Bleepie
Bleepie is a POCSAG/FLEX pager transceiver that plugs into your Tildagon badge as a hexpansion.
Welcome on Sam Machin
Recent content in Welcome on Sam Machin
Latest posts
BleepieAPRS
BleepieAPRS is alternate firmware for your Bleepie hardware. It runs on exactly the same board — the same hexpansion, radio and USB-C board — but instead of turning it into a POCSAG/FLEX pager it turns it into an APRS transceiver.
AlexaWeb Reborn
6 Years ago this month I published one of my first Alexa hacks, Alexa In The Browser This was one of the key projects that got me into Alexa Development and lead to me being nominated as one of the first Alexa Champions.
About
This is the 3rd or 4th incarnation of my site, most of the content has been migrated over in each iteration but some things like links or images might be broken.
JSONUrl
Super simple service to return a blob of JSON thats been encoded in the request URL, with a basic webpage to create the encoded urls
Node-RED Asterisk ARI
My Entry for TAD Hack Orlando 2020 (remote) Is a Node-RED package for controlling calls on Asterisk in real time.
Node-RED Zapier
NodeRED and Zapier integration packages allowing you to connect between NodeRED flows and Zaps.
UK Train Departures - Alexa Skill
A skill I created at the ReInvent Alexa Hackathon Alexa Skils Store
Alexa Slide Clicker
Something I started working on but never got around to releasing
Echo Show Security Camera with a Pi
The Echo Show is the first Alexa enabled device from Amazon with a screen, with this device Amazon introduced some new capabilities within the Sklls SDK particularly around video, one of these is the ability to view home security cameras such as the Nest and the Ring Doorbell using the command “Alexa show X camera”
AlexaPi - Its come a long way
Its over a year now since I released the first version of my AlexaPi code that turned a Raspberry Pi into your own Amazon Echo like device via the Alexa Voice Service API.
The Internet of (Sweet) Things
The Friday before Christmas was the Christmas Party at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, Unlike most office parties which involves a couple of boxes of cheap wine and drawing some holly on the meeting room whiteboard The Studio encourages residents to all create something interesting, there’s usually some silly games, creative art and assorted tech projects that people have put…
The $10 Echo
For the 3rd instillment of my “Putting Alexa on all the Things” series I’ve got Alexa up and running on a CHIP.
Alexa in the Browser
Following on from my previous hack allowing you to access Alexa from your phone with Twilio I present Alexa Web, accessing Alexa via your web browser.
Call Alexa
I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with the Amazon Echo and the underlying Alexa service which sits behind it.
SMS Lists via Google Docs & Twilio
Let face it the world runs on spreadsheets. Although meant as a financial tool they’ve found their way into just about every part of a business and quite a few home uses too.
Beacon Calling - TAD Hack London 2015
I attended my first TAD Hack event back in April, TAD Hack is a hackday aimed at telecom application developers, so in general its going to be people that like playing with things like SIP and WebRTC, possibly dabbling in a little light SMS!
Train Ticket Machines - What about the Power Users
Plenty of articles have been written on the UX of train ticket machines, while they tend to vary by train operating company they’re usually one of 2-3 varients and usually generally awful to use!
A Story of Enterprise IT:
Spock: Captain, Klingon Bird of Prey de-cloaking off the port side Kirk: Mr Sulu, ready photon torpedos Sulu: Captain, there’s a problem, Kirk: What Mr Sulu?
The Apple Sim - Its a Bad thing
Lots of people are getting excited about one of the features of the new iPad Air 2 - The Apple Sim, its being pitched as a single sim card that allows you to switch carriers as you please, I suspect that under the hood its a special kind of multi profile sim card that actually contains profiles for each carrier, or possibly even allows new profiles to be loaded over the air.
Indie Talk
For quite a while now I’ve been thinking, talking and hacking away on something I’m calling The Talk Project, I won’t go into too much detail about that here, you can read some more on the sites own page, and I’m intending to add a lot more to that site in the coming months.
A platform based bank account
For a long time I’ve always felt that telecoms and banking/payments are pretty similar industries when it comes to technology, both handle massive amounts of real time transactional data, making a payment in a shop using a visa card is fairly similar to the idea of sending someone an SMS when you strip it back, of course payments have to have higher levels of security than telecoms but…
A 'real' utility
Yesterday evening I noticed some problems with our mains supply at home, the lights were dimming for a short period of time maybe 2-3 minutes.
Three InTouch
I’ve been lucky enough over the past few weeks to trial Three’s InTouch app, which allows you to make and receive calls and SMS on your phone over WiFi, ideal for times when you don’t have coverage.
Faking iBeacons
Back in January at CES 2014 the organisers added a feature to the event app whereby you could unlock badges in the app by visiting different areas of the show floor and unlocking the badges by your phone detecting an iBeacon, I managed to write a simple hack to spoof these iBeacons from my MacBook therefore unlocking all the badges without leaving home :)
New site Old Blog posts
I finally decided I needed to overhaul my ‘site’ I had a very ageing wordpress blog that hadn’t seen much of an update in several years and really just needed taking out an shooting.
Beating the Phone Spammers
Ever since we moved into our house over 7 years ago now we’ve had a real problem with phone spam on the home number, we took over the same number as the lady who lived here previously as it was the fastest way to get a connection so that I could order ADSL on the line, I think I got it to 4-5days after we moved in :)
Tracking Data Usage
A few months back I changed ISP over toAndrews and Arnold, they’re great by the way, not the cheapest but I’m a big believer in you get what you pay for and they certainly delivery a quality product.
Distance Matrix
A few months back there was a serious possibility that we were going to have to move house as a result of my wifes' job, she’s an A&E Doctor and I won’t bore you with the details but the way that medical recrutment works is its all done on regions and you get allocated/offered a job in a certain region, this will then usually consist of ‘rotating’ around 5-6 (or more)…
Twilio to Sonos via Heroku, Pusher and a Pi.
Over the easter weekend I was looking for an idea of something to build, somehow I came up with the idea that it would be kind of cool to be able to make ‘announcements’ around my house when I’m not there, not really sure why but I’m sure there’s some use case for this when combined with a home security webcam or maybe I can just talk to the cats.
Electronic Payments & Graceful Degradation
Theres a lot of hype around NFC & mobile payments going around, analyst are predicting it as the next big thing and rumour mills are churning out stories about the iPhone 5 having NFC faster than a Foxconn plant on double time.
Android, Buyer Currency Support C-
One of the new features announced by Google yesterday was support for “Buyer Currency” now this may come as something of a shock to iPhone users but chargeable apps in the Android Market have been billed in the developers currency since launch!
My Breakfast
Last week I went to DroidCon in London, as I had an early start and I got the venue with half an hour to spare I had breakfast at the Breakfast Club Cafe in Angel, unfortunately our expense system only allows 50 characters in the description field when claiming expenses which I hardly think does this experience justice (nor can I claim to be embracing the spirit of Sarbanes-Oxley) therefore…
That syncing feeling
There’s been some recent discussions around contact syncing and particularly issues wiht the HTC Hero’s latest update.
T-Mobile UK Capped Data Charge - Hidden Rip Off
I recently managed to get my wife to become a regular user of mobile data, great I thought this stuff is finally getting mainstream traction, Until we got this months bill…
OpenMIC - Mobile Data Charging
We had a very interesting discussion at OpenMIC 2 today, I put the topic up as “Lets Design the Perfect Mobile Data Charging Model” quite a daunting task but I thought it might attract attention
iPhone 3.0 MMS Settings
I’ve been experimenting with my unlocked 3.0 iPhone 3G for a week or so now and I’ve just got the MMS Settings sorted.
T-Mobile G1 vs. iPhone - Round One to iPhone
So the G1 is out, I’ve had a chance to play with one in a T-Mobile store and it seems like a nice OS, however it doesn’t look like an iPhone killer yet.
Mobile Broadband signals the Death of WiFi Hotspots
Its been a long time since I last wrote a proper post and I doubt this will be that, however having just spent the afternoon chatting with the guys at carsonifiedabout whats happening in the mobile industry I’m feeling all inspired.
2008 Predictions in Mobile
Better late than never, Ive put down some of my thoughts as to what _might_happen in the mobile industry in 2008.
My Web 2.0 Life
I’ve been thinking about my whole web2.0 life for a few weeks now and the multitude of different platforms out there.
So What is twitter? Its really hard to say as I don’t think it falls into any obviuos catagory, its a great example of a new format for information thats simple and flexlible that will push tech forward.