The McKenzies' Blog…

This posting has been inspired by a recent posting (Take control of your notifications) from @sciencebase on his website “sciencetext”.  It does make sense to turn off unwanted notifications from websites, but if you do wish to receive them then you can take some simple steps to take control if your inbox.  Pretty much every mail service and mail client have built in filtering rules that can be used.   I’m going to show you how to configure mail filters in GMail since that’s where my email is hosted.

 

I’m always amazed at how many people NEVER use filters or have even heard of them.  I see this all the time in the work place as well as with friends.  People I have worked with that used Outlook never ever use rules to filter email out of the inbox and I’ve seen people with 80,000+ emails in their INBOX!!! That is, in a word, retarded!

 

Right, on to the important stuff …

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I find it rather frustrating that there aren’t any good ole coffee shops anymore. Sure, you can go on down to a Starbucks or a Costa Coffee or some other big name coffee vending place but there’s zero atmosphere in these places. In most cases it’s nearly impossible to just sit and chat in these places because of the noise due to how busy they are.

I remember some great coffee shops back in Canada and the US, the sort of places that comfy chairs and sofa’s with coffee tables, good cheap coffee and sort of atmosphere that allows friends to gather and chat.

Why am I righting about this?  Well, I went in to Cambridge today to meet up with a couple of friends, one of them picked an Italian Café called Café Milano, it’s more of a restaurant then a café but that was fine.  I was the first one there and asked about a table for 3 the bloke asked if we were planning to eat as he didn’t have tables available “just for coffee”.  Now, it was lunch time, but as a coffee shop it really struck me as odd that we wouldn’t be able to just sit and drink coffee.  As it was we’d decided to eat so all was “good” I guess.

That was what got me thinking about why there aren’t any just good ole coffee shops.   I’m sure they must still exist, perhaps the people that know about them keep quiet out of fear of them becoming popular and getting over run, and I suppose I couldn’t blame them for it.

I like the coffee shop in our village at the Cottenham Community Centre, they have a couple of comfy sofa’s which is nice, but they could do with a few more of them.  My only real complaint about the place though is because it’s an old Church, the very high ceilings do nothing for the noise levels in the place.  The coffee there is good and the nibbles are great, but the noise can really do your head in after a while.  They also have free WIFI, which I think these days is a bit of a must in coffee shops.

Anyhow, just a small rant to ask where all the friendly little coffee shops have gone to If you know of any and are willing to share, please let me know.

Further to the blog posting over at Lisa & Emma’s Blog, I’d posted about how the girls got a cute little Syrian Hamster, named Nibbler, for Christmas.  I wanted a way to keep an eye on him in his cage that might be fun for the kids too… what to do, what to do .. oh yeah, get geeky and find a small camera for the cage, HamsterCam<tm>

This is something quite new to the market and it’s come out just at the right time.. enter the SMART-I (World smallest Wi-Fi Camera) by Smart Witness.

Here are a couple of pics of the camera fitted to the cage.

The field of view is pretty tight on the camera, which is a bit of weakness as it’s sort of sold as a security type device, it’s only 50 degrees, it really wants to be closer to 90 degree’s I think (or at least adjustable).  But it really is a crack’n little device.

Setup is crazy easy, plug it in (or put a battery in), switch it on, look for it’s WIFI Access Point SSID and connect to it.  If you want it to join your existing WIFI network so it acts as a WIFI client rather then an access point on it’s own, just switch it to the Setup Setting, connect to it’s SSID and configure it for your network including the WIFI key, switch it off and back on again and you’re done.

There are a couple other minor annoyances I have with the device but all but one can be fixed with firmware updates.  The one that can’t however is it’s ability to see in low light.  I don’t mean no light, but middle of the afternoon with the curtain drawn and all you get is a black camera.. not really ideal for a “security” type device.

I’ve not yet tested it’s ability to see with a IR light source.  I’ll test that and if it works I may rig up an IR flood lamp on an PIR sensor so it will trigger the lights when Nibbler moves about the cage.

It could really doe with a pan and tilt system too haha but that’s asking for too much in something so small.

Here’s a sample screen shot from the camera (this was taken with the built in recording Java app in the camera)

All in all I’m pretty happy with the camera and I’m sure it’ll come in handy in other places as well, as it’s a it’s own WIIF Access Point it can be used anywhere you want and that you have a USB power source (or a battery).

I suppose I should list some Pros and Cons for this little camera to make this a bit more complete, not that it’s a proper review (yet).

Pros

• The size, this has to be it’s biggest asset for sure.
• Fully Wi-Fi enabled device, access point and Wi-Fi client to connect to your own network.
• Feature list I’ll put as a Pro, as it’s short comings can be sorted with future updates
• Image quality in good light is quite good
• Allows for a user/password to be set up control access
• Runs off 5v @ 1A so most USB ports on modern laptops should be able to power the camera
• (optional) Accessory kit comes with a stand, mains and car power adapters, battery replacement uses standard Mini USB cable

Cons

• Image quality in low / no light is unacceptable.
• Only allows for a single user/password to be set, the user had all or nothing access
• No way to limit or prevent access to audio other then by the single account, ie: no public access to camera yet blocking audio
• The camera runs quite hot, I’ll put this as a Con, see below
• Not water/weather proof at all, strictly indoor use only unless it’s dry outside.
• Not likely a good idea to put this in a case for external use due to the heat generated
• Audio quality is pretty poor, but given the size of the device and mic I didn’t expect much here

Tags: Camera, Hamster, Syrian Hamster, Wi-Fi

So, when I bought my Samsung Galaxy SII I’d already read that it can operate the USB port in “USB On-The-Go (OTG)” mode, meaning you could plug in USB devices to the phone to share the data, for example USB Flash Drives, Digital Camera’s, keyboards, mice, etc.  I wouldn’t say the list is endless as it depends on what drivers are required.  However, generally speaking most basic input devices and storage should be supported.  A note about the storage though, Android currently only supports up to 32GB FAT32 partitions, so keep this in mind when shoving storage onto your phone.

Continue reading ..

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While looking for ways to use my phone with my Nikon D5000 DLSR I came across a very nice bit of software called PhotoIRmote on the Android Market.  This turns your Android phone into DSLR Remote Timer Controller, or an intervalometer. 

Some Screen shots of the app, from the developer:

I had a go at making the Basic IR Emitter on the developers website, however that failed.  Thinking I’d done something wrong I went for the other one he made, same result.  I wasn’t getting anything at all out of the IR LED’s .. not sure if it was my IR’s or what I did more Googling, finally found the problem was, sort of, my Samsung Galaxy S2 phone.  I say sort of because the problem is the output from the headphone jack on the phone isn’t enough to drive the IR’s.  Clearly this was a failing from Samsung for not thinking that crazy fools would want to plug IR LED’s into the headphone jack of their phones so they could control their cameras

 

Anyhow, back to the story.  So, Google turned up that I would need to build an Active IR Emitter box.  So, having read through the page linked just back there, I went and bought the bits to make the box.   Sadly, I didn’t take any photos during the construction, but to be honest there wouldn’t have been much to see.  This is my box, you can see inside as well.

Under the perf board is the 2N3904 Transistor, I’ve just fed the legs up through the perf board so I could do all the soldering on the top  I’ve made one modification to the board from the photos above, the 56 ohm resister has been replaced with a 10 ohm.  I didn’t have my head on when I build this and thanks to my mate Gavin (M1BXF) he let me straight on my error.

So, the parts list used.  This is from Maplin in the UK so you can work this out for yourself, but I’ve linked the parts from their store so you can check the specs.

2 x IR LED Emitters – YH70M – £1.14 (£2.28)

1 x 10 Ohm Resistor (I had this), around £0.30

1 x 2N3904 Transistor – QR40 – £0.29

1 x ABS Plastic Box (50mm x 35mm x 17mm) – SC78K – £2.29

1 x 3 AA Battery Case – YR61R – £1.19

1 x 3.5mm Stereo Plug – HF98G ( I had this already, but it’s £1.79)

A scape of perf board but to be honest it isn’t really needed

So, the total cost for the project was around £5.00 for me as I had some bits, but if you had to buy everything add another £2 to that.

 

In testing it with my Nikon D5000 DSLR I found it to work very well in my living room.  The IR Receiver for this camera is located on the front of the camera and in the handgrip on the right hand side.  Clearly you’ll need a tripod when using this as holding it would block the IR Receiver and, well, rather defeats the purpose for a control timer.  I found this to trigger the camera very nicely from a wide variety of angles both in landscape and portrait mode.  The distances I tested with were only about 3-4 meters, I will do more testing later to see how far I can push it, but I think that’s about all I’m going to be able to expect out of these LED’s.

I hope you’ve found this helpful, and I’d like to give credit where it’s due.   The software was written by some folks over at www.wegroo.com and the design of the Active IR Emitter was from Walther Grube and his blog page again for this is http://wgrube-electronics.blogspot.com/2011/08/active-ir-remote-for.html

Please, feel free to leave any comments / questions you might have about this.  I might have another go making another one but with a couple more LED’s to try and increase the range of it, will update if I get around to doing that.

Happy clicking … and now my phone will click for me

Tags: Android, Electronics, Galaxy S2, Infra-Red, LED, Samsung