February 14, 2021

Raspberry Pi: Programming Motors with Python and pigpio

We’ve: Unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car.. Set the car up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub. Connected a wireless gamepad. Replaced Wiring Pi with pigpio and read from a sensor It’s finally time to make this car move. You’re going to talk to the motors! Using pigpio In the last post, we left off with code that looked like this: import time import pigpio def beep(count): for i in range(count): pi.

February 3, 2021

Crosspost: Rsyslog Configuration and Troubleshooting

Loggly’s blog serves as an impressive library of logging documentation. I’m proud of being published on their site. Here’s a post about Rsyslog The BSD Syslog standard has been with us for a long time, and even with the advent of journald, it’s here to stay. Rsyslog logs messages to the network or to local disk via the standard while boasting high performance. Its client-server architecture and multithreaded architecture make it easy to scale your logging infrastructure.

January 27, 2021

AWS Lambda Tutorial

Here’s a post I wrote for Scalyr’s Blog almost a year ago. Functions-as-a-service are a very useful technology, and I plan on writing more about it here, and how it can relate to IoT and especially robotics. AWS Lambda is one of the leading serverless architectures in the cloud today. It was first-to-market among the major cloud vendors, offers the most competitive pricing, and is employed by Netflix, one of the largest cloud service providers in existence.

January 19, 2021

Python Test Automation

Here’s a post I wrote for TestIm a while back. It’s more of a listicle than a tutorial, but looking into Python tools I wasn’t already familiar with was fun. A few weeks ago, we talked about automating tests. Now it’s time to take a look at six of the best Python test automation tools. The good news is that the Python standard library already includes excellent unit testing tools. You can go a long way toward setting up robust test automation using the language’s built-in capabilities.

January 13, 2021

Ansible Tutorial

More Ansible! I wrote this one for Cprime last year, around the same time as the other Ansible post. Enjoy! Ansible is an automation tool for cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and other IT operations. You can use it for simple tasks, like deploying and configuring software releases, or for managing complicated multi-tier environments. Ansible doesn’t need agents and works with existing security infrastructure, so it’s easy to integrate into an existing network.

January 10, 2021

Developing a Last.fm shortcode for Hugo

I moved this blog to Hugo from Ghost over the holidays. This was after about a year of dissatisfaction with (very expensive) hosted Ghost, after many years on WordPress. While Hugo has fewer bells and whistles, it suits my purposes perfectly. I can write in Markdown, which I prefer over any other format. Ghost claims to support Markdown, but you can only input Markdown to its editor. You can’t see it.

January 5, 2021

Java Stack Traces

I was a Java developer for a little more than five years at Thomson Reuters. That wasn’t the only time I wrote Java code, just the most recent. So, I tend to jump on the opportunity to write a nuts and bolts Java post. This one was for Scalyr. Deploying your Java code to production limits your troubleshooting options. Connecting to your app in production with a debugger is usually out of the question, and you might not even be able to get console access.

January 3, 2021

Raspberry Pi: Programming the GPIO

So far, you’ve unboxed and assembled a UCTronics Robot Car. Then, you set it up as a Wifi client and installed JupyterHub so you could write Python code to control it via a web browser. Just before the holidays, I dug up my old post about reading a USB game controller and refreshed it, so you can use a gamepad to control the car after I go over how to control the motors.

January 2, 2021

Zwift: January 2, 2021

The one thing that’s taken me the longest to learn, and I’ve had to relearn it several times, is that the mind doesn’t work well if you neglect the body. I managed to lose a lot of weight so far during the pandemic. I fell off the wagon for a few weeks, but now I’ve set up a “smart” trainer for my bike and I’m giving Zwift a try. So far, I enjoy it.