I’m excited to say that I’m getting married in a couple of weeks to the woman that I love. She makes me a better person and I’m happier for it.
If anyone is wondering why my projects haven’t been getting done, I’ve been busy! Gonna get a little bit busier for the next couple of months since I’m also trying to get back into astronomy and astrophotography!
To celebrate, I updated my Audio Reactive LEDs project for the Raspberry Pi for the holidays. Now you can play music directly on the Raspberry Pi and make the lights dance. Check out the full demo video below:
I decided to buy myself a gaming laptop in November. This is my first gaming laptop, ever. I’ve been a desktop gamer for the last 15 years and I thought I’d treat myself this year. This is also very handy for programming and content creation.
The MSI GE75 Raider laptop was on sale at Costco for about $1300 (shipping and taxes included). Here are some specs:
Processor: 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-10750H Processor
Memory: 16GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM
Drives: 512GB NVMe Solid State Drive + 1TB Hard Disk Drive
Graphics: 6GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 GPU
Video: 17.3″ FHD 144Hz 3ms Display
Keyboard: Steel Series RGB Backlight Keyboard with Anti-Ghost Key + Silver Lining
Power: 6-Cell 51Wh Li-Ion Battery with a pretty heavy power cord
Weight: 5.75 lbs. (pretty heavy for a laptop)
I’ve used it for gaming (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends so far), programming (mostly Python work), and video editing (part of this video below was edited through After Effects on this laptop).
It works really well and I’m happy with it. Using my Costco VISA card also provides the added benefit of getting 4 years of free warranty with this thing which is amazing.
Check out the video review below for more info on the laptop. Have questions? Ask away!
My September project is a cool one I think. It’s a Flask App hosted on a Raspberry Pi (behind Apache) which controls some WS2812b LED Strips. It’s a good way to test your strips.
It’s still a work in progress and in the demo, I show you what I’ve done so far.
In Dec 2018, I created a tutorial showing how to create your own Audio Reactive LED strip with a Raspberry Pi. The original tutorial had a lot of steps (30+) that you needed to take in order to get the software up and running.
A lot of viewers have also asked if there were ways to make the installation simpler. So I took a stab at it and got the installation steps down to just 2! Clone the GitHub repo and run the installer. Of course I’m not counting the hardware set up!
The world has been uncertain for a few months. A little over three weeks ago, I was lucky that I started working from home. The government was extremely slow to react to this virus even though they had months of lead time. As a result, the United States has become number one in COVID-19 cases. As of today, we are at over 215,000 cases with 5,000 deaths. Most of these cases are from my home state of New York. I currently live in Massachusetts but I have family and friends all over New York City.
If you haven’t already started, please stay home. It’s the best course of action to flatten the curve. For more information on what “flattening the curve” means, check out this video:
You do not want to be another statistic or be responsible for passing on the virus to others. The Coronavirus pandemic is serious and should be taken seriously.
Been a while since my last update but I’ve still been at it with my home automation projects. This project lets me control my Garage Door from my phone!
The written tutorial is all there is to the tutorial, I tried something different and did not do a full video tutorial but don’t worry, the written tutorial is still very thorough!
Questions or comments? Feel free to share on EasyProgramming.net, on YouTube, or open a Github issue in the Repo above.
I moved to another city at the end of June. Still in Massachusetts but much closer to work. I’ve mostly settled in but still have many boxes that need to be opened.
The last tutorial I made was posted on June 1st and I showed you How to control an LED from your browser!
I am ready to start making more videos. In fact, I have one planned for this coming Saturday. It’s not a Raspberry Pi video but don’t fret, I will be making more of those soon. It takes much more time to prep and record a Raspberry Pi video so I thought I’d start getting in the groove again with a quick JavaScript video. The video is titled “Intro to JavaScript Modules” so be sure to check out my EasyProgramming.net on Saturday!
In the meantime, enjoy my RPi tutorial from June 1st: