Use Power BI to view your Smartthings devices

Intro This is more of a proof of concept to show that you can read from custom and not-often-used data sources into Power BI. As you go through this small showcase/tutorial, I encourage you to think about what type of data would benefit from you being able to look at it in a cohesive dashboard.…

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Using a RGB LED strip as an audio visualizer

Audio Viz

Intro I recently bought a RGB LED strip and wanted to do something fun with it. It was very much like this one [link]. Except I bought it at ebay for a whopping $11 shipped. After a bunch of deliberation, I decided to paste it under my two monitors on my desk. So what to…

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Microcharts on OLED displays using a Raspberry Pi

When you think of microcharts, you probably think of something like these: This is fine if you want to display it on a traditional screen, but what if you don’t want it to take real estate on your computer screen or cellphone? What if you want something nice and bright and readily available? Enter the…

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Analytics on your keyboard? Why not?

Intro I’ve owned a Razer keyboard for a while now. I’ve always loved the fact that the keys light up according to the context of the application. For the most part this means that the keyboard will react to context. Amongst the supported apps there is one cool Adobe Photoshop integration, but mostly it’s games.…

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Amazon Dash Doorbell Update

I had previously posted about how to use an Amazon Dash button to turn it into a doorbell. Well, recently, Amazon has added a new camera device type to their smarhome skills api. This is great for us because it has the ability to receive doorbell press events. What I set out to do is…

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Create a visual and audio notifier

In one of my previous posts, I had shown you how to hack an Amazon dash button to do whatever you want. In our case, we had it so that it alerted us via SMS and Telegram. But what if we want to be visually alerted as well as by sound? Alexa will soon open…

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Amazon Dash Doorbell

Recently, Amazon dash buttons came on sale. After reading many tutorials out there, I succumbed and decided to ‘hack’ it. Which is another fancy way of saying I used it for something other than intended. I’ll tell you how I did it and hopefully it will be easy for you to do. Let me know…

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