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This page lists all articles in reverse chronological order. Use the Categories page to view the list of categories or Search to locate a particular article.

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• 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).

• NeoPixel Stick Mounting Issues

  Thursday, May 15, 2025 at 07:28 AM in Arduino, ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT), Project Builds
  

  In yesterday's post about mounting Adafruit NeoPixel Stick devices in a line, I made the following comment: "But, the folks at Adafruit didn't feel the need to make this easy." For this post, I thought I'd explain why I said that.

• Mounting Multiple NeoPixel Sticks in a Line

  Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 05:48 PM in Arduino, ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT), Project Builds
  

  This post describes a 3D printed device I use to mount multiple Adafruit NeoPixel Sticks together in a line. I had a friend create it for a project I'm working on.

• FoxAlien Masuter Pro Spindle

  Tuesday, May 13, 2025 at 07:14 AM in Woodworking
  

  Recently, I purchased a FoxAlien Masuter Pro CNC Router for my workshop. I assembled all the parts and started testing the unit. Everything seemed to work, except for the spindle. I couldn't get the included software to turn the spindle on.

• Mounting Breadboard-friendly NeoPixels

  Sunday, March 16, 2025 at 06:11 AM in Arduino, ESP32, 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

  Sunday, March 2, 2025 at 01:37 PM in 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

  Saturday, February 22, 2025 at 10:48 AM in Phishing
  

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

• Cloud Function Certificate Issue

  Tuesday, February 18, 2025 at 07:53 PM in 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

  Tuesday, February 18, 2025 at 06:46 PM in 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

  Sunday, February 16, 2025 at 08:15 AM in 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

  Saturday, February 15, 2025 at 08:41 PM in 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

  Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 05:26 PM in 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

  Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 07:24 AM in 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

  Monday, February 10, 2025 at 06:02 PM in 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.

• Playing Around with Info Orbs

  Saturday, February 8, 2025 at 08:59 AM in ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)
  

  A while back, I learned about this ESP32 project called Info Orbs; it's a simple project that pairs 5 1.8 inch circular displays with a simple stand and some pretty cool software. The kit seems to be designed as a first project for people interested in getting into Arduino; it requires a little bit of soldering and the entire software configuration and deployment process runs in Visual Studio Code. The assembly instructions are simple and easy to follow.

• ESP32 HTTP Client Request with JSON Body

  Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at 06:57 AM in ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)
  

  A few weeks ago I published an article called ESP32 Connect Using HTTPS that demonstrated how to build an Arduino sketch for the ESP32 platform that connected to a remote server using TLS (HTTPS). I wrote that article because I wanted to learn how to connect to a REST API running on a server online and I knew that most (all) modern API servers required TLS.

• Amazon Prime Invoice Scam

  Wednesday, January 29, 2025 at 07:25 AM in Phishing
  

  Received a scam/phishing email the other day that really surprised me. The message is so clearly a scam that I wonder why they even bothered to send it. Here's the email message:

• Phishing Email Elon Electronic Device

  Sunday, January 26, 2025 at 12:09 PM in Phishing
  

  An interesting email showed up in my inbox this morning. Interesting because it appears to be from Oracle (and I work for Oracle) but there's a whole bunch of weirdness about the message. Take a look, here's the message:

• Certificate Conversion Utility in Gemini

  Saturday, January 25, 2025 at 09:56 AM in Miscellaneous
  

  AI Generated   I'm excited to find out that my Certificate to Arduino announcement post made it into Google Gemini.

• Certificate to Arduino Command-line

  Friday, January 24, 2025 at 06:59 AM in Arduino, JavaScript, Internet of Things (IoT)
  

  Before I created the web application described in Automated Public Cert to Arduino Header Conversion, I started with a simple node.js command-line utility. I like command-line tools and starting with the Node version made sense to me. I switched to the web app version once I realized that most people who needed to do the certificate conversion to Arduino wouldn't have node installed on their development systems.

• ESP32 Connect Using HTTPS

  Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 07:02 AM in ESP32, Internet of Things (IoT)
  

  As I described in my previous post, I'm working on a project where I'm using an M5Stack device to interact with a Google Firebase Function I have running in the cloud. As I started planning my project's code, I realized that the SSL (HTTPS) requirement Firebase Functions forces on applications would be a problem for me.

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