Phatty's Tech Talk

Heidi got an awesome shirt for me: So here goes: I was really tired of my garage door openers working sometimes but not others, and I was totally inspired by my dad redoing his garage door openers with some cool arduino stuff so. Amazon Affiliate links to what I used: A basic 5 volt relay  https://amzn.to/2Pe6YyS A nodeMCU esp8266 board with wifi (and only the size of 2 quarters, HOW COOL IS THAT! Thanks dad!)  https://amzn.to/2Sn9CVi An HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensor  https://amzn.to/2TZHEQS  (mine came in an arduino starter kit, I didn't spend this much on it) Some phone cord A telephone inline coupler  https://amzn.to/2TZHIQC I already had some wires to connect it all, a hot glue gun, some glue, and some solder and a soldering iron. The goal was: Spin up a webserver on the ESP8266 host a web page with a button to trigger the relay detect if the garage was open or closed and display that on the web page. Here is the basic wiring diagram Not

So after making an arcade console and getting the kids hooked on great old video games, I saw this set of videos from Bob at http://www.iliketomakestuff.com Arcade Cabinet Part 1 Arcade Cabinet Part 2 Arcade Cabinet Part 3 Parts 1 and 2 were informative, but part 3... A human sensor that turns the lights on and off!!! Must have! So I started playing with an arduino uno board, (really fun) but then I got to playing with this little creature:   you can learn more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NodeMCU You can buy some with my Amazon affiliate link here:  https://amzn.to/2SoLbGK Update: the above link is to the version 2 which I used for this project, but the version 3 is available now here for ~$5.50 each:  https://amzn.to/2Sn9CVi It took a bit of fiddling to get it to work so I wanted to capture that on the blog for later use. First I had to get drivers here:  https://www.silabs.com/products/development-tools/software/usb-to-uart-bridge-vcp-drivers Once I had t

So, for my birthday I got a Raspberry pi 3, with a case, and a power supply, and I had to immediately set it up. I tried OSMC with Kodi I tried straight up Raspbian And then I found RetroPie !!! I was completely sold. Old school games, Kodi, nice interface, So I set the whole thing up with XBox 360 USB connectors, it was cool...but playing those old games I wanted the arcade feel: Hearing "Full point" in Karate Champ is not quite as amazing when you had to use the D-Pad and the ABXY buttons. So I did what any one else would do, I ordered 4 joysticks and 40 buttons and 2 two player PCB boards that attach via USB, and a trackball, oh and 2 more LED joysticks (for Karate Champ!) and an OrangePi PC so I did not have to cannibalize the RPi media center. I was excited , the OPi is: Slightly faster than RPi 3 at 1.6 ghz vs 1.2 Has the same RAM A Mic for Alexa support An IR chip It was only $27 with a case and power cord! Sadly: OS support is very poor  The