Phatty's Tech Talk

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-dri...

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...

Wow it has been a while and I wasn't sure I was really done, but... I went through 3 Motarola Atrix phones and 2 HTC phones before I finally got one that worked :-( The good news is that I have an HTC Inspire 4g just like Squeej! I have rooted it I have installed ICS (The specific inspire build is Ice Cold Sandwich by LorD ClockaN) Everything but hd video recording seems to work. I have tried a couple of other roms, MIUI was pretty good once I fixed the sound issues, but I kept getting FCs all over the place Cyanogenmod 7 is my next favorite but then I miss my ICS too much so Ice Cold Sandwich it is. Thanks for listening...

Got My new phone :-) once I put the battery in, (sent it back without one, and ordered the replacement a different way), it started to hard reset :-( The wifi chip doesn't work at all, it just says "error" under wifi settings. Every time I plug it into a power source it hard cores. I updated the Rom to the latest version, no difference. I got my data off of it and my microsd card and sent it back to the Geek Squad, Got an iphone 4 loaner. It's a pretty phone, but call quality is not as good as my motarola, and ios 5 is no Ice Cream Sandwich ... although this white iphone kind of looks like an ice cream sandwich, wonder what it tastes like ... New, New phone should be here on Friday according to the guys at BB. No longer holding my breath. The good news is that if this one doesn't work then I get a $600 in store credit to buy the phone of my choice. Now to decide between the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket, and the HTC Vivid; decisions decisions.

Tuesday I lost my beloved Ice Cream Sandwich.  We were out in the yard burning the Ivy that we tore off the house last week, I had my phone in the pocket of my sweat shirt. While moving some out lying ivy into the fire I dropped my phone.  Let me just say, raking through coals and seeing "Motorola" is a sickening experience.  I completely freaked out because I have a full month (today actually) before I have a phone refresh coming. My dreams of being able to wait for an I phone 5 or a real ICS build or...or...were crushed. Now I have to get what I can afford, and that will limit money for the next "precious". And then I remembered, "I have Black Tie Accident Protection on my phone!" My joy was full. I could get another Atrix 4G and continue enjoying my ICS pleasantly awaiting something better. I jumped in the car and flew over to Best Buy (happy not to see any police because I drove a little too fast). Stopped by the phone counter where they said, "...

Let me start this by saying "I am an Apple fanboy!" I just want to make that clear. I gave water to the dead the day that Steve Jobs died. I felt personal pain watching Woz on dancing with the stars. I suffered for months with a failing wireless card, and bad memory in my macbook pro because I don't want to go back to a Dell (no offence Micheal). I can't wait for the next Iphone because I am eligible for an upgrade on May 5. That being said, I really like this ice cream sandwich. After Google released the source for ICS late last year, Cyanogen and his development team went straight to work building Cyanogenmod 9 (Cyanogenmod 7 was based on Gingerbread, they skipped Honeycomb because of it's tablet specific pedigree). Unfortunately my phone, the Motorola Atrix 4G did not have official Cyanogenmod support due to some difficult hardware and Motorola's highly customized OS. I had no hope for ICS any time soon. Then last week we got an over the air update to t...

Prerequisits: Motorola fastboot (win32/64 or osx depending on your os of choice) Android sdk installed and adb working proper drivers for your device installed. ROOTED Atrix 4g Assuming all of that is done there are a few setup steps necessary to en able your device to speak to adb: Plug in phone via micro USB cable, wait until it is recognized by the OS. On the phone, pull down the alert menu and choose USB connection Make sure that "NONE" is selected Open settings->applications->Development Make sure that USB debugging is checked Installing ClockWorkMod This nmod allows you to back up your phone and recover it gracefully it is essential if you are going to do any development or hacking of your device. Download the latest version from tenfar here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1019143 cd to your adb folder and adb install MOTOA4_Bootstrap_###_###-signed.apk (update the numbers appropriately). Once installed, on the device, open the app t...