Recent Posts
Weekend Project V
Published: May 19 2013
I have been seeing a number of Automation or Internet/Mobile controlled home appliances projects like Lifx or Ninja Blocks which made me wonder ‘how hard is it actually to do such a thing?’ (from the hardware point of view) so for this Weekend Project I got my self some opt-isolated relays and a power strip with the idea of creating a power switch that can be controlled by TTL, this project is really easy but relatively risky as it involves switching 220V AC so some care is needed
anyways here is a simple use case demo
get a cheap power strip
open up the power strip
remove the unnesacerry items and make some room for the relay board
to make the relay board fit in the space we can break some plastic
parts by applying little force
mark the holes for relay
create some holes
looking good
Finally make the connections to relays
Raspberry Pi
Published: December 25 2012
After waiting for more then a month my Raspberry Pi finally arrived last week. Its a great piece of hardware at a great price, as always I am not really clear on what all I am going to do with it, initial plan was a Media Center running XBMC for the TV, I live in a rented apartment which I am sharing with some friends, we have an old 21” CRT TV which does not have any input source like VGA/HDMI, so the RCA composite video connector on Raspberry Pi made a lot of sense.
To power it I am using the charger I got with my Galaxy Tab which has a nice 5 Volt - 2 Ampere output which should be more then sufficient for what i have planned
- Home Automation using the GPIO pins
- Different kinds of Bots
- 1 Player Foosball
- Solar-Powered FTP server (well not really but super cool idea)
Since it boots directly through an SD card converting it from one project to other is really easy, currently I have 2 configurations on 2 saperate SD cards, one with XBMC (Raspbmc) streaming to TV from my NAS and other with Arch Linux for testing out different server/service configuration
and well here are some pictures
PS - This just showed up on HN!
Moving to Github Pages
Published: December 13 2012
I have finally decide to move to Github Pages instead of S3, since i was anyways using jekyll, moving to github pages was easy, Github has some instructions here, I have also added redirects from wordpress to this blog for the moment, there are few images/files which are pointing to wp-uploads in my older posts, I still need to move them somewhere else and then I can finally say bye bye to wordpress
Moving from Wordpress to S3
Published: December 12 2012
Finally i decided to move away from Wordpress to a Static blog hosted entirely on S3. I have a lot of things tied up with wordpress, planning to move them over when i get more time, till then i will be using both wordpress and S3, new blog location http://blog.ankurs.com and Post Archive
First Car
Published: May 25 2012
Last Month i bought my first car a Honda Brio and i am absolutely loving it. Bangalore’s traffic is pretty bad and not to mention the problems with finding parking, but i guess it will take me a while to get used to these issues.