DevSpace is a two day, annual technical conference back for its 5th year in Huntsville, AL. Sessions covered a wide range of topics such as functional programming, game development, machine learning, AWS, testing and more. This was my second time attending the conference (first time was back in ...
Counting Pixels by Color in Python with Pillow (a PIL fork)
I'm a maker and love creating 8-bit art, mostly with wood. I have a new project in the works where I need an exact count of each pixel per a color. I started to manually count them before I stopped myself and thought, why don't I just write a script to automate this!? ...
JavaScript’s Null Coalescing Operator | Today I Learned
Scroll below for an important language update to this blog post. I was fixing a bug in a portion of code when I came across a getter structured very similar to the lines below: At first glance, I was confused thinking why would you return a Boolean here? Shouldn’t this be a ternary ...
Tinkering Around with Adafruit’s PyBadge LC
I recently purchased an Adafruit PyBadge LC. and I've had a lot fun tinkering around with it. There are three boards in this family of boards from Adafruit: PyBadge LC (the one I have)PyBadgePyGamer The PyBadge LC is the cheapest of the bunch, hence the LC for low cost. For more details on the ...
I made a Sphere-O-Bot (An EggBot Mod)
As Easter approaches, I thought building a Sphere-O-Bot (EggBot) would be a fun a STEM related project for the season. I 3D printed the parts for the Sphere-O-Bot, a variant of the original EggBot by Evil Mad Science, and purchased the hardware kit from JJ Robots. Printing and assembling the ...
AdaBox 005: Break for Pi | Adafruit Subscription Box
The Adafruit AdaBox is a quarterly subscription box service containing Adafruit products, collectable pins, and discounts for future purchases. AdaBox is geared towards beginners interested in learning more about electronics (similar to the way Creation Crate is geared towards beginners). Adabox 005 ...
NESPi Raspberry Pi Case (RetroFlag) Mini Review
I think it's official: I have found my favorite Raspberry Pi case. A few weeks ago I discovered the existence of the NESPi Raspberry Pi case from Retroflag. This case is shaped as the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I was able to purchase it via Amazon for $25. (I have seen ...
Avoid using mutable values as default parameter values in Python (Today I Learned)
Today I learned something interesting about the way Python functions behave with default parameter values: avoid using mutable objects such as lists as default values for function parameters. What's the problem? Default parameter values are evaluated when function is evaluated. Which means ...
Adafruit Joy Bonnet for the Raspberry Pi
At long last, I finally completed a project with the Raspberry Pi Zero. I bought one several months ago, but it just collected dust in my office. Adafruit recently released a little bonnet for the Pi Zero with hand-held arcade controls. It fits perfectly on top of the Pi Zero. Purchasing the ...
Creation Crate Month 4: An Arduino powered LED dice game
Tinkering with microcontrollers has been on my “to try” list for quite some time. I recently stumbled upon Creation Crate. Creation Crate is a monthly tech education subscription box. Each month you receive a Arduino UNO R3 and parts to complete a project. The instruction book includes the source ...