The foggy future of 2.4Ghz Wifi

 Saw this packaging at Costco the other day:

The thing that caught my eye:

With the WIFI 5 standard being the 802.11ac spec, that's only 5Ghz and necessitates manufacturers include the wifi disclaimer on their packaging now.   Although the WIFI6 includes 2.4Ghz I'm not certain it will cover these older 802.11g spec devices.  It could be a confusing future for people and wifi.  I can foresee people getting their spiffy WIFI6 / 802.11ax networks online and getting blazing speeds to there phones, tablets and laptops only to find that their 10-year old doorbells, thermostats and smart fridge's can't connect.

The RP2040 is going to change things in the microcontroller space

This is a bit of a Captain Obvious statement, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation's RP2040 is going to shake up the microcontroller space.  I can't wait to play with this stuff.  For the most part I stay within the Adafruit ecosystem.  They are the "Easy Button"  of microcontrollers.  If you want to do stuff with out having an Electrical Engineering degree, Adafruit is hands down the way to go. They do so much documentation and easy to follow examples at learn.adafruit.com that you can self teach yourself how to work with microcontrollers. 

Raspberry Pi Pico - RP2040

The RP2040/Pico is the first time where I feel like I could sail beyond the safe harbor of Adafruit.  The open source and collaborative nature of the Pi foundation makes the information accessible and supported. Looking at the example projects on the Pi site for the pico you can quickly learn how to customize it to your own needs with ease.

Because of this open behavior of both Pi and AdaFruit you get some fantastic remixes and combinations of hardware.  This kind of low cost, easy access and modification of the platform lets creative people do new and interesting things.  Recently the FUZIX distribution was ported to the pico.  MicroPython and CircuitPython is already ported.  It won't be long and a simple and inexpensive wireless interface will be added to the mix and IOT will be in play.

Anyway I think over the next 2 years you're going to see more and more computing embedded into more devices.  A great example of how the future products can change.  The idea of a smart mirror started with people figuring out LCD monitors and Raspberry Pi's are cheap.  Initially they were hacked together by industrious individuals.  Then the open source projects to make it easier came along.  Today you can get a home gym with a built in smart mirror for workouts. The low cost of the Pi computer made that possible.  The Pico and RP2040 chip is going to do the same thing on a microcontroller level.  

Circuit Playground BlueFruit LED light strip

I don't tinker as much as I'd like. I usually get distracted surfing the web or playing Civ 6 games. Finally got around to trying to build one of these:

https://learn.adafruit.com/easy-no-solder-bluetooth-controlled-room-lights

Basically take a Circuit Playground Bluefruit - https://www.adafruit.com/product/4333 and a strip of neopixels and you can control them with the adafruit BlueFruit app on your phone.

So it's super easy, requires no soldering (as the project title suggests) and turns out pretty cool.  

Anyway finally got one in.  I burned out one of my bluefruits in the process.  I wired it upside down *AND* used a 12v power supply by mistake.  YIKES!  Smoked it right up.  Going to have to buy another to replace it.  

Side-note the crayon containers from Micheals (or JoAnn or the other craft stores) are fantastic for storing these things (you can see some on my messy desk)

Photo Challenge week 3 - Black And White

 

Week three - Take a black and white photo of any subject you want.

I love how vivid the details turn out in this shot when I was just goofing around. 

It's even more interesting when you remove the background - it looks like a drawing.  I need to clean up some spots around the ears, the auto select tool did good, but not perfect. 

So now I just need to try this again, but next time I want to try a person and get one of those black and white portrait photos that show details like skin tone.  Like the cover shot in this article: https://iso.500px.com/35-fantastic-black-and-white-portraits-on-500px/

So this catches me back up - next week is 'Warmth' - not sure what I'm going to do yet.

Photo Challenge week 2 - Rule of Thirds and getting back on track

So I put the photo challenge on pause.  I knew I was getting a new lens for Christmas and wanted to wait for that.  Anyway I finally got back out and started up again last week. The photo prompt is "Rule of Thirds Motion" - Use the Rule of Thirds to show Motion on your picture.  So here's the concept I want to do:

So that's the best of the shots I took.  I hate it. There's a lot of problems with it and I'll probably try and take it again. The first issue is I'm on the wrong side of the trail, the sun is just out of frame giving me awkward lighting. (it's where the bench I could sit on was located and it's a 30' drop on the other side of the trail. The second issue is it was cold - so very few people on the trail so I didn't have a lot of candidates to shoot.  I like the idea - set the shutter speed slow to blur the runner or rider.  Another version I might give a shot is a bench near my house that's on a busy street - see if I can get the lights to blur as the car drives by.   

Anyway wanted to get back to putting these pictures up to force myself to take more photos so I can get better. 

Starting a 52 week photo challenge

I've come to the conclusion I need to take more pictures to get better.  So I'm starting a 52-week photo challenge developed by Dogwood Photography.  The website seems to be defunct now but the PDF of the challenge is still around.   I'm pretty sure I won't do the pictures every week and will be playing a lot of catch-up.  I also won't be posting them every week, even if I take the pictures, because posting them isn't the goal here.

The goal is to force myself to take more pictures so I'm better able to make what I capture on the camera match what I'm seeing with my eye.  I can get the shot I want about 50% of the time, but that's only with a lot of trial and error and fidgeting with the settings.  It's neither effortless nor fast.  My hope is that by taking more pictures I'll get better.  Right now I spend too much time with my face buried in the LDC screen of my camera.

So here we go - Week 1: Self Portrait - Take a picture that tells us who you are, without actually showing your face.

So I'm not super happy about how this went, but it wasn't all bad.  I'll probably try it again later.  I wanted to do some gentle fill in flash but I can get the RF transmitter for my cheap Neewer flash to work anymore.  I was using my 50mm lens but I think I need something wider.  I only have the basic kit lens that goes wider so I'm not sure I'll have the aperture range I need but I'll give it a try.

Synthetic Biology and future mass destruction

 

An interesting TED talk I saw the other day (it's from 2019 - I'm behind the curve)

 

it's a scary thought

Similar to the numerous talks about not being ready for the next pandemic that were given prior to COVID-19, I think this one is also presient of things to come.  I'm often in awe of future looking people like Rob Reid.  I'm not confident that we'll have the forethought and follow through to get ahead of this.