Murli Shenoy

I’ve had this idea in mind for a while, an E-paper display that is connected to the internet. In this blog post, I want to freeze the high-level idea and the project execution plan. Hacker/maker Extraordinaire Sprite_TM has done something before on similar lines. I’m planning to build my own version from scratch while adding some new features I use a combination of physical sticky notes, along with the reminders and notes app on my Apple devices for improving my productivity at work and at home. I feel that it would be a great idea if could somehow combine these three tools into one device, and this is the first step towards it. Here’s a block diagram of my Idea. ...

The Idea for this post struck me on a hot summer day here in California, it was a 100F outside and my phone mounted on the car dashboard wouldn’t charge as fast(like 1% in like 30 minutes) although the phone indicated that it was in fast charge mode and I could not see any other issues with the charger or the charging cable, maybe the heat was affecting the charge rate?, I had to find out for myself. ...

Recently, I built a touch activated LED toy based on the Attiny85V from Microchip (née Atmel). The schematic is shown below I got the PCBs made from every hobbyist’s favorite PCB manufacturer OSHpark. On the surface, the project seemed pretty simple. It gave me an opportunity to work on touch sensors and learn their functioning and implementation. I decided to go with an external touch sense solution(MTCH102 from Microchip as well), as I had plenty of board space to spare and, the it wouldn’t add much cost to the BOM. Also it would save me a lot of development time as implementing a robust power efficient capacitive touch library could be an interesting project in itself! ...

Yesterday I visited Alamere Falls, near Bolinas,CA. We started at the Palomarin Trailhead (there’s plenty of parking there, it being peak season though we had a hard time finding parking) It’s a rather long hike (8 mi+)but large sections of trail have good tree cover and it was very foggy when we visited. do remember to pack as much water as you can and some energy bars.Note that there’s no clear sign or marking indicating the trail that leads to the waterfall. I suspect that this might be due to the fact that trail is quite dangerous and steep, and the authorities don’t want people to go there. I used the offline maps feature in here maps to find my way. ...

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I was craving something that’s tasty, but not too difficult to make and pasta sounded like a good idea. I really love creamy Alfredo sauce, but i had no parmesan cheese on hand. I also like tomato pasta sauce, but when made fresh. I really hate the taste of store bought pasta sauces, they are way too sour and leave a weird aftertaste. But these sauces are super convenient, so I always have them in stock. ...

I started work on a new design, I have long had a desire to create a “product” from scratch using minimal off-the-shelf stuff. This design should help me achieve that goal, and help me learn project management(albeit on a micro scale! :P). Last year I spent some time on an esp8266 based design, new ideas got added to the design midway and a couple iterations later, i have OSHpark purple “art”. FEATURE CREEP, as it’s called, its very hard to fight off. ...

Saw this post on hackaday and decided to work on fixing my own Mx Master which had the infamous scroll wheel issue. I could not toggle between the scroll modes of the mouse. The feature stopped working the very next day i started using the mouse. It seems to be a design issue on logitech’s part. But its a quick and simple fix, check the hackaday post above for more info. ...

Today a coworker of mine gave me his old Philips Sonicare toothbrush. He said it had stopped charging and would no longer work. That was a good opportunity for a tear down 😉 Lets see what makes this baby chooch….(As the great man himself said https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA0kiYqyBmo) There’s very little to this device. it seems like there’s just a micro controller running the show, like every other product. (there’s more horsepower in a toothbrush these days than an a 50 year old Supercomputer!) it probably does the following tasks( my guesstimate) ...

Last weekend over thanksgiving, I finally found some time to move over my blog to a custom hosted solution over from the old one. I now have a custom WordPress install(this might change soon, as I’m looking at other options, which are more efficient like jekyll ). The blog should now be snappier, also i’m planning to add a few bells and whistles on the backend (git server, host some files etc). On the hardware front, I am currently working on the ESP8266 on adding an Epaper display and a few custom sensors. I’m using a rather interesting and firmware framework called SMING, which is an interesting hybrid between the Arduino framework and native GCC. Sming I feel is still rather nascent, but the developers are working hard on refining it. I plan to finish the e paper display interface this week, and then I can go ahead with finishing the project, something that looks more like a product than a quick hack. I’ve had a few stumbling blocks along the way, which i have put them aside for now. ...

Recently, I got a used Atrix 4g lapdock for 30 bucks off of craigslist. It was a really good deal for a device that packs a USB hub, a 10+ inch LCD a keyboard, a trackpad and also a 10000mAh battery. Supply it with a processor and it can be a full fledged laptop computer. My atrix 2 worked fine with the lapdock. I used it a lot for watching youtube videos and for PDFs. ...