I recently got in a discussion on the Slack associated with the Hacking SaaS substack. (Which if you’re in the industry, you should definitely read!) The question was about what kinds of tools you should feel comfortable using if you’re an engineer at a SaaS business. The conversation then turned to the nature of: what …
In a recent blog post I described building a more powerful EL-wire driver based on the 555 timer. That was in service of a small art project which I finished last week, “Luminous Gates.”
I built my own circuit to handle conversion of 6 VDC power from the batteries to the 2 KHz AC power required by EL-wire.
My latest gadget is a Wifi spectrum analyzer. Built on the Wio Terminal by Seeed Studios, it was a simple embedded device to set up.
I recently designed a custom case to fit a Raspberry Pi 4 and a 7″ LCD screen. I wanted a small tablet-like computer I could set up to look at while seated at a table, or standing at a counter in the kitchen.
Time to wrap this up… I was, in fact, able to get this successfully wired up and mounted on the boat! All in all, I had a great time making this project and learned a lot.
All the pieces have come together. It’s time to hook this up on the boat and see how it works!
Now it’s time to put it all together! Mechanical fabrication is one of my weaker skills and this is where having handy friends really helped pay off.
With the software running on the Raspberry Pi and touchscreen in a “bench test” format on top of my desk, it was time to start thinking about how I would actually package this up into a complete device that I could install on the boat. It needed to be waterproof, powered by the boat’s battery bank, and ideally no larger than necessary.
With the basic platform package chosen — Raspberry Pi, a 7″ 800×480 sunlight-readable touchscreen, and the NGT-1 — it was time to put it to work. This post dives into the software built to run on this platform and deliver that telemetry analysis and visualization I was looking for.
