Andy's blog o' goodness – Page 3 – php, web stuff, raspberry pi… even blacksmithing!

July 17, 2017

First blacksmithing session

I had my first blacksmithing session last week, and it was probably the most fun I’ve had with a hammer and metal in… well, I’m too old now to remember how long ago things were. But a long time, let me tell you. At first I learned how to draw down to a square point, and then built on that...

Blacksmithing Comments: 0

May 31, 2017

Cleaning up my vice

Along with the anvil I was also given a leg vice. This is a heavy-duty vice with a long pole that goes down into the ground a little way to transfer energy away from the hammer blows or moving the metal making it less likely that the vice will break under use. It was thrown in with the anvil because,...

Blacksmithing Comments: 0

May 28, 2017

Cleaning up my anvil

The anvil I was given for my birthday is wonderful, but was really rusty. Not knowing the best way to clean it up I hit a very popular smithing forum called I Forge Iron. The people on there were nothing but friendly and helpful and gave really good advice about my ol’ girl and how to clean her up. All...

Blacksmithing Comments: 0

May 23, 2017

And now for something completely different… blacksmithing!

For quite some time now I’ve loved the idea of blacksmithing. There just seems to be something about heating up metal over a hot forge, the ring of the anvil, that harks back to times gone by. I’ve always joked with my wife that if I didn’t do web development I’d do blacksmithing. Two problems with that, though; I’m not...

Blacksmithing Comments: 0

January 11, 2017

Rotary volume control for the Raspberry Pi

If you have checked out my previous post, you know I want to create a clock radio powered by the Raspberry Pi with the audio coming out of a JustBoom AMP Zero pHAT. One of the things that I thought would be quite handy (probably necessary) would be volume control. Ideally that would be some kind of hardware rotation controller,...

Raspberry Pi Comments: 6

January 5, 2017

PiZero Clock Radio – Part 1

Long story short; I have a clock radio and it can just about play something from the radio and wake me up in the morning. But if the power goes out it never remembers the time or what any of the radio stations were, and it completely lacks the ability to auto-seek for stations (and I can never remember what...

Raspberry Pi Comment: 1

November 29, 2016

Calculate aspect ratio

This is a handy little function I’ve used a few times to calculate the aspect ratio of an image or video. Simply give it the width and height and it’ll give you the aspect ratio.

PHP Comments: 0

July 24, 2016

Trail camera – first outdoors test

Last night I packaged everything up in the trail camera lunch box and gave it the first outdoors test. The first thing it captured was this little guy! I think there may still be a few things to sort out. The PIR sensor may not be very sensitive or the code may not be 100% functioning correctly (though it seemed...

Gadgets/General/Raspberry Pi Comments: 0

July 22, 2016

Dynamically control PiCamera record length: motion sensor fun with the Raspberry Pi

One thing I’ve always wanted to do with my Raspberry Pi was to build a trail camera, and when the Pi Zero was released with a camera port I thought that it was about time I stopped wanting to do it and actually just do it. It took a while to get parts delivered from various places, but eventually in...

General/Raspberry Pi Comments: 0

July 13, 2016

Converting JSX to JS on the command line

Yesterday I was starting a small, very stand-alone project that required a pretty dynamic interface. I decided to put together the components using ReactJS but as it was essentially just one JSX file that I had I didn’t want to have to set up a gulp file, babelrc file, and whatever new-fangled build process the young kids are in to...

javascript Comments: 0