Battery endurance is a big issue with modern mobile devices. Who wants a phone that goes down in the middle of the day? But with increasing screen sizes and ever faster processors, how do manufacturers mange to squeeze a day or more out of those batteries?
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As a late-term “Baby Boomer” – I grew up with black-and-white TV and an assortment of shows that didn’t need a lot of blood or sophisticated tricks, but glued us to the TV sets anyway. Time to re-create some of the magic.
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A bit chunk of breached confidential data, containing millions of e-mail addresses and passwords, were -again- made public a few days ago. How can we protect our user’s data and accounts?
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There are a few ways to measure power consumption, voltage or current with an Arduino. Unfortunately, the ESP8266 has a few limitations that make it somewhat difficulty to get things going. Let’s look at an easy way to achieve our task.
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While the LUMOSUR environment does it’s thing based on sensors, touch screens and mobile controllers, voice control is also a part of the mix. We are not developing an Alexa clone and you won’t be able to order a pizza through LUMOSUR, but you can entrust it with your home automation, air conditioners – even door locks – because it doesn’t require any cloud- or even Internet connection. However – a good microphone is required to reliably recognize voice commands. So – we tried the ReSpeaker v2.0 microphone array. Read More →
Home automation is cool. It really is. Switch power and or off, lights come on with a touch or voice command, everything can be controlled from everywhere. Well – sometimes. Or not. Because there’s a big fight going on below the deck. And you may want to wait who wins. Read More →
After having been working with voice controlled or .. voice activated “smart” environments for a while, here’s my take: This could get really great if .. and that’s a big if .. we find a common protocol that enables flexibility, compatibility and true interactions. Read More →
So – you got this Amazon Alexa device at Cyber-Monday? And maybe a connected “smart” plug or light bulb? Before you start adding more “smart” stuff – here’s what you need to know. Read More →
Yep – those little ESP chips are cute. And powerful. And easy to program. And much more. But if you are going to control more than – say a closet light – you want to think about security. This requires hashes and tracking of the current time.
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Cheap IoT devices like power plugs are mostly manufactured in China. They connect to “bridging” servers we don’t really have control over, they are usually not documented and those required “bridging” services may fail or even be terminated at any time. Which would of course render your (or my) “smart” power plugs useless. Time to do something about it. Read More →