Last year we kicked off the first Hardware Happy Hour in Louisville Kentucky, USA. We had a lot of fun sharing our projects with each other and hearing about all the things being built in our own back yard. If you’re building something you should try looking for an event in your area as more and more are popping up around the world.

Last year I started work and completed the first prototype for managing a roomba via sms and radio. Overall the prototype was a successful, but over time highly unreliable in the face of failure. Most of this came down to state management for the API endpoint and the Roomba OI (Open Interface) code running on the Feather. This week I had the opportunity to sit down and fix some of that.

Day to day I spend a lot of time interacting with database systems. While this is super useful it can also create issues with testing that have been covered many many times in many other articles.

I recently had the need to measure time and performance on an application that interacted with a lot of on disk files. Most of the time when talking about timing and measurement in Python we see the use of timeitand various built in timing techniques. For this work I wanted a little more information about how the application was interacting with the system, and what the performance looked like from outside the application. Getting a rough view of this is pretty easy on a nix using /usr/bin/time.

I recently completed my first EdX course Embedded Systems Shape the World and wanted to share a little bit about the experience.