This weekend, I finished writing the battery voltage monitor for the Hackulator. While doing research about how to display the battery voltage in the menu for the Raspberry Pi, I initially came across some information that developing plugins for LXPanel was the way to go. However, it seems the Raspberry Pi PIXEL environment is a highly customized version of LXDE and I was unable to find information of how to create a plugin. However, did notice that there is an existing plugin called "System Tray" which is part of the menu by default, so I looked in that direction and came across some python c...

Tonight I went to mount the camera in my adapter and it turns out it was just a bit too big. After a few more revisions, I printed another one out, put some double-sides foam tape so it would have a bit of a seal and tried it again. It went in tight and fits great. I tested it out and the angle looks so much better with a 15-degree tilt. Since it was dark out by the time I finished up and I don't work tomorrow, I decided I'll go ahead finish up taping everything together and putting the trunk back in order then. I may put the STL file for the camera mount up on thingiverse so that other people...

I was looking into the LCD Controller Board I have. I received it a couple of weeks ago and it basically works and has the connectors for the LCD screen I have, but I didn't read the eBay ad closely enough and apparently the resolutions and screen ratios are programmed into the controller board and the one I bought had a 1280x800 resolution programmed into it so a black bar appeared on the right. This time I ordered from Aliexpress because the stated shipping times looked much faster (12-20 days as opposed to 24-59 days on eBay). I plan to use the board I have for now and will just swap it out...

Tonight I replaced my 3D Printer nozzle with a 0.4mm nozzle instead of the 0.3mm it had on there and the flow is so much better, so now it's back in operation. I also hooked up my Octo-Power Box and got that working through voice commands and I set up my windows computer to remote start up and shut down and enabled voice commands for that too. That one was harder because I could only find one example that was close, but I was able to get it figured out so that voice worked too. I got the LED strip control I built put up and functioning. I had to re-solder the ESP8266 chip because the flux was ...

I finished up my Octo-Power Box and it works great. I made some more progress on the Hackulator towards getting it all set up and made a few decisions such as looking into creating some LXPanel plugins to deal with the battery level indicator and the Keypad Driver.

I received a bunch of the items I've been looking forward to and I also started organizing and prioritizing my projects and realized I had around 12 projects in the works of varying sizes. Over the weekend, I finished up the X-10 Controller Project I started last week including finishing touches on the source code, mounting it in a box, and writing up about the project. I also built a Sonoff Dual Power Outlet Box that I was able to load the Tasmota Firmware onto.

I also made some progress on the Hackulator and fixed the wiring. One of the wires had broken off the USB board. I fixed that and th...

Monday, I received my other Light Switch and it installed very easily. After all the playing around with the X-10 devices, I decided to buy a CM15A off eBay or multiple reasons:

I got an AdaFruit Huzzah Feather because it can make use of a LiPo battery for reliability and wired up a couple harnesses, so the entire thing can be assembled without a breadboard. I should be getting a project box in a couple of days that I'll stick the circuitry into. I polished up the firmware and implemented the new commands so other people can put together a cheap and easy modern FireCracker controller if they ...

I preformed the electrical tests for the Hackulator again and they tested good. I also had to shave down the faux connector so that the battery panel laid flat. I also took a sharpie and colored any places that should be black. The calculator is looking really great and it's pretty much just software that I need to work on at this point.

I went ahead and connected the X10 FireCracker to the Wio Link since it is WiFi capable and I thought it would make a great board to control the FireCracker with. My only concern was that the Wio Link/ESP8266 uses 3.3V logic and since the FireCracker has an RF...

Tonight I almost completely finished assembling the Hackulator. I decided I was going to glue the rear cover on so I could cut more of the insides away because it was so tight. I ended up using hot glue to place things inside and had to make a few minor adjustments such as making wires longer or re-gluing parts in a slightly different place. I had accidentally pulled an SMD LED off with some hot glue and overheated it while trying to solder. I was able to put a different LED on in it's place, but it's red instead of blue. I still need to do some final checks to make sure everything still works...

So I worked on the software setup for the Hackulator so that I could perform some hardware testing. I had written a little document that outlined the steps of what I did, so I followed those and installed the battery monitor. When I ran it, I got a reading, but it appeared way off. Upon closer inspection, I had discovered that I soldered the 2 resistors in the wrong places. After swapping those I still wasn't getting a good voltage value. After looking at some data sheets, I discovered there's a few differences with the SPI communications between the MCP3008 and MCP3002. After making some adju...