You are locked in here with me(dia) – function keys always on. How to deactivate?

You are locked in here with me(dia) – function keys always on. How to deactivate?

Pressing F5 does not refresh your view anymore but rewinds the current media?F11 does not run the selected JUnit test in Eclipse any more but activates Caps Lock? I have a Logitech K850 keyboard and I unintentionally turned on the function key lock (didn’t even know such a thing existed). Try the following: [Fn] +…

Always look on the bright side of life: An adaptive night light for RGB LED stripes in MicroPython
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Always look on the bright side of life: An adaptive night light for RGB LED stripes in MicroPython

This covers a very configurable and more complex variant of measuring brightness and turning on LEDs.If you are looking for a more basic variant: It all began with a LDR and curiosity. The result is a night light for a ESP8266 like D1 Mini or Raspberry Pi Pico (W) which compensates darkness with many configurable…

How not to make your config file a pain in the ass – MicroPython edition

How not to make your config file a pain in the ass – MicroPython edition

Externalizing the configuration is a good idea. This makes the reusability of your program much higher and a user doesn’t have (and shouldn’t have to) change values in the code.This separation tends to show where your code is perhaps too tightly coupled and constants are referenced directly as they are directly available in the script…

Is it dark yet ? – Measuring brightness with LDR on Pi Pico (W) and ESP8266 (D1 Mini & NodeMCU v3) in MicroPython

Is it dark yet ? – Measuring brightness with LDR on Pi Pico (W) and ESP8266 (D1 Mini & NodeMCU v3) in MicroPython

Materials you need for this: LDRs (I am using 5528), breadboard, jumper wires, resistor (I used 56k) and a 5V power supply. The MicroPython code has been written for and tested on Pi Pico, Pi Pico W, D1 Mini and NodeMCU v3 ESP8266 .I bought it at berrybase.de and az-delivery.de (not referral links). The microcontrollers…

How not to be seen – a.k.a. Notepad++ Analyse Plugin hidden result window

How not to be seen – a.k.a. Notepad++ Analyse Plugin hidden result window

This short HowTo is about a problem I had with the Analyse Plugin for Notepad++. The Main window with the text and the one with the filters were still shown, but the result window disappeared and it wasn’t an instant fix to display it again. This is was worked for me:After a quick search I…

Trust is good control is better – JUnit Tests (parametrized and different arguments providers) with RxJava and some Mockito

Trust is good control is better – JUnit Tests (parametrized and different arguments providers) with RxJava and some Mockito

A follow up to Software tests – some basic JUnit testing in the area of RxJava. Not much text right now, just the announcement, the code below and the link to my github repo. Includes a build.gradle with all the needed dependencies.(There are already some other test concerning ConnectableObservables subscriptions and time of emit.) Short…

Deciphering the expected secret – Python this.s in a one liner

Deciphering the expected secret – Python this.s in a one liner

The little easter egg of “import this” in Python is well known – it shows Zen of Python. Nice guideline of how to keep your code clean. The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters Beautiful is better than ugly.Explicit is better than implicit.Simple is better than complex.Complex is better than complicated.Flat is better than nested.Sparse…

Better scratch your balls than your frozen windshield – MQTT warning for nightly low temperatures with Node-RED querying a weather API

Better scratch your balls than your frozen windshield – MQTT warning for nightly low temperatures with Node-RED querying a weather API

I have a talent to forget to cover my car before a night with temperature below zero and the next morning I have to scratch away all the ice. As I really don’t like that I decided to build a warning mechanism for that. I already had a Node-RED flow querying the weather API to…

Easy peasy – querying weather API in Node-RED and publishing the current temperature to a MQTT broker

Easy peasy – querying weather API in Node-RED and publishing the current temperature to a MQTT broker

Precondition: Have your lokal MQTT broker and Node-RED installed and setup or access to a remote one. I recently added a http request node querying a weather API to Node-RED. After extracting, the current temperature is then published on the local MQTT and can be used by all devices connected to the broker.In this example…