Tinker Niche

There is an unused Medical Advertisement system in a pharmacy nearby.  This system would show many medical ads on local medical services; hospitals, medicines etc. Since a long time now it has been switched off and unused "perfectly working" things cause a lot of botheration. Got the Mukesh Medicals Pharmacy owner interested in reviving it so that it could be repurposed to show other things: custom ads, local information, products on offer etc. The hardware turned out to be an MP4 player with a VGA out connection. Good deal of time was spent in experimenting in encoding a suitable video that could be run on the System as it was 10+ years old and many codecs and features have evolved and cannot be run on older systems. Also the file structure on the storage device also played a part in the video operation. The earlier system keeps a record of how long and how often a particular ad has been played for payment purposes and this feature couldn't be changed. There was a need t...

There was a need for an Organisation to build a phone network for use by their employees. Unlike the yester-years where telephony was analog and it required switching exchanges to route calls. The Govt or large corporations would set up Private Branch Exchanges (PBX) for this function. Now a days calls can be made digitally on the internet itself given that a server can appropriately route them to their chosen destinations. Voice over IP is used to digitally transmit packets over IP on the network to enable calling. There is a need for a VOIP server and clients that can talk to each other just like the old phone network. This can be easily achieved using robust opensource tools. Asterisk is an opensource PBX that has been around for a long period of time. Asterisk is an open source framework for building communications applications. Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server. Asterisk powers IP PBX systems, VoIP gateways, conference servers and other custom soluti...

  A portable camera was needed. This was before the time of the Raspberry Pi, commonly available mobile phone extensible apps. The following would be nice to have Very tiny form factor Low cost Open Source software to enable extension Support standard computer interfaces Maybe run on battery too As other extensible platforms were not too common, it was standard practice to use existing low cost Access point. A few notable mentions would be the Linksys WRT54G, which has many mods and hacks like WIFI car, etc and others. A suitable candidate was the TPLINK MR3020 Pocket router.  TPLINK MR3020 POCKET ROUTER It has a USB Port so its extensible. Has Ethernet too. Has an OpenWRT port so any new software/configuration/mod can be written. It can be battery powered. It is super cheap less than 1000 INR. Downloaded or generated (it was too long ago) a ROM for this router and added USB support in the kernel for various USB devices including UVC Cameras. It has an mjpeg video/camera strea...

Handwritten Like Calendar  Intent: To make a unique calendar of my own. Handwritten Calendars look arty and it was chosen as a good calendar format. There was access to a CNC machine. A template file was created in Inkscape, the Vector Drawing tool and the month files generated. Had to add support for other fonts and the files generated were then converted to a format suitable for printing. Had to experiment with various fonts and styles and sizes to make it look good. A batch of 15 calendars were produced and physically processed by a Calendar maker. A Limited number of  copies of the 2023 calendar were generated It was made in two colors: ivory and card board style. It was well received by interested parties and all the calendars were sold out. Satisfying ! Next steps for new calendar might be: To automate calendar generation via an extension for Inkscape. Allow users to specify important dates and custom images Auto generate calendar for printing. The 2  types in ivory...

Adding Rudder Control to a Putt Putt or Pop Pop Boat   Putt putt boats or pop pot boats are inexpensive toy boats that are fun to use. They basically use a simple steam engine, a boiler that is mounted in the centre of a boat frame and when water is filled into the boat heater pipes and heated at the boiler, it causes steam to be expelled from one of the pipes which causes more cold water to be sucked in. The expulsion of the steam causes the boat to move forward and creates a suction/expulsion cycle. As the only motion that is provided is forward motion, it would be very desirable to have turn control. This is done by using a rudder. Implementing the Rudder Control on the Putt Putt boat This mechanism needs a rudder a piece of metal/wood/plastic and turns left or right depending on the control from the user. To achieve this mechanism, simple off-the-shelf parts or parts available from the numerous online electronics hobby stores were chosen. A simple SG90 servo can provide the lef...

Notable technical stuff from another of my Blog  The Old Blog is here  Aj's Old Blog   Custom Android ROM generation and new hardware interface for a Micromax Funbook for an interactive table for a Coffee Franchise Needed a new touch screen with deeper depth sensing to be interfaced to an android tablet. A hackable Android tablet was found and its hardware enabled to make changes. Cyanogenmod was a popular alternative Android variant. The CM10 Android ROM was compiled for 24 hours and its ROM updated to a stock Micromax Funbook (P300?) Google apps were also run separately. A different touch screen needed for this was interfaced to Android and was found to be working satisfactorily. The link to a related blog is Cyanogenmod 10 (Android ROM) on Micromax Funbook Howto build a tiny Home projector Needed to build a DIY projector  By taking apart the reflector backing from a phones display one can get transparency like film. Using a strong light and some proper lenses, a p...

Long time wish to build a smart watch. Experimented with various platforms, not built anything usable yet. Many opensource variants: watchy, openwatch, pinetime, etc. Pinetime is by the Pine64 Organisation  Pine64 Org . They make many open source products like laptops, phones, watches, SBCs, etc. The Pine64 forum has a watch called the Pinetime. It looks nicely packaged and so wanted to see if its suitable for everyday use. More info here  PineTime It is an NRF52 based chipset with an IPS display and chinese sensors for heart rate and step counting. They have an FreeRTOS based OS called the Infinitime . It was WIP then (Mar2021), so many features were under development and also the UI was rudimentary. At about the same time there was another micropython based OS called WaspOS which was under active development.  Downloaded this and generated the OS. The advantage is that one can just write micropython apps and download to this board. No classical embedded development nece...