In the previous review, we have talked about excellent WiFi routers that can be enhanced with intelligent devices. One such device can be Xiaomi Mi Smart WiFi remote control multi-function device. If you are looking for simple, robust, and fun home automation device, this could be a great choice. The main features of the Xiaomi Mi Smart WiFi Remote Control are:
There are very few houses that still use LAN connection for most network connections. It is impractical to use wires for several network devices like laptops, printers, TVs, tablets, and others. In smartphones and tablets, there aren’t other options than WiFi. The more devices you add to the network list, the better router you should aim for. Probably some of you had a situation when the most straightforward router couldn’t reliably handle several devices connected to the internet simultaneously. The only option was to upgrade to better, which naturally tends to be more expensive. The good news is that you don’t have to pay more to get a great router to handle the loads and deliver high speed to all your connected devices. Check out the newest Xiaomi Mi WiFi router 3, which comes with four high-gain antennas delivering better coverage with more robust signal and better sensitivity. The router supports the latest 802.11ac WiFi standard, which, by using 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, can deliver up to 1167Mbps in total.
One of my projects (AVR DDS 2.0) requires multiple power supplies that could supply +12V, -12V, and 5V. Back then, I have constructed a simple transformer-based power source with few linear voltage regulators. It works fine but is powered from mains 220V, which is not the safest solution to squeeze in to box enclosure. Another option was using the ATX PC power supply, which is too big. Banggood has been offering pretty attractive power supply kit which has a voltage boost circuit that raises voltage level either from USB or from the 5-24V jack. Power supply kit has most of the voltages that you may need including + 12V, -12V, + 5V, -5V, and +3.3V. It is capable of outputting 300mA per channel. Total power is limited to 10W, which is not bad and can provide a short-term high current single output, but be sure to attach included heat sinks to protect ICs from overheating. It is advised to keep the output currents of each channel to less than 0.2A.
There is a Raspberry Pi 3 out there, which is much faster than versions 1 and 2. While latest two are faster than first model, I thought it would be great to give some purpose to first Raspberry Pi model B. We share several computers around the house and sometimes need simple file storage solution to make backups, share and store. Raspberry Pi model B is sufficient for simple Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution. Such network automation setup doesn’t need much processing power to manage the drive. And there is also an option to have a torrent client running 24/7. Another benefit of using Raspberry Pi is low power. Let’s go through all steps on how to set up Network Attached Storage on this Raspberry Pi. You can go with several different solutions for setting up NAS. You could go with cloud solution like Owncloud, which is similar to Dropbox. This might be convenient in many ways, but I would like to have the ability to use the drive as portable media when needed. In that case, I am going to stick with SAMBA server.
E-commerce is a booming industry that companies are making billions of dollars on. The thought of sitting in the comfort of your own home and being able to do any type of shopping is liberating. Many people shop daily online, and increasing sales is the primary goal of every small and large e-commerce company. There are certain things that can be done if your sales aren’t where you want them to be. The following are a few of the ways to increase sales on your e-commerce website. Having a fast and efficient checkout system is essential, as companies can lose millions of dollars in sales if the page has a bug or requires way too much information. The purchaser might get frustrated or have buyer’s remorse before purchasing the item. The speed and efficiency of the checkout page is critical as the checkout page closes the deal for the company. A page that reloads or freezes a computer could be clicked off, and the shopper will go to a competitor for the product.
Previously we have configured basic NAS storage on Raspberry Pi. Having such power and doing nothing with storage is a waste. To prove its usefulness Next logical step is to implement a torrent client on this machine. The benefit is obvious. You have a NAS server that is always available and a torrent client that downloads/seeds files without the need power-hungry PC. You can find many torrent clients that can be used in Raspberry Pi, but it seems that lots of people prefer Deluge, which has plenty of features and requires small memory to run. Deluge is great in its flexibility – the ability to run on desktop, through the web interface, and through ThinClient. The other popular packet is Transmission, which is also lightweight and has great WebUI. Transmission can handle magnet links from the web interface. And it seems it is easier to configure. So we are going to stick with Transmission.
Cyber security is one of the buzzwords in IT, often dominating the thoughts of IT professionals and the front pages of national newspapers and big websites. There’s no doubting that using a professional company to protect your business from cyber-attacks is the best option to choose. However, there are also some things you can do to increase your security. A great place to start is by looking through the government’s pamphlet entitled Small Businesses: What You Need to Know About Cyber Security. If you don’t have time to read through this pretty long document, though, we’ve condensed the five most important points for you, which you’ll find in the handy guide below.
Structures in GCC are used in a variety of applications, such as: Basically, Structures are nothing more than collections of variables so, called members. Structures allow to reference of all members by a single name. Variables within a structure don’t have to be the same type. General structure declaration: or In the second example, we declared the variable name. Otherwise, variables can be declared this way: Members of the structure can be accessed by using the member operator (.). The member operator connects the member name to the structure. Let’s take an example: We can set the robot’s position by using following sentence: or simply Structures can be nested. A nested structure is a structure that contains another structure as one of its members. To access robot x coordinate, we have to write: Nested structures can be used in various applications, such as representing complex data types, like records or objects, and organizing data in a more readable and maintainable manner. They’re also helpful in systems programming, where you might need to represent hardware or software components as nested data structures. Actions can be taken with structures: Of course, you can treat a structure like a variable type. So you…
When the first Raspberry Pi board was introduced it changed the understanding of small computers by bringing Linux closer to us. With great support, low board prices, and the vast community, it stayed on top next to Arduino for four years. Of course, in to keep that success, updates in hardware and software are mandatory. We know how fast things change computer industry, so time to time, Raspberry Pi foundation kept upgrading Pi boards From first to second and now the newest third generation – Raspberry Pi 3. At first glance, you may see that Raspberry Pi 3 board is practically identical to version 2. component layout is the same, including all peripherals. So all enclosures that worked with Pi2 should fit fine for Pi3 boards. But not the most obvious things that make it stand out.
In this post, we will demystify the learning algorithm of linear regression. We will analyze the simplest univariate case with single feature X wherein the previous example was temperature and output was cricket chirps/sec. Let’s use the same data with crickets to build learning algorithm and see if it produces a similar hypothesis as in excel. As you may already know from this example, we need to find linear equation parameters θ0 and θ1, to fit line most optimally on the given data set: y = θ0 + θ1 x x here is a feature (temperature), and y – output value (chirps/sec). So how are we going to find parameters θ0 and θ1? The whole point of the learning algorithm is doing this iteratively. We need to find optimal θ0, and θ1 parameter values, so that approximation line error from the plotted training set is minimal. By doing successive corrections to randomly selected parameters we can find an optimal solution. From statistics, you probably know the Least Mean Square (LMS) algorithm. It uses gradient-based method of steepest descent.