While trying to make some graphs for one of my side projects recently, I came across an issue that both matplotlib and ggplot did not show up the graphs. I was able to save the graphs to an image file just fine, but if I tried to show them directly on screen while running the script, it just printed a number and exited. After tearing apart my hair for some time, I checked the backend being used by matplot lib:

I’m building a smartwatch project based around the new IoT posterkid on the block, ESP8266. Apart from the usual “smart” stuff, it does still need to display correct time :) and hence, the need for an ntp driver/client. I couldn’t find anyone working on that yet, so wrote up a quick and dirty implementation here:

NTP Implementation for ESP8266

It still has a lot of stuff left to be done to make it good enough for the smartwatch project but it works. Feel free to try it out in your own projects and let me know how it fares :)

So I got bored of listening to same old songs on my phone over and over and Rdio announced a streaming plan for India. With a sigh of relief I subscribed immediately and it was stellar at home with its wonderful 32 million song collection and chromecast support to boot. The experience during the commute daily was underwhelming. Couple the spotty airtel data connection with no one station covering all songs I would love and it makes for a frustrating commute with long gaps all over. Slacker has a radio station caching feature but unfortunately doesn’t support India. So I took things into my own hands and Shoutcast2Dropbox was born this weekend. Details follow below.

Spent this weekend building a remote controlled car with a live camera feed with a Raspberry Pi doing the communication and brains duty. Pretty nice real time movement control and camera pan/tilt control through websockets with a live stream feeding back to any browser directly from the car through mjpg-streamer

(PS: Video is at the bottom of the post. Browser/video on TV courtesy ChromeCast. Casted my Nexus 5 screen to the TV simultaneously while controlling the car :) )

Dangerous is a mind which is left grounded at home for days. Being stuck at home and having a few pieces of joy around made me do this over the weekend.

Ingredients:

• An old Toy RC car broken out of shape by my 4 year old

• DAGU Mini Driver

• Screw Driver/Batteries/Tape/Glue/Rubber bands/Old gift cards

• Half an hour of coding

Output:

A car that runs automatically making 8 shape on the floor (More like random fractals due to the wheels having no grip)