OSMDroid with Google Play Location Services
Introduction OSMDroid is a suitable alternative to Google Maps if you need an alternative tile source for mobile maps (e.g. a hiking map or a custom representation of a campus or theme park). In this ... Read More
Flight radar with Raspberry Pi and an SDR dongle
Introduction Most large aircrafts today are equipped with an ‘Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast‘ (ADS-B) system. This equipment will be mandatory in 2017. It broadcasts flight dat... Read More
Daylight controlled devices with PyEphem
I needed a camera to be turned off at night and a PIR sensor (controlling a light switch) to be turned on. A photoresistor would be an obvious choice here, but we can also accurately calculate twiligh... Read More
Motion detection with Raspberry Pi
To detect intruders in my living room I used the PIR sensor from a Funduino starter kit. A Python script triggers some appropriate actions when motion is detected. Set the jumper on the sensor PCB to ... Read More
Google Text to Speech on Raspberry Pi
Google Text to Speech provides excellent speech quality. A limitation is that the Pi needs to be online to use it (which mine always is, so it’s not really a drawback). First, the ALSA sound dri... Read More
Create a Debian package from an executable jar
We’ll use our simple game Cave Fizzer as an example again. It’s a libGDX project and we can simply export the desktop sub-project as a runnable jar. Once we have done so the challenge is t... Read More
Using the Loader pattern with SQLite on Android
In my Dutch Hangman game a random word is retrieved from a database containing about 100000 words. To provide a smooth user experience this needs to be done asynchronously. (Actually several asynchron... Read More
Remote-controlled mains sockets with Raspberry Pi
Introduction RC power sockets commonly use the 433 MHz band, like many other Short Range Devices (e.g. car keys, garage doors, LPD radios). We will use pilight to sniff the RF signals so we can reprod... Read More
Raspberry Pi Camera: turn off the LED
Since our camera is placed behind a window glass and the LED causes reflection, there’s a need to turn it off. Current versions of Raspbian seem to ignore the disable_camera_led=1 setting in /bo... Read More
Google Analytics SDK v4 with libGDX
Introduction Google discourages the use of the legacy Analytics SDK in new projects. Instead the want you to use Android Native Application Tracking as provided by Google Play Services. Some documenta... Read More