Tony is a Geek

Ever wanted to build a robot?  Of course you have!  You could just " buy " one pre-done and job done, but where's the fun in that? I was thinking..... robot interest flared at the end of the 90s and early 2000s but like the mobile industry it took a bit of a nosedive afterwards, just like the mobile industry.  The technology has now moved on leaps and bounds, what would be involved in building a robot that you could just bolt together and write a little bit of C code for? Back in the day( late 80's ), I got a GCSE in electronics, it interested me, but it was too low level.  I learnt the colour coding of resistors, making PCB boards, etc... but I'm a developer, not an engineer.  I don't " make " widgets, I " use " widgets to get a job done.  It took a few years for me to realise that. Keeping that in mind, now that the Arduino has matured and the Arduino Shields have come on a long way, these have now become " widgets " tha...

Google....good old Google have decided that the phone is not enough being just a phone.  It needs to evolve. Let me introduce you to PROJECT TANGO : " Project Tango brings Motion Tracking, Depth Perception, and Area Learning to mobile devices. Thousands of developers are building experiences that do things like finding your way around, measuring your world, and walking through stories. Show everyone what you can do with Project Tango by getting a Tablet Development Kit, creating an application, and uploading it to the Play Store. We believe this journey is one worth following." Well, I "was" building myself an Arduino based robot this week that could basically do all these things shown in the nice diagram above.... I'm now wondering if I should bother?  or should I just get myself a DEV KIT and use all the cool new tools/toys from Google instead? Nah, I think I'll continue building the robot side of things myself....and wait for...

After blowing the dust off the Arduino 'robots' that have been sitting on a spare desk in the "home office" for the past couple of years, I decided to see how much things have changed in the land of the new buzzword: Internet-Of-Things (IoT). I just ordered 9-10 items from DFRobot (how did it reach £200!?!), but, as they are in China, it's going to take a little while to receive the parts.  One of the items I ordered was the TEL0047 WiFi Shield for £50. In my impatience, I set about seeing what else was available.  I discovered the CC3000 WiFi Breakout board for about £30 , it looked promising. Then I found the Sparkfun ESP8266 WiFi Shield at Pimoroni.com for £15 including P&P.  [BUY] button pressed.  Arrived the next day. Then the fun began.......... [ CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT HOW TO SETUP AND USE THIS WONDERFULLY CHEAP WIFI SHIELD ]. If you don't have something hooked up to the internet soon, I'll be very surprised!

Augmented Reality and Pokemon Go.... just moved up to a whole new level! Pokemon Go for Android & iPhone Told you 2016 was going to be the game changing year :-)

We bought an Amazon Fire TV stick earlier in the year, so that we could use the Amazon Prime Instant Video service on our ma-hoo-sive Samsung TV (rather than via the X-Box). This weekend I looked into "what is the Fire TV stick"? turns out it's running Android. I also was a little disappointed that none of the Apps allowed me to run an app that would display the Crunchyroll Manga/Anime shows.  After checking the official forums it turns out there is no Crunchyroll app for the Fire TV stick. This got me thinking....the Fire TV stick is running Android and the Crunchyroll app is a .apk app.... I'll now explain,  how to go about getting Crunchyroll onto the Fire TV stick and watching all those great Manga/Anime shows! >>>>>>>>> CLICK HERE to view the photo's of how to get this working <<<<<<<<<<

Okay, okay, okay..... so this "might" be a little bit of a promo for IBM, but I have to say this is a really interesting field to work with. There are loads of scenarios that you can think of where you could utilise the beacons to detect the location of a persons smartphone If you want to get up and running using IBM Presence Insights via Bluemix, click on the following link and press the BIG red button at the bottom, it'll guide you through all you need: https://presenceinsights.ng.bluemix.net/piui/ Here's the link to the generic sales/marketing web site link To be able to try this out, you'll need: Android smartphone (okay, you "can" have an iPhone....but, pfffhhh, if you must, there is an SDK for both) A couple of Beacons (you can get some from beaconinside.com - they're not the smallest, but they'll do the job and not break the bank) Some time to write a sample app using either Eclipse+ADT or Android Studio I'll ...

The more I see Augmented Reality blurring with Virtual Reality and "new" ways of thinking, the more I am liking where things are going for 2016. I backed the KickStarter project for Oculus Rift a couple of years back, when I got my headset and access to the code I was excited by the possibilities.  Unfortunately, it was just too new and I didn't have the time to dedicate to writing 1000's of lines of code for libraries.  I had the vision, but not the time. I see now that a lot of those libraries have now been written, so what I had in mind can now be achieved in a couple of days of hacking code together. I'm impressed. Check out the original article here.

I thought I would do a write-up and share how to use the Wikitude SDK for Android to allow you to see how awesome Augmented Reality is from your phone. Here's a little YouTube video showing the outcome of the slides presentation above: any questions, feel free to ask.

Here's a great article from Ray: Working with Ionic, Box, and IBM MobileFirst Summary = Box is a cloud storage provider much like Dropbox, but also provides some pretty cool workflow services as well.  While it is still early, you'll soon see some interesting collaborations between IBM and Box.  Ray, sets out to see how easy it would be to integrate Box into a Hybrid Mobile application using both Ionic and IBM MobileFirst. Check the article out , it includes a Video too:

Official IBM press-release Ionic press-release Yes, yes, yes..... this is several weeks late.  What can I say, I've been "busy"  :-) The good news is, IBM has this product called IBM MobileFirst (I may have posted a thing or two about it?!) that helps support making, managing and securing the back-end services of your Mobile applications.....and Ionic Creator is just an awesome front-end product for building the Mobile application itself. Officially putting these two things together is great news (I've been doing it un-officially for quite some time, so it's great that it's now official news).