Author: cymplecy

  Once you start playing around with getting Alexa to control stuff around your home with NodeRED, you are normally faced with the issue of needing an Alexa skill. And you then either have...

After testing at home – uploaded my modified Scratch Desktop to dropbox and took the robot into school Software install went fine – logged onto dropbox -downloaded my zip file and unzipped it to...

ALPHA STATUS: ONLY FOR EXPERIMENTAL USERS 🙂 I’ve manage to add native ScratchGPIO blocks to Scratch 3 Desktop on the Pi. If you fancy trying it out (its liable to change so don’t start...

As part of my ever-lasting quest for cheap robotics, I’m trying out using continuous servos as the motors. These are simply standard servos mechanisms where the internal position feed back has been disabled (and...

I normally teach Scratch using 1.4 in class but decided to give Scratch 3 a try-out in January/February with Year 4 (previous class experience – one half-term when they were in Year 3) Summary...

If your broker accepts websocket connections then you can connect to it using that protocol instead of normal port 1883 connection To do so, add an MQTT node and then configure it for a...

Simply run sudo apt-get install mosquitto mosquitto-clients This will install and run mosquitto. But if you want it to run automatically at startup then run sudo service mosquitto start To configure how it operates,...

As anyone who knows me will testify – I’m a great fan/user of the Cheerlights project and my house is full or neopixels that are controlled by the Cheerlights API feeds. But lots of...

Amazon Dash button re-deployed as garden #cheerlights colour changer pic.twitter.com/Eycdnj04wD — Simon Walters (@cymplecy) July 19, 2018 I’d heard about hacking Amazon Dash buttons to control stuff via a Pi but never bothered with...

You can now use a DHT11 Temperature/Humidity sensor with ScratchGPIO. To get readings simple use an example script like this to ask for readings once per second from a sensor connected to pin10.