I'm a 29 year old UIUC Computer Engineer building mobile apps, websites and hardware integrations with an interest in 3D printing, biotechnology and Arduinos.
Using Twilight for automatic late night TV dimming
I watch a lot of streaming tv and constantly fight myself if I should watch just one more episode before bed. Quickly I find myself in the early AM hours wondering how I got there. Unfortunately looking at LED screens encourages staying up late because of the light temperature that comes off the tv is very blue-ish (6000K). Our [...]
Get a Notification When Your WAN IP Changes
Home residential internet connections have dynamic public IP addresses that can change whenever the DHCP lease expires. But from my experience, I’ve had the same IP for months, so I was curious when they actually do change and if there is anything you can do anything to trigger a change (i.e. power cycling)? I started [...]
WIFI Signal Degrades More Than You Think
I recently went down the path of switching as many of my computers to gigabit ethernet and I wanted to test to make sure my cables were actually able to do 1000Mbit/sec. Unfortunately the normal route to do that is to buy a cable certifier unit that runs over $1000. But then I found iperf3, a linux/mac/win command line tool [...]
State of Wifi (2017)
I live in a medium sized apartment complex and there are 82 networks in range. Connectivity is erratic and bandwidth varies enough to make netflix/hulu/amazon to switch resolution feeds throughout a show. The graph below is from a program called Wifi Explorer and it visuals the 2.4ghz and 5ghz wifi radio spectrum. Along the [...]
Using Node-Red to send commands to Wifi LED Controllers
After buying a new Raspberry Pi 3, I noticed it came with an interesting app called Node-Red. Already familiar with Node.JS, I thought it was going to be some cheesy simplification that was going to severely limit what it could do for beginners. To my amazement, it wasn’t. Node-Red is a tool designed for IoT to get you [...]