Reading from sensors is great but there are times when you need to interact with surrounding hardware. Window air conditioners, televisions, stereos and many other household electronics communicate with infra-red (IR). Adding an IR LED to your spark core will allow you to control these electronics remotely. For example, I’m currently using a temperature sensor […]
Failed to Find Android Wearable Dependency
Problem: After installing Android Studio Beta and using the wizard to create a new wearable app, the Gradle build failed with the following errors: Error: Failed to find: com.google.android.gms:play-services-wearable:+ Error: Failed to find: com.google.android.support:wearable:+ Solution: [Update]Additional useful information: http://developer.android.com/preview/google-play-services-wear.html[/Update] [Update 7/16/14]The latest version of Android Studio extends Activity for watches rather than WatchActivity[/Update] Until we […]
Spark Core with a Humidity / Temp Sensor (HTU21D)
Monitor the humidity and temperature of your home or apartment from anywhere. The Spark Core connects to your home WIFI and allows you to monitor or control devices remotely. In this post we’ll start with a basic sensor. The HTU21D sensor was the least expensive sensor I could find that monitored both humidity and temperature. […]
Build a Single Page Web Application with Knockout.js
Knockout.js makes working with JavaScript much more enjoyable. The MVVM pattern helps to better organize code and keeps the UI in sync with the server. In the case of complex web applications, a framework like this is incredibly helpful. I would not recommend this library for static web content or sites that need to be […]