New Projects:

These are great little Arduino based controllers. They are Wifi connected and can be programmed over the internet with Particle's Web IDE. Particle has several different boards available, the Proton, Argon and the Boron. They had a Xenon which used a Bluetooth based mesh network. Particle has decided to discontinue this board.
These boards work with a whole range IoT services. You can trigger them over the internet using your cell phone. There is a service provided by twilio which can text you when an event happens. Overall they are pretty cool little devices.

The Fool's Quarter

I get to play with these wonderful little toys thanks to a good friend having a vision of starting a haunted house over a decade ago. I greatly enjoy the experience of learning how to make them do what I need for them to do. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it takes weeks of looking at something to get it right.

Visit Milburn's Haunted Manor!

Particle Photon 2 - Emergency SMS Controller

I was tasked with coming up with an easy method for each of the rooms to contact the staff as needed in the haunted house. A couple of ideas where batted around but then I remembered the wonderful world of IoT and the Particle line of microcontrollers. Since I played with them last they have introduced the Photon 2, a Wi-Fi connected controller that when coupled with Twilio can send a pre-determined text message at a push of a button. Thus this project was born.

Great Links

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