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Year of full-scale war

One year since Ukraine stands off the full-scale invasion from russia.

Some pictures that I have saved during these days. Sorry, I do not have the authors for the pics, ping me if you know who should be mentioned.

Photos

Posters

Reality strikes

A couple of years ago everybody was freaking out over the sick, irrational and needless violence in the fictional story of the Game of Thrones, but reality has proved to be much more harsh and much more irrational.

Pictures are not mine, collected from different sources over time.

 No comments   2022   Ukraine   war

Cool stuff of the week

Hey.

It’s been a while since the last time I’ve posted anything here.

Full-scale war was launched by russia in Ukraine. The life was kind of quirky these months.

Anyway, the company I work for, managed to continue the business, almost without changes. Some part of the team has moved out of Ukraine, but otherwise our work rhythm is back to what it was before.

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Found some interesting things I wanted to share:

Simple JSON to TypeScript Converter

We are in the process of migrating to TypeScript, so this is quite handy.

You put in a bunch of JSON of your data, and get a typed interface(s) as a result: http://json2ts.com/

Simple notification system / bot for github/gitlab

(and some other services) – https://danger.systems/

I made a small demo for my team https://gitlab.com/beshur/danger/-/merge_requests/5

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Help Ukraine win this war by donating to charity https://www.comebackalive.in.ua/donate

Smoke and Temperature Sensor for my 3D-printer

Smoke and Temperature Sensor Assembly

Sometime ago I bought an IKEA smoke sensor. It lived some time in the kitchen as expected, but then I put next to my 3D-printer that was located in the garage.

But then, it doesn’t make a lot of sense if it only fires an alarm in case of smoke, since I maybe away, so I decided to hack it into something IoT.

There are a couple of useful blog (this and that) posts that I started from.

It took quite a while to just follow the advice given there and to solder properly ground connection to the CS2105G0-S12 chip (that people suggest is actually MC145012). Anyway my project is a bit simpler in a way – the wi-fi module (Wemos D1 mini) is constantly powered with USB and feeds data every second to Blynk.

One other issue I had was that smoke sensor IC is using 9V for power and signals, so it had to be stepped down. With invaluable help from my former colleague Mich, I did it using an NPN transistor and it works pretty smoothly.

Printed a special case for it to fit all the components.

In case of smoke the Blynk app will send me a notification. Later on, it will also turn off the smart socket that the printer is powered with.

Arduino source is on Github. I will try to put some more details and the scheme later.

I have no illusions that this thingy is pretty weak in terms of safety and reliability – there are too many things to break in case of a real fire – but it was an important learning project for me.

Dune is huge

Just like this sand worm

Sand worm smells Atreides

The haters gonna say the movie is kind of shallow and only scratches the surface of the Dune lore, and that is correct.

But for me this was very big, I felt revelation, such a great franchise finally got a right treatment.

I was never fond of David Lynch’s version, but I always liked the story covered in the first couple of books and the PC games.

So it’s a worthy candidate for the “next big sci-fi saga” (since Star Wars gone kind of wrong way :))

Must see if you like sci-fi.

 No comments   2021   Dune   movie   mustsee

Bought a 3D printer!

Slicing crane hook and container in Cura

Finally I bought a 3D printer – an almost complete kit for popular Creality Ender 3.

It happened to be a decent printer that produces fairly quality prints.

Some test prints:

The first things I modelled:

Some more stuff from thingiverse:

This was a failed first ABS print:

Came out fine after some filament drying:

Child Bike Hub

Settings up the shop in the garage:

Future hacker space badge:

Hacker Garage Lab

Created a new instagram account and post stuff related to 3d-printing and general DIY: @shu.makes

The journey continues!

All hail to Airtable

Some time ago I learnt about Airtable and thought that it was a great thing, but didn’t have a project to try it with.

Now I use it a for a couple of my projects.

First “production” use was when I did the diPlayer. I just needed some connected database where the end user could edit the records with his phone without extra hassle. Also I wanted something with a simple yet robust API. And Airtable was a great fit for it.

Another one was a side project with a chatbot that tracks citizenship application status for users. The users just enter their application code, and the bot does the regular checks and reports back when status changed. Very handy, and with Airtable I just outsourced all the database work to a service. With this one I also gave very granular control to another person, so that they can add records in bulk in their space without accessing all the database.

Now I am building another IoT project that will also use Airtable for remotely accessing data that will be gathered by a Raspberry Pi running an MQTT broker.

Then I used it for a couple of home things – like keeping track of the job applications statuses, utility contractors.

So it’s a great thing if you want to shorten your time to market and focus on client. Give Airtable a shot!

Completed a learning course in Arduino

Finally a 3-month online course in Arduino from robo.house came to an end.

The course covered basic electronics, components, sensors, motors and some other bits.

It was pretty fun to go over it together with other people.

The final task was to assemble a smart home model, using most of the sensors. I integrated the gas sensor, temperature/humidity, RFID to open the gate with a servo-motor, 2-line LCD screen, ultrasonic sensor, and that’s about it.

Can’t say I have learnt a big deal from it, I have already covered this basic level myself by trying to do stuff. Still it was very nice to connect with other people in this field, also got some details about how actual components work inside, which I did not bother to learn before.

Here is a gate opening on reading a correct RFID token:

 No comments   2021   arduino   DIY   learning

Fired up Raspberry Pi Zero Camera

Just wanted to share.

Ordered some time ago a tiny Raspberry Pi Zero W with Camera for one project, that I postponed right after that :)

Anyway, yesterday my shipment has arrived, and I got some fun connecting the smaller camera to a small board.

Here is a selfie I managed to make after adjusting focus distance. Taken without any settings, so white balance is off, but I guess it can be tweaked.

 Selfie with a Raspberry Pi Zero Camera

Here is how tiny the stuff is:

March 2021 Links

Some more links I found interesting this month:

Videos

Cool project with transparent LED displays:

Great drone piloting around bowling club:

 No comments   2021   arduino   DIY   links
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