Over the past few years, I looked at micro-controllers as a solution for better customization and control of Christmas lights. I started with an Arduino Mega 2560, an older multi-purpose development kit board. I then replaced that with a smaller Arduino Uno, hopefully making it more compact.
As the summer storm season continues, I wanted a quick way to see the local weather radar and get an idea of what might be coming. I have used GeekTool in the past to put images/webpage data onto the desktop, but I was having trouble embedding the radar image from Environment Canada . GeekTool doesn’t let you crop the webpage being embedded, and I cannot link directly to the radar image as it is…
I recently came into possession of some family home videos on VHS and 8mm tapes. To digitize them, I needed a Mac compatible capture device. One of the options I found was the Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro 4K capture card. I figured I could use its analog import for the tapes, and then try the HDMI for capturing video from a Nintendo Switch.
July 2019 Update: I removed the list of products from this post as I don’t feel they give enough details on each product to make an informed decision. I hope the list of criteria is useful for making a purchasing decision.
Two years ago I worked through the process of setting up a Raspberry Pi as a control unit for an outdoor set of wireless holiday lights. I had been using the web interface to control it, until this year when I supplemented it with HomeKit support.
HomeKit offers a way to control various home monitoring and automation accessories from your iOS (and recently Mac) devices. With a Rasberry Pi, the GPIO pins can be used to interface with various components and control devices with no built-in HomeKit support.
(Updated Dec 11, 2018)
Do you back up your Mac to a Linux server running Samba , and occasionally get this error message? It seems to happen randomly, but restarting the Mac always restores the ability to make backups (until the error occurs again). There may be an alternative to restarts that also works: fixing SMB mounts. I am running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6, and this may or may not apply to other versions; I have…
I had been planning on setting up remote control of the G-35 lights via Bluetooth and iOS or Raspberry Pi. I ran into some snags though, and I will wait until the fall to continue the project.
This is the eighth in a series of blog posts about researching and rewiring Christmas lights to work with Arduino devices.