Blog Archives

HydroBot

HydroBot is a modular control system for automating hydroponic gardens. This system is designed with three objectives in mind. First, it will facilitate optimal growing techniques by using scheduling and feedback control loops to maintain state and adapt to changing conditions. Second, it will simplify controls

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Posted in HydroBot, Projects

Low Cost DIY Photobooth

Photobooths are popular at many types of social events, including weddings, birthday parties, and school dances. However, renting one can easily cost upwards of $1000, making them impractical for many events. So when a friend mentioned wanting one for her

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Posted in Linux, Projects, Python

BeagleBone Black Soft Power-Off

The BeagleBone Black is an ARM-based device and doesn’t have ACPI support like most x86 systems. ACPI generally handles triggering shutdown and other power management events on x86 systems, so this functionality is missing on the BeagleBone. We can easily

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Posted in Linux

BeagleBone Black and DTC

Arch Linux ARM currently includes an unpatched version of dtc (device tree compiler) which lacks the “@” option. If you want to enable additional UARTs, SPI, I2C, or just use GPIO without recompiling the bootloader, you need a patched version

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Posted in Linux

Downloading wget Without wget: Use bash

There are many ways to download and install wget without having wget itself installed. For example, one can use curl, a sort of competitor to wget, or a package manager with libfetch or some other library-level downloader integrated (such as

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Posted in Linux, Quick Tips, Technology

Google Voice and Asterisk

There are numerous guides about setting up Google Voice and an incoming sip number for free outgoing calling. Sadly, all of the guides I found were written for FreePBX or some other Asterisk bundle, and also used a shell script

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Posted in Linux, Technology

(Really) Cheap RFID door opener

Well, the school year is over, so I thought I’d post up some information about my (extremely cheap and junky-looking but functional) door opener.

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Posted in Arduino, Projects

Archlinux Chroot on Gentoo Guide

Archlinux is quite a popular distribution among the geekier crowd of GNU/Linux users. I understand that Ubuntu is the most popular GNU/Linux distribution in general. It may supposedly fit the needs of the populace, but that attempt to support getting

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Posted in Linux

Insurgency: Access your linux box from anywhere

The problem: you have a computer sitting behind a firewall. You want to access it from a different location, but you don’t have the ability to forward any ports to it. The answer: SSH tunneling.

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Posted in Linux, Quick Tips

Quick and Easy Passwordless public-key auth

Need passwordless auth with ssh? Need it really really fast? 3 steps and you’re done. ssh-keygen -t rsa      (don’t enter a passphrase) ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa user@remotehost ssh user@remotehost Wasn’t that easy?

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Posted in Linux