Rooting the Creality Halot One resin 3D printer

I have finally decided to enter the 3D printing bandwagon. Having room for more hardware have always been the main inhibiting factor for not having done it longer ago. But with a little tidying up of the available space the impossible eventually became a reality. At least that was my reasoning, and the selection of a small resin printer seemed like an interesting choice in that respect, at least in what concerns the space occupied by the device itself.

Building a hardware watchdog timer for a kiosk or other system that needs to run 24x7

It was proven by Alan Turing back in 1936 that the halting problem applies for computing in general, and our contemporary computing machines are no exception.

Would predicting the crashing of an algorithm or program be a possible function, and we would be able to know the edge cases that cause an application to fail or enter a loop, without having to explore the actual scenarios to find these edge cases. To put it simply we would only have to ask the algorithm in which conditions it would enter a loop or end unexpectedly, and by not providing these inputs we would with absolute certainty not enter these scenarios.

Building a kiosk for Home Assistant from scrap parts - Part 2

With a project of this type, the hardware preparation is just the tip of the iceberg. It was thoroughly explained in the last post, despite one last change still being pending. What lacks is basically the addition of a resistive touch panel to the front of the screen, in order not to depend on the mouse as a pointer/input device. The panel is still somewhere between China and my location..

The first aspect that I found important to cover, now that I had this Android based kiosk up and running, was the ability to remote control it and launch arbitrary applications and services on startup.

Building a kiosk for Home Assistant from scrap parts

It is great to have automation in the house providing increments of comfort such as eliminating manual tasks like cleaning the floor, or to aid in managing the energy consumption by turning off lights and appliances which are not in use, or in the safety side, by providing intrusion detection or monitoring the presence of gas leaks or other hazards, and executing the adequate actions.

Repurposing an old Android Phone

I had an old Samsung Galaxy Y (GT-S5360) which the previous user didn't particularly enjoy for its performance and replaced with a fancier, newer model. With no obvious use to give to the device, I decided to repurpose it for building some kind of a remote monitoring/observation station, and try to find out how it stands out against the harsh outside environment.

While not attempting to simply put the device outside, directly exposed to the sun, rain and extremes of temperature, I made several customizations to better prepare the smartphone turned into a monitoring station.

The first thing I wanted was to have it entirely self-sustainable. As such I bought a 10 watt photovoltaic panel to harvest the energy required by the device:

Controlling Amiro (the name I have baptized the car) from an Android phone (HTC Desire)

While the Java PC application is useful for testing and controlling the robotic car while sitting in a chair, for on the field fun a more practical solution had to adopted. So using a popular platform that Android is, I decided to port the (Java Swing) application I already had, to run on any Android phone with a accelerometers and a Wifi connection. As the car behaves like an access point, all it is necessary is to associate the phone to it, and run the application.

Just about as fun as it is to drive it, coding the client in Android was quick an fun experience.
The interface had to contain just the essential elements. While the target hardware has abundant resolution (480x800), like in any mobile platform, screen real estate is always a concern. As such I had to economize on the components to be displayed. The result was a relatively simple UI: