With the twins, I messed around with a Neopixel strip. Not sure what I’d do with one in a future project, but at least I know how to program it in MakeCode now. Our project:
Author Archives: Eric Mesa
Today in Programming: Microsoft MakeCode
Since I’ve been making a lot of great progress programming with the kids in Scratch, I bought some Circuit Playground Expresses to program with the kids. The Circuit Playground Express can program in Arduino’s C dialect, CircuitPython, or Microsoft MakeCode, which uses blocks like Scratch. Today Scarlett and I made our first useful bit of […]
Setting up my Raspberry Pi Zero W for the Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT
As I mentioned before, I got a Raspberry Pi Zero W to replace my Arduino MKR WIFI 1010 and ENV board in the bathroom. My Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT (or bonnet, as Adafruit calls them) finally arrived a few days ago, so I setup a git repository for my code. The Pimoroni git Enviro+/Enviro Mini […]
Today in Programming: Python
I noticed that something had gone screwy with the Raspberry Pi 1B in the garage that was monitoring the garage door. I restarted it and discovered that last time I was coding and working on making it more robust if it had a temporary lapse in WiFi (so it wouldn’t crash), I’d created a little […]
Vivaldi on Windows Part 2 (plus a teeny bit about Vivaldi on Linux)
I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for about a week now. As I said in the penultimate paragraph of the post where I mentioned exploring various browsers, I don’t really use my browser on Windows for much more than uploading YouTube videos. And I mentioned last time that it wasn’t the best setup […]
Today in Programming: Python and Scratch
Scratch Once again I worked on some Scratch projects with the kids. This time it involved a sports theme. I let the kids choose which games they wanted to create and Sam chose to create the game where Scratch the Cat goes Skiing. Having done this for a few weeks now, it wasn’t too much […]
Upgrading main computer (Supermario) to Fedora 32
It’s been about a month since Fedora 32 was released, so I decided to try and upgrade Supermario to Fedora 32. First I had to disable the dropbox repo since they don’t have a Fedora 32 binary yet. Other conflicts included: bat in module gimp in module meson in module ninja in module pythnon3-pytest-testmon (doesn’t […]
Raspberry Pi Zero W for new Projects
The next project I wanted to work on was to see if maybe my environment monitoring might be slightly more reliable with a Raspberry Pi than with an Arduino. So I wanted to do some comparisons. For my bathroom IoT project, I am using: Arduinio MKR Wif i 1010 – $32.10 Arduino MKR ENV Shield […]
Vivaldi On Windows Part 1
This is the first post continuing my exploration of web browsers outside of Firefox and Google Chrome. You can read the introduction here. For the first browser I wanted to check out on Windows, I decided to check out Vivaldi. My thought process is that I’m most likely to end up with Brave, so better […]
Are Web Browsers Getting Exciting Again?
It’s been a while since I last considered web browsers. I wrote this post in 2008 about which browsers I was using. And in 2011 I wrote this post about KDE Browsers. So that’s at least 9 years since I wrote about browsers. What is my current situation? Well, on Linux I bounced back and […]
Yesterday and Today’s Programming: Scratch
Stella’s Project Because last week was busy with house projects, this week I continued the ocean/water-themed programming from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The first project was a game I made with Stella (her first computer game creation), a boat race in Scratch. While we mostly stuck to the tutorial, we did partake in the challenges, […]
Today’s Programming: Scratch and Python
Scratch Starting off with this code from the Raspberry Pi foundation, Sam made his first ever video game. I then modified it so the shark would close his mouth when he eats the fish and added a sound at the end when a score of 5 was reached. Here’s a video of Sam playing his […]
Last Three Days of Programming: Python
I’ve mostly been working on version 5.0 of my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since I adopted the Semantic Versioning principle for the project, an API change means a major version change. I’ve been taking everything I’ve learned about Python programming from 2019 and 2020 and tried to make my code both more Pythonic and more […]
Today’s Programming: Ruby and Python
I don’t know how long I intend to keep doing this, but I decided I wanted to document my programming as I went along. So yesterday I worked on Scratch and here’s today’s entry. Ruby A while ago I got a bunch of kids’ programming books in a Humble Bundle. I tried showing Ruby to […]
Today’s Programming: Flowers in Scratch 3
First of all, if you’re a Linux user and would like an offline version of Scratch 3, you can get it from https://scratux.org/. They make binaries for a few Linux distros plus an AppImage which works on any of them. On the Raspberry Pi Blog I saw that this week was about making art on […]