Project - Solar Powered Flower

Last winter I noticed that I had accumulated a sizable collection of small 5 volt DC motors which I had salvaged from a bunch of old CD ROM drives.

Trying to think about what I could do with these motors, I played around with them a little bit to come up with some ideas. It was during these experiments that I realized that when one of these motors were hooked up to a solar cell that I had laying around, it seemed to spin the motor at a very good rate. From there, an idea was formed.

The Seasonal Shop Expansion

As you can tell from my desk building project, the main disadvantage of having a small shop is that I am really limited in the amount of space that I have available for working on those really big items,.

Building a $5 Smart Phone Tripod Mount

In a lot of ways, your typical smartphone has merged a lot of gadgets into one small device.

Today my smartphone has replaced to need to have a calculator, digital camera, notebook, among other things.

In a recent upgrade to my smart phone's operating system, I can even now use my phone as a bubble level and tape measure.

One thing that smartphones have been excelling at recently is capturing of high definition video, which means that my old camcorder can now be put out to pasture along with my old Casio graphing calculator.

Recently I got a new toy (which I will post about in the future) and I wanted to try my hand at making an unboxing video that all the cool kids seem to be doing these days and I figured this would be a perfect thing to record with my smartphone.

The gotcha here was that in order to do an unboxing, I really needed to be able to use my 2 hands - meaning I couldn't really hold my smartphone and unbox my new toy at the same time.

Luckily I still had my old tripod from my camcorder - I just needed some way to mount my smartphone to it.

A quick Google search paraded a plethora of mounts for my tripod - all way, way above the price I would be willing to spend for what really is not much different from a smartphone holder you can get for your car (which I could easily get for less than 2 dollars down at my neighborhood dollar store).

After one such trip to my dollar store, I ended up coming home with one of those cheap car phone holders - and an idea.

Web Page Visitor Counter Part 3 - Putting it all Together

Now that I finished building the software "LEGO" that I needed to do in order to have some way of displaying the number of visitors that I had on my website, the time had finally come to stop pounding away on the keyboard and to work on something that was a wee bit more tangible.

Before I started work on creating my Google Sheets and ThingSpeak applications, I first made a couple of quick purchases on eBay for the various electronic bits that I would need to make my visitor counter a reality.

Web Page Visitor Counter Part 2 - Adding Thingspeak

In my last post, I stated that I wanted to build an IoT device that would display the number of visitors to this very website.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was finding it a bit difficult to find an easy way to read my visitor count via an API call to the IoT device that I would use to display the visitor count.  After some poking around I figured that I could obtain that data via a combination of Google Sheets reports and a ThingSpeak API application.

In my last post, I focused on the building of the Google Sheets report. This time around I will be focussing on building the ThingSpeak logic to read the Google Sheets report and to create a data pipe that my IoT device can use.

Again, this is going to be more of a post about software than spending quality time in the shop, but trust me, we will be back in the shop soon enough.