A Letter To My Brother about Finances

Posted on by mrsoltys
My brother is about to finish school and start his first job. I'm writing this post to him, based on lessons and things I've learned along the way, but hopefully it's helpful to everyone! My financial goal here is to live comfortably (not excessively) and be able to retire someday! If your employer has retirement matching, max it out! This is...Read More

Getting started with the Particle Photon

Posted on by mrsoltys
I love using all flavors of Arduino in the engineering classes I teach. They're great tools, and students do some truly awesome stuff with them. More and more, students want to build connected devices.  This used to require an expensive WiFi shield or Ethernet shield, or require the students to switch to developing on a Raspberry Pi. Enter the particle Photon:...Read More

Wireless Google Calendar Display using Raspberry Pi and Arduino

Posted on by mrsoltys
When I'm not in my office, I like for people to know where to find me. Am I teaching a class? Working from home? In the manufacturing area? So I thought it'd be cool to build a little device that I could put in my office window that shows where I'm at and when I'll be back... On the window...Read More

ATtiny85 and the Particle Photon

Posted on by mrsoltys
As you know: I love all things Arduino and use them extensively both as a hobby and as a teaching tool... I wanted to talk about a few products that I've been especially stoked on lately, just for those nerdy blog readers out there. ATtiny85 [caption id="attachment_1637" align="alignleft" width="300"] Here's the ATtiny connected to two 8-bit shift registers to give it...Read More

Home Buying

Posted on by mrsoltys
My last post was more than 8 months ago! I want to start updating my blog again, So we'll start with the biggest update I can think of: we bought a house. A little background: [caption id="attachment_1630" align="alignright" width="300"] In early 2015, Boulder housing prices began to climb steadily[/caption] The city of Boulder is surrounded by a moat of open-space...Read More

Poormans Nest

Posted on by mrsoltys
[caption id="attachment_1616" align="alignright" width="300"] Ok, for sure not as sexy as the NEST[/caption] I start a lot of projects and never finish them. So in the spirit of documenting where I've been, here's my Poorman's Nest.  Here I'm using one of my Microview's I had laying around A potentiometer (on pin A0) A small digital temperature sensor (on pin 3)...Read More

Replacing Dropbox Pro with Amazon Glacier, and other services

Posted on by mrsoltys
Recently I've started auditing my tech spending to save some money.  One of the things I decided to drop was my subscription to Dropbox Pro, costing me $99/yr for 100 GB.  (really 140, because they double your free-space with a pro account). Here's what I did. Photos: Amazon S3 Glacier Backup A big chunk of my data in dropbox was photos:...Read More