KDE Neon is build on Ubuntu LTS (currently 18.04) with up-to-date Qt and KDE libraries. Updates tend to arrive pretty much every other day and it gets annoying to enter your password every time you launch Discover to install an update.
Continue readingNote: this post was first published on Mevisys website.
In the previous post about monitoring temperature we have used a simple RS-485 connection to communicate with a sensor. While this approach is very simple and has been proven to work well in many applications it can be complicated when the amount of connected sensors increases. Also adding or removing sensors can cause complications.
Modern technologies allow us to connect sensors using existing computer networks. For example the incredible ESP32 SoC can easily be programmed to read data from a sensor and relay them over WiFi using MQTT protocol.
Continue readingNote: This post was first published on the Mevisys website.
When we talk about environment monitoring, temperature monitoring is one of the most ubiquitous use-cases and makes for an illustrative example as well. The measurement side of the process is not an area that would offer many exciting innovations in this day and age – today it is all about how you process the collected data.
Continue readingIn the year of 2019 home automation is finally starting to be a thing. However the industry is walking in an uncharted territory where most of the companies are coming up with their very own devices, protocols and mobile apps. And if you don’t want to use a separate app to switch on your lights and another to open the door you can sometimes even connect them to a walled garden network proprietary smart-home framework or even your home surveillance device assistant!
Sometime last year the company hosting my blog at wincak.besaba.com decided to change the rules and move all blogs hosted for free on a new domain.
This transfer wasn’t the one-click-painless process they advertised so it took a while to find out how to do it properly and get around some bugs. But here we go, this great blog is online again!
I have recently gotten involved in setting up both latest Gnome (Ubuntu) and KDE (Manjaro) environment on two X230 Thinkpads with fingerprint sensors and the question of how to make them work appeared.
After the wild success of the first workshop, it was time to make another one. Location and team remained the same: Marius and me had a room in Krikragaa HQ (in Pilies dirbtuves, Klaipeda) at our disposal. This time we have focused more on manufacturing process and simplified the circuit complexity as much as possible. Components: coin battery and flashing RGB LED. Skills taught: PCB preparation. Goal: make a flashing badge.
Recently new iso’s with Plasma Mobile were released (no, don’t look at the official website, you can find it on a seemingly random blog). So how to try them out? The post just briefly mentions booting in a virtual machine. You can also find instructions how to use qemu to run Plasma Mobile there, but they describe what seems to be the old way of doing things, now obsolete.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to organize an electronics workshop in Klaipeda with help of my friend Marius and people from the Krikragaa. The workshop was a part of christmas events – market and workshops.
The goal of the workshop (apart from having fun) was to build a simple flashing circuit with six LEDs. To fit into the christmas mood better, LEDs were usually embedded into custom decorated cardboard christmas tree.
If you want to take good care of your lithium-based battery, you should not charge or discharge it completely, but stick just to a part of the total range. This way you can increase the number of charge-discharge cycles it survives and thus prolong it’s life.
Certain laptops offer ways to set battery charging thresholds.