turn them high/low.

Frankenfeeder Part II

Pi Controlled

This is Part II of the frankenfeeder project.  Part I is here.

So how to close a circuit with a Pi.  Simple, use a relay.  A relay's job is to close (or open) a circuit when current is applied to it.  (a nice illustration is here where I borrowed the image) So just pop a relay onto a PI GPIO pin and off we go right?  Nope.

Frankenfeeder - Part I

Kick off:

A while back my folks moved to town in their retirement to be close to their mess of kids and grandkids.  It's been great having them closer and in our daily life.  My dad and I decided to spend a little time each week just geeking out with something completely unrelated to our jobs (he failed to retire properly) to rest our minds from the daily patterns.  He is a pseudo-retired pastor and I do Cloud Computing.  But we both enjoyed and wanted to learn more about hobby electronics or just making stuff.

For our first project we decided to create something that would allowed my dad to feed his dogs remotely if he and my mom were out gallivanting (technical term) about.  Don't worry, the dog door allows for the post-processing to occur safely.

We did some research and found this cool project by Amanda Ghassaei:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Twitter-Controlled-Pet-Feeder/

Why?

Why this blog?
This is my third attempt at starting a Blog, so why now? why here? Well several reasons.

• I have been doing a lot of electronics experimentation and I am inspired to share some of my stories. I thought about doing instructables or something, but couldn't bring myself to get to that level of detail.  So I'll try to share stories here.  If there is interest I can share more.
• I enjoy writing.  Possible future posts and news about pending novel publishing, short stories, etc.
• I wanted a place to share ideas, and thoughts, I guess thats a blog

Ok, that's about it.  So the content here won't be frequent, but hopefully it will be worthwhile.

Oh, and the name . . .. While the name might seem self evident after a few posts  but while I was considering what to call this, my son started relating a dream he had and was very excited that it was full of "Lots of cool geeky things," his words.  I thought, Perfect!  And here we are.  "Lots of cool geeky things."