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hobby mobile, nfc

If you have an Android phone that supports NFC, you can save and change some settings very easily based on your location. All you need is some blank NFC tags like shown below, which are very cheap and a free app called NFC Task Launcher.

NFC Tags

NFC for the uninitiated

NFC stands for Near Field Communication. It’s a set of standards build on RFID that allows wireless communication between devices in a close proximity. It is commonly used in contactless payment systems.

Manage tasks with the task launcher

It’s a very intuitive and easy to use app. First, you select an action group (like WiFi On/Off, BlueTooth On/Off).

NFC Task Launcher

Then you configure the action (like Enable/Disable) and finally you touch to your tag to associate the task with it.

Secure your phone outside the house

After playing around with tools like WiFi PineApple I’m now even more afraid of wireless networks than ever. Thinking about it, I don’t connect to open networks on purpose and if my phone connects to one of them that means something fishy is going on. So why should I have WiFi when I’m not using my own? But of course turning it on and off every time I enter/leave the house is cumbersome. My solution is: doing it with NFC. Although it’s not completely automated, I just touch my phone to the red tag I stuck to my door when I leave the house and the WiFi is turned off. When I enter the house, I touch on the green one it is turned back on. Simple as that!

NFC Task Launcher

Resources

hobby ,  dev kinect

I know they are about to release XBox One and they have already released Kinect for Windows but I still only have a Kinect for XBox for 360. I’m hoping to create a quick and sample application to test my Kinect and discover what’s in Kinect SDK so that I can remove it for a while from my gadgets-pending-to-be-tested-and-played-with list.

Until I buy a better and more recent hardware I just decided to utilise my existing sensor. I followed Channel9’s video tutorials and here is the code to display a video output of the sensor on the screen:

Xbox-360-Kinect-Standalone

Source code:

using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Imaging;
using Microsoft.Kinect;

namespace KinectDemo
{
	public partial class MainWindow : Window
	{
		KinectSensor _sensor;

		public MainWindow()
		{
			InitializeComponent();
		}

		private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
		{
			
		}

		private void Window_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
		{
			if (KinectSensor.KinectSensors.Count > 0)
			{
				_sensor = KinectSensor.KinectSensors[0];

				if (_sensor.Status == KinectStatus.Connected)
				{
					_sensor.ColorStream.Enable();
					_sensor.DepthStream.Enable();
					_sensor.SkeletonStream.Enable();
					_sensor.AllFramesReady += _sensor_AllFramesReady;
					_sensor.Start();
				}
			}
		}

		void _sensor_AllFramesReady(object sender, AllFramesReadyEventArgs e)
		{
			using (ColorImageFrame colorFrame = e.OpenColorImageFrame())
			{
				if (colorFrame == null)
				{
					return;
				}

				byte[] pixels = new byte[colorFrame.PixelDataLength];
				colorFrame.CopyPixelDataTo(pixels);

				int stride = colorFrame.Width * 4;
				image1.Source = BitmapSource.Create(colorFrame.Width, colorFrame.Height, 96, 96, PixelFormats.Bgr32, null, pixels, stride);
			}
		}

		void StopKinect(KinectSensor sensor)
		{
			if (sensor != null)
			{
				sensor.Stop();
				sensor.AudioSource.Stop();
			}
		}

		private void Window_Closing(object sender, System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs e)
		{
			StopKinect(_sensor);
		}
	}
}

I think for this amount of code and the simplicity it is a pretty good result.

Probably I will continue my conquest of Kinect after I get the latest one, but for now I’ll just call it.

Resources

hobby electronics, msp430

I have a number of electronics kits and boards like Netduino, Arduino and Gadgeteer. Among all the cheapest one I’ve ever seen is Texas Instrument’s MSP430 LaunchPad. Last year I bough one of these just because it was so cheap but couldn’t spend much time on it. I recently found out it has dropped to £8 and I decided to buy the latest version. Now that I have 2 of these babies I definitely need to spend some time to play with them.

MSP 430

Looks like there are a few differences between the two. The one on the left in the picture above is the old version. The new version comes with better controllers and male pins on the side.

Installation

First thing to do is go to its official site and download Code Composer Studio to develop programs to run on it. It is an Eclipse-based IDE so I’m hoping it won’t take to long to get acquainted with it.

First Program

Good thing there are plenty of tutorials about it. I decided to follow one of the simplest ones which just blinks one of the on-board LEDs. To be honest, the code looks hideous:

unsigned int i = 0; 
void main(void)
{
  WDTCTL = WDTPW + WDTHOLD;     
  P1DIR |= 0x01;

  for (;;)
  {
    P1OUT ^= 0x01;
    for(i=0; i< 20000; i++);
  }
}

I deleted the comments to keep it short. But even with detailed comments it looks hard to develop complex applications with this. Anyway, I’ll see how far I can get with it. So far, for this amound of work, the results are not so bad.

Resources