PiHut’s Maker Advent Calendar 2023 – Day Three Project

December 6, 2023 | Comment

In box three of the PiHut Maker Advent Calendar are two switches, one red and one green, clearly to be used with the red and the green LED that was in box two. Unfortunately, I still haven’t been able to get the green LED to work so today’s project has been slightly neutered but does work to a point.

As you can see from the video below I did get one of the switches working … 🤣

I have reached out to PiHut hoping that they can point me in the right direction and get the green LED working. This … Read the rest

PiHut’s Maker Advent Calendar 2023 – Day Two Project

December 4, 2023 | 2 comments

Now that we have two boxes open we can carry out the first project which is to take the supplied Pico, LED block light, breadboards and cables and wire them together.

As with last year’s calendar, the projects come with an excellent set of tutorials which you can find on the PiHut website. These walk you through not only the project but also come with an explanation as to what the components are and how they work. This is useful for beginners and acts as a nice refresher for experts too.

Today’s project was to take the block LED, which … Read the rest

PiHut’s Maker Advent Calendar 2023 – Day Two

December 3, 2023 | 1 comment

Yesterday, I opened the first box from this year’s PiHut Maker Advent Calendar. This next box revealed some simple parts so we can get on and do the first proper project, which I will be covering tomorrow. Take a look at the video 👇 for details of what is in the day two box.

Day two included the following:

  • 1x 15mm diffused ‘blocky’ LED
  • 1x Resistor
  • 2x Male to male jumper wires

Tomorrow I will post a video showing how I got on wiring it all together.… Read the rest

PiHut’s Maker Advent Calendar 2023 – Day One

PiHut’s Maker Advent Calendar 2023 – Day One

December 1, 2023 | 2 comments

It’s back! As I trailed a while back PiHut have released what they call the “Maker Advent Calender” for 2023. This year both the original and a new “Let it Glow” versions are available. Given that I did the original one last year, this year I am unboxing the “Let it Glow” version.

Day one included the following:

  • 1x Raspberry Pi Pico H (with headers pre-soldered)
  • 1x 1m Micro-USB cable
  • 2x 400-point solderless breadboards

Not terribly exciting but the foundations on which to build what I hope will be some exciting light based projects.

As last year there is a … Read the rest

ShiftCam SnapGrip & SnapPod Review

November 22, 2023 | Comment

MagSafe has been around for the iPhone since the 12 variants released in 2020 and works incredibly well. I carry this Anker MagSafe power bank with me when I am out and about that snaps onto the back of the phone and gives it a bit of a top-up. Other than power banks I haven’t really seen anyone make much of the iPhone MagSafe.

Enter ShiftCam which does a series of accessories that use Apple’s MagSafe in interesting ways. I am taking a look at the SnapGrip and the SnapPop here.

SnapGrip

SnapGrip is a snap-on accessory that adds a … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Five – Putting it all Together

November 10, 2023 | 2 comments

In this series of posts we have looked at:

In this final post we are looking at putting it all together. This includes a worked example plus a complete library of functions that will allow you to easily interact with the Bluesky API.

The Prerequisites

What this project has predominately been about is the correct formatting of the parameters that need to be passed to the Bluesky API. This code does not directly call the API but uses BlueskyApi by Clark Rasmussen to do that.

Here’s … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Four – Link Cards

November 9, 2023 | Comment

In this we post we are continuing to look at accessing Bluesky from the API via PHP. Previously we looked at making a connection to Bluesky, posting text, images and handling links and in this post we take a look at Link Cards.

What Even IS a Link Card?

Link Cards are the snippets of a website that is linked to a post that you will no doubt be familiar with seeing elsewhere. Typically, elsewhere these are handled for you but not in Bluesky – here you do all the heavy lifting.

Example of a Link Card

Fetching Details

… Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Three – Links

November 8, 2023 | Comment

So far we have looked at making a connection to Bluesky, posting text and images. In this post I want to look at how links are handled. Unlike X and Mastodon on Bluesky when you post text that includes one or more links these are not parsed and activated. You have to tell Bluesky that you have links in your text and where they are.

Parsing for Links

In order for links to be handled correctly by Bluesky in addition to the text itself you also need to pass an array as part of the parameters giving the start … Read the rest

Posting to Bluesky via the API from PHP – Part Two – Images

November 7, 2023 | Comment

In the first of these posts we looked at creating the connection to the Bluesky API and posting a text post. In this second post we are going to extend that out to post images as well as text.

The code posted here are snippets from a larger library of functions that you can drop in and use to post to Bluesky. If some parts look more complex than they need to all will be revealed in the final version.

Uploading Images

In order to post an image to Bluesky you have to take a few steps:

  1. open and ingest
… Read the rest