Father’s Day is right around the corner but don’t worry, you still have time to get your dad a gift in time! Check out my gift guide for ideas at any one of these ABC stations website: Los Angeles/KABC, San Francisco/KGO, Houston/KTRK, Fresno/KFSN, New York/WABC, Chicago/WLS, Philadelphia/WPVI and Raleigh-Durham/WTVD.
This is also my first video rendition of a gift guide as well:
My TED 5000 (more about the product here and here) whole house power monitor by The Energy Detective that I’ve been using for years stopped working properly. The date/time would no longer keep after a power outage causing the logging of the data to get all messed up. I thought I’d try to repair it — this is my first on camera repair video.
Come along with me and see if I am successful with my repair…
I’ve been running DD-WRT on the Linksys WRT54G for about 6 years with no issues. But Amazon had the Linksys WRT1200AC on sale so I decided to upgrade to the latest model — have to say the WRT1200 is a whole lot faster than the WRT54G. As you can see in the video, the install process is also amazingly quick and you’ll be up and running in no time!
Amazon: Linksys WRT1200AC
It’s been a while since I last uploaded a video to YouTube. In this video I give an update on my YouTube channel, a neat Fusion 360 tip (attaching canvas and using the calibrate feature), show an extremely basic process of designing something in Fusion 360, sending it to Simplify3D slicer then printing on the 3D Printer. I will be posting more videos on YouTube so please subscribe to my channel as it definitely puts wind in my sails and influences the type of content I create.
… continued from part I.
It’s been a while since I last posted an update on the mavroOBD project. After a few (3) board revisions, I’m happy to report that I’ve successfully miniaturized the Arduino UNO (ATMega328P based AVR) and SeeedStudio CANBus shield into a compact OBD module form factor. Next, I will begin the coding portion and will post updates as that happens. Feel free to post a comment if you are interested in helping out with this project.
Today I’m announcing my next project, mavroOBD. It’s an open source Arduino compatible OBD/Can-Bus module. The goal behind this is to provide an easy way for people to interact with their vehicles. Not sure where this will lead but I’ve been wanting to get into the “car hacking” space for a while. I’ve already sourced an OBD port module and designed two boards (power and mainboard). This is an open source project and is available here on Github.
The idea is to be able to enhance my vehicles capabilities — since they don’t provide us a way to do this via configuration screens in the vehicle — one thing that drives me crazy is in my vehicle, I have to press a button for my front parking sensors to be active (if I haven’t been in reverse first). This is annoying when pulling into a space. My first task will be to emulate the parking sensor button when traveling less than 10mph.
The first step is to sniff the OBD port Can-Bus traffic to see if I have access to the system via the OBD port. Depending on the manufacture some of the “internal”, non-diagnostic features are on a low or medium speed Can-Bus. I’m still learning so if anyone has more knowledge and wants to share, please post a comment or join my efforts. More to come… components will be here soon and I will be posting again when I get the boards populated and I can access the high-speed can bus network of my vehicle.