Control an ESP8266 With Amazon Alexa!

Over the last year or so I have became captivated with anything and everything ESP8266 related, and rightfully so. This little WiFi module is everything I have been hoping for in a development board for years. It’s small and compact, and has built in WiFi, as well as several GPIO lines, and is Arduino IDE compatible making reading sensors and controlling things like relays and such very easy. In this review / overview I am going to take a look at the Linknode R4,  a new offering from LinkSprite, a fairly young company that is dedicated to offering the public affordable DIY home automation solutions.  [node:read-more:link]

Using NeoPixels to Visually Indicate Temperature

A few days ago, I started working on a environment temperature monitoring project that I wanted to turn into a tutorial here at TMWB, and half way through, I decided to integrate NeoPixels as a sort of basic visual aid. Basically I wanted the NeoPixels to change color based on a hot / cold threshold. While this is simple in function, it will give users an easy way to determine if a room is warm or cool. [node:read-more:link]

So you just finished soldering up your Sanguinololu 1.3A board and are ready to test it to see if everything is working properly, but before you can upload any firm ware to the board you need to burn a Bootloader to the ATmega 644P. In this tutorial I will cover using an Arduino or Arduino clone as your ISP programmer.  … Class starts after the jump. [node:read-more:link]