Showing results for 2016
Collecting and Handling 911 Event Data
Seattle has a pretty awesome approach to data availability and transparency through data.Seattle.gov. The city has thousands of data sets available (from in-car police video records to land zon…
Location to HTTP - Send GPS data to remote script
I wanted to capture my phone's location information and store it remotely (on my server) so I could do with it as I please. Most of the apps I found were severely limited in that they only mapp…
Webcam Captures Text and Stores in MySQL Database
While visiting my family recently, I saw my dad entering numbers from each of the 5-8 ticket receipts he receives daily to keep track of the work he's done, report for payroll, etc. I knew ther…
Data Visualization and Demo
As mentioned previously, my goal wasn't to just create a home controller/dashboard but to also collect as much data as possible while doing so. So tonight, I started playing around with a few d…
Home Automation and NFC Tags
NFC has proven to be a pretty useless technology for cell phones (unless you're one of the people who use you Google Wallet/Apple Pay). Nevertheless, I decided to buy some tags and play wi…
Expanding the Home Dashboard
In the previous post, I outlined the Home Dashboard touchscreen for controlling lights, temperature/humidity, displaying Amazon Echo information, displaying who's home (via bluetooth sniffing), …
Home Dashboard using a Raspberry Pi
After creating a desktop home automation dashboard and, later, a live stream "digital picture frame", I got the idea to combine the two into an always-on control panel that condenses everything …
Using a Pi to measure TV habits
As noted here, I'm using the the DirecTV SHEF API and a Raspberry Pi to poll my DirecTV receivers every minute and store what they're doing into a MySQL database. After ~6 months of st…
Webcam Stream as Digital Picture Frame
I don't have a quality window view in my office building and found myself checking the local news' weather cams throughout the day so I thought it'd be cool to have a live outdoor view streaming to m…
A month of tinkering
New Design
The original design wasn't "clean" feeling and didn't function too well on mobile or even tablet displays. I changed that up a bit and the new design has a lot of transparent divs, …
The Foundation
Purpose
Let’s just get it out of the way now -- there’s no true practical purpose or value in doing this. I took this on as an experiment and opportunity to learn something new.
What is it?
Using a …