Posts tagged with "android"
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Changes To Solar Controller Setup
A few days ago, we got the exterior of our house painted. I had to move a lot of things out of the way for the painters so they can paint in every nook and corner. During that time I had to disconnect my solar controller electronics setup. What that means is that the solar charge controller takes over the responsibility of deciding when to charge my battery and when to disconnect the grid and let the load run from the battery + solar etc. Unfortunately the way it handles switching between battery, solar and grid is not as optimal as I’d like. Don’t get me wrong, it does a good job, but I always want something better which is why I built my own electronics and software intelligence to go with it to optimize the hell out of the solar panel output.
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Solar Panel Project Update - Part 5
This is the final update in the solar panel project series for now. Hopefully by now you must be quite bored with the updates because I am sure no one is going to build a project that is exactly same as mine. But in case you are following along, you might have picked up some things that you did not know earlier or may be you found somethings that you could have done differently. The reason I am writing is to keep a journal of things. While I fixed most of the issues with my setup, I still had a couple of problem that don’t happen frequently which makes it difficult to debug. In this post I will discuss the problems and my solutions. May be there are better solutions, but these are ones that I could come up with. A reader was lamenting that my posts are too short so I let this post go as long as it needs to be. So enjoy :).
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Failed To Repair An Android Tablet
I tried to fix an old android tablet and I failed. If you recall, a few posts ago, I mentioned how I failed to repair my TV. Later I figured out the issue and eventually was able to fix it. I hope the same can happen with the tablet. But as of now, after many attempts to recover it, I was unable to bring it back to life. It was working fine until the battery has gone bad and the device would not turn on without a battery. A few weeks ago, the battery of this cheap android tablet bulged like a balloon. The bulge was so big that the back of the device opened up. In the past, when some of my old android phones had a bulged battery, I could remove the battery and still run it using a USB charger. That does not seem to work with tablets though.
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Android Tablet As A Second Monitor
In one for my earlier posts I mentioned about using an android tablet as a second monitor for my laptop. I wanted to explain how I did that in case anyone is interested, although I am not sure how useful it will be. First of all, let me explain my setup. I almost always use Linux and my current favorite distro is Manjaro. I dual boot to Windows 11 for the occasional gaming fun. On top of using Manjaro Linux I am on the bleeding edge usually. So instead of using X11 I am actually using Wayland as the display server. If I already lost you, then don’t worry. Continue reading because you may still find something useful in here that works for Windows as well as for Linux with X11.
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Reusing Old Android Tablets
Before I retired, I used to work as an Android engineer in a reputable company. One of the benefits of working in an android team is that we get access to a lot of devices and form factors so we can test our products (the android apps that we build) on various devices. As a result, I have a bunch of android mobile devices and tablets. I will show off the collection in another post some day. After I quit, we were allowed to keep some of the old devices and use them for personal work. However, we are not allowed to sell them or give away to non family members. So I thought I need to put them to good use.
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Collecting Data From Solar Panel Setup
After having setup the solar panel on our terrace, I wanted some data. Specifically I wanted to know the panel output over the course of the day and how much energy savings we are enjoying. The solar management unit (SMU) gives some details about the instantaneous power output and energy savings. But for some reason I felt the numbers look a bit too optimistic. Moreover I could not get more granular data from it. I guess it has more to do with not invented here syndrome. Either way I decided to hook up some sensors myself to gather all the data I'd like from it.
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Friends Roster – Next Friend To Call
This is the continuation of “how I built the Friends Roster app” saga. If you missed the previous parts in this series, do check them out — part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6. To recap, I was describing how I built various screens using flutter.
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Where I Struggled With Flutter
In one of my previous posts I mentioned that it was fun and easy to code in Flutter. But that does not mean there were no difficulties. In this post I will cover a couple of areas where I struggled. The post will go into some technical details regarding Flutter and android development. So if you are not interested in them you might not care much. Feel free to skip.
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Experience With Flutter
In one of my previous posts I mentioned about a project that I wrote entirely using Flutter. This is the continuation of that post. I will go into the details of how Flutter became the platform of choice and my experience with it. Let me preface by saying that this may be interesting only to a limited set of software engineers. So if you are not one of them, it'll serve you best to skip this post.
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