Piccorobo arduino biped

April 9, 2017 Frances Berriman

I picked up a little flat-pack robot arduino kit while I was in Tokyo. I couldn't find any instructions on how to put it together in English, but VStone does have a wiki with instructions that Google Translate got right enough to follow along. It appears to be called a "PiccoRobo", and it was actually a piece of cake to assemble, even though I've never built anything with an arduino before. It can walk backwards, forwards, make left and right turns and shake its head.

The Japanese instructions can be found on the wiki over here. I skipped the first part and didn't bother testing the board and parts before assembling the robot. A couple pro tips if you find yourself assembling a similar set.

When you get to the calibration step, if, like me, you find one or two of the servos are totally at the wrong angle - rather than correcting it in the software, I actually unscrewed the part that was wrong (in my case, his left leg was a good 45° off) and reassembled it closer to 0° so there's only minor software corrections to make.
Mark the ends of the cables of the servos as you go (with tape or a sharpie), so you'll remember which is which when you come to plug them into the board - I had to pull and hope I could see where the cable went - I still ended up swapping his left and right legs by mistake.
The battery box shifts slightly from side to side as it walks, as it's not a snug fit between the two pieces of MDF inside, and can cause it to tip over. I recommend rectifying this by either using a bit of sticky tack or velcro tape to secure it in place - either way, you'll want to still be able to remove it to change the batteries down the line. I may even end up moving the battery pack to the robot's back as a counter weight when its head inevitably gets too heavy with electronics (fashioned into a jetpack, perhaps).

It's all up and running now. I'm going to pick up a wifi module and a couple inputs and outputs and see if I can't hook him up to the house next.

A short romance with Pebble

December 7, 2016 Frances Berriman

I picked up a Pebble Time Round cheap on Amazon after seeing a friend sporting one recently. Finally, a watch that's lady-wrist sized! It's pretty and e-paper! It's notifications work and they have adorable animations! It's developer friendly! I love this thing.

Pebble has built-in activity tracking that I'm syncing out to other systems like Google Fit and Fitbit

My GadgetWraps strap matches my keyboard. Swoon.

The evening it arrived, the rumours started that Fitbit had acquired Pebble and Pebble would be no more. Uh oh. Did I jump in too late?

So slim. This thing actually just looks like a regular watch.

Even with the backlight off, the e-paper displaying my minimal watch face is easy to read at a glance

Today, Pebble confirmed that the company did indeed get acquired, along with all of it's IP and some of the team. Pebble is dissolving, and the hardware is no longer being manufactured.

Bummer. At least I know why it was cheap now.

I'm not returning it. It's a nice device and it's not going to stop working overnight and really, what are the alternatives for a slim watch that doesn't look like you strapped a circa-1999 Nokia to your arm? The Time Round is arguably the only feature-rich wearable that appears to have not been exclusively designed for chunky white guys.

There's an alternative operating system for the watches, called GadgetBridge, that I may have to look into but honestly, given that most hardware these days seems destined to return to the sand it was once formed from within a year or two, I didn't believe this was a forever deal anyway.

Braun Oral-B 3000 Bluetooth toothbrush

December 6, 2016 Frances Berriman

Getting a bluetooth toothbrush was never my intention. A third Philips Sonicare died in our household in 18 months, so I felt it was time to give the competition a go and that's just what I ended up with for "free". Why Braun hasn't branded these models BlueToothBrushes is anyone's guess. My marketing consultancy rates are reasonable, FYI.

Let's be clear - the bluetooth aspect of this toothbrush is useless - but, like Gillette and the endless blades, they've got to innovate somewhere, right?

It's so overwhelmingly stupid that I can't really be bothered to write much about it. The app only lets you set up one user, so if you're in a household that uses one handset with multiple heads - well, you're gonna get bonus fake brushing points. It might have made sense if it was to encourage kids to brush their teeth, but the application is clinically boring. To quote Dr Ian Malcolm, "Your Scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

It doesn't even tweet.

Amazon Echo Dot 2nd Generation

October 25, 2016 Frances Berriman

We're taking our first proper foray into the voice-activated side of home automation with the new Amazon Echo Dot 2nd Generation. This is the first Dot you can order independently from the Amazon Echo - previously, you could only order a Dot via the original Echo device. This one also only cost me $50, instead of the $179 for the full Echo (I tried to get one of these on Amazon's big black friday sale thing - but their website crashed. Poor me.).

It's going to take a few weeks to really get a feel for it, but here's a couple of immediate reactions to the device after receiving and unboxing it yesterday.

It's tiny!

This thing is literally palm size and about as thick as a stack of coasters. Given the quality of the sound that comes out of it and how well Alexa picks up my voice - I'm really impressed with the hardware.

It's confusing to set up.

The Alexa app already knew that I'd bought the device and gave no prompts on it as to where to go to get the wifi set up. We had at least 2 minutes of Alexa loudly complaining that it didn't have an internet connection. Software usability definitely feels like the weaker side.

Alexa is not totally comfortable with my British accent.

Enjoy when Alexa mishears me asking for a specific playlist and turns off my lights instead. I can see this will cause zero problems.
— Frances Berriman (@phae) October 24, 2016

I'll be back with more on Alexa after she's settled in a bit.

MySmartBlinds review

October 18, 2016 Frances Berriman

Back in October of 2014 I backed my first kickstarter project - a set of devices to make blinds "smart". A little earlier this year, the fruits of this particular project started to arrive and now that I've been using them for a couple of months, I'm ready to show you how MySmartBlinds are working out.

MySmartBlinds are exactly what they sound like - they're devices that you put into your slatted blinds to make them controllable via a mobile device. I've got 3 sets installed - 2 in the bedroom and one in the office. They require no hardwiring, but do require a bluetooth compatible iOS or Android device for setup and control.

The good

Firstly - they're a lot better than I expected. After installation, they've basically worked without interference since. To me, this is a good sign - very few of the "smart" things I've put into the house have gone in without some amount of wrangling and debugging from the start. I also misunderstood from the pitch that they would require removing the tilt-wand - but this actually stays as part of the system and acts as a manual switch to the system - tugging the wand tilts the blinds a little in a cycle, so no need to pull out a phone to make a small change. The optional add-on remotes are nice for phone-free control, too.

I've set the blinds up so that they open in the mornings. At a time that I'd like to be waking up, the blinds gradually open up over a 15 minute block. It's a much more preferable way to wake than a blaring alarm or from up-dimming the interior lighting (I tried this for a while - the artificial light was just too jarring). The blinds then close up again at night at a set time, which is nice from a privacy point of view on the busy road we live on. I haven't tried it yet, but they also have a "sun tracking" mode, which does exactly what you think it does, enabling the system to adapt to varying light levels throughout the year.

The motors themselves are powered by a battery that lives in the top of the blinds, hidden away which are either charged over USB or with a solar powered add-on. Since I installed the blinds a few months back, I haven't had to charge them yet, and MySmartBlinds promise a rather vague 6-12 months of charge with "average" use.

The bad

Some caveats to that, however - the android version of the app seems buggy and I had issues using that to setup and control the blinds. The iOS version seems to be a lot more functional. I also had some difficulty updating the firmware on a couple of them, which necessitated removing and re-adding them to the app.

The app itself is rather amateurish looking and seems out of place along side more polished-looking apps on my phone. I also, as always, wish it had a) a web-based version because it's 2016 and b) had outside application connectivity - this is yet another siloed system that can't communicate with my other IoT home devices. It means I can't change behaviour based on whether we're away or have guests, for example.

They're also loud. I mean, they're pretty mechanical, so of course they make a noise, but I didn't realise how loud they'd be. It's not a deal breaker since opening and closing happens so quickly and mostly not when I'm right next to them. Here's a video, though, to give you a better idea of what the motors sound like, as well as latency between app and blind (which is actually pretty decent).

Conclusion

I love 'em. I've still got one kit left that I haven't been able to use anywhere - but I would definitely get a couple more kits for upgrading all windows in the house when I eventually get around to replacing the roller blinds in those rooms.

Price points? Well, the kits I have (enough for 4 windows, plus 2 remotes) cost me $249 via kickstarter. I didn't get the solar powered option - I got the set that included some very long USB cables for each window.

The equivalent currently retails for $99 per basic kit (everything you need to control a window via your phone), $60 per remote, $14 for the long USB chargers and $45 for solar panel add-on. Of course, unlike Somfy, or another built-in system, they're restricted in regards to the type of blinds they work on but a Somfy system starts at around $270 making this is a pretty cost-effective, easily temporary, entry-level option.

Hidrate Spark smart bottle review

April 11, 2016 Frances Berriman

My phone did not truly capture the strong Win95 vibes this cap is giving me.

Taking dangerous steps into the land of We Put a Chip In It, I backed and just received the Hidrate Spark - a "smart" water bottle that tracks how much you're drinking.

I don't have a ton to say about it. It doesn't need charging (see below). It holds water, which you can later drink. You can pair it with bluetooth to an app on your phone that'll log the water you drink (or pour into your houseplants, as I've been doing).

Most "you must drink seventeen gallons of water an hour to not return to a feral state" advice is quackery at it's best, but since I subsist on mostly tea and gin, I figured I could stand to take in a little more of the pure stuff. The bottle glows from time to time to tell you to drink more water - that's the smart bit.

Thoughts about the bottle:

It's huge! I've never owned a water bottle this big. I didn't know everyone else was carrying around so much in a clean-water-available-in-taps country.
The soft silicone of the main compartment feels quite nice and soft (not sure why this matters) and the teal colour I picked is pretty cool and makes me think watery thoughts. However, the cap colour doesn't match and is more of a murky green Windows 95 shade in hard plastic.
Operating the button to flip the lid is noisy - but that's okay, because it's important to notify your colleagues that you're hydrating, so they know you're about to be more alert.
The glow is fun, but underwhelming.
The sync and glow smart features are disappointing since neither of those features appear to reliably work.
It holds water.

I went to look up how to remove and change the battery and it looks like they'll be selling new batteries. Fool me once... But, I believe that without a charged battery, the bottle will retain all of it's water-holding abilities. I'll let you know if that isn't the case.

I got an early bird cheap-o price on the thing, but I believe they retail at about $50 + replacement battery once a year.

Conclusion: You can probably skip this one.