Tech Tidbits & More

Welcome to the Internet Home of John M. Wargo; I created this site back in 2009 so I could post articles about things that interested me. Herein you’ll find articles on a lot of different topic areas: Mobile development, Web development, Internet of Things (IoT), and a lot more. Every time I learn some new technology or complete some cool or interesting development or IoT project I publish an article here.

You’ll also find information about my books, source code projects on GitHub, and articles published in or on other sites or magazines, even videos of my many conference presentations or project demonstrations. I’m also especially fond of the series of Stupid Developer Tricks posts.

You can view all articles in reverse chronological order, or you can find articles by category. Of course, if you can’t find what you need in those views, use Search to find anything anywhere on the site.

Recent Posts

• Note: An AI Generated pill displayed in the list below indicates that the post description displayed on the page was generated from the post content using Generative AI (GenAI). The post content itself was written by a human (me).

• Mounting Breadboard-friendly NeoPixels

  last week  | Categories: Internet of Things (IoT), Project Builds

  I build a lot of projects using Adafruit's NeoPixels. They dramatically simplify the process of wiring multiple LEDs into a project, requiring only three wires between each NeoPixel rather than two wires and a resistor to each LED. This article explains an issue I discovered with mounting Breadboard-friendly RGB Smart NeoPixel in a project and the solution I found for resolving it.

• USB 3.0 Cable Power Switch

  3 weeks ago  | Categories: Project Builds, ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)

  On a couple of projects lately I found myself repeatedly plugging and unplugging microcontrollers to/from my development system. This happens most frequently when writing faulty code for an ESP32 device and, when the compiled code runs on an ESP32, the code Panics and repeatedly reboots the device - panicking every time it restarts.

• Phishing American Express Message Ready to View

  last month  | Categories: Phishing

  I received an email message the other day that seemed to be from American Express, but wasn't.

• Cloud Function Certificate Issue

  last month  | Categories: Arduino, ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)

  After publishing my M5StackC-Plus Cloud Function Execution example, I used it for about a week before it just stopped working one day.

• ESP32 Request Repeater With Sleep

  last month  | Categories: Arduino, ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)

  In my previous post I described how to put an ESP device to sleep (allowing it to wake up later). I used a sample sketch I created, ESP32 Request Repeater (HTTP), to show how it works.

• Putting an ESP32 Device to Sleep

  last month  | Categories: Arduino, ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)

  While playing around this week with a hardware project, I decided to spend some time learning how to use Sleep modes in an Arduino project on an ESP32 device. It turns out that it's not that hard to do, but you really have to pay attention to a couple of things as you code your project. In this post, I demonstrate how to build an Arduino project that sends a HTTP request to a remote server, puts the device running the sketch asleep for a few minutes, then wakes up and does it again until the device loses power.

• ESP32 Parroting Web Server

  last month  | Categories: Arduino, ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)

  I'm working on a version of my Pumpkin LED Controller for the Unihiker M10 single board computer. Web and mobile apps have a variety of issues when connecting to a web server running on an ESP32 device (as I wrote about in Accessing an Arduino ESP32 Web Serverand Pumpkin Controller Native Apps for Windows) and I think a device like the Unihiker may provide a way around them.

• M5Stack M5StickC-PLUS Garage Door Opener

  last month  | Categories: Arduino, ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)

  In ESP32 HTTP Client Request with JSON Body I demonstrated how to call a remote API from an ESP32 device; in that example, the request body passed content in JSON format to the server. As I described in that post, I built that sample because I wanted to be able to build an ESP32 garage door opener and that was a stepping stone for me to this project.

• Added Apps and Demos Page

  last month  | Categories: Miscellaneous

  Over the years, I created several apps that solve a particular problem I had. The first was the Goodreads Page Adjuster and most recently the Cert2Arduino app. When I published a simple service to use with my ESP32 HTTPS Client Request with JSON Body, I decided to publish a demo site visitors could use to try out the service as they worked on their related Arduino or ESP32 sketch.

• Coding Unihiker Programs Using PyCharm

  last month  | Categories: Internet of Things (IoT)

  AI Generated   I recently had the opportunity to work with the Unihiker M10 device from DF Robot. Using PyCharm, I was able to easily create a new project, write Python code, and deploy it to the Unihiker device. By configuring the deployment settings in PyCharm, I was able to upload my code to the device and run it successfully. Overall, the process was straightforward and allowed me to quickly test and run my Python programs on the Unihiker device.