GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

I was graciously invited to give two panel discussions at the IoT World conference that happened last week in Santa Clara, CA.  Since the panels are not recorded, here are my thoughts and jots from before and during the Wednesday 5/15/2019 panel, entitled  Wrangling IoT Data for Machine Learning .  (Actually, I'm going into even more detail than I had time for at the panel.)  Despite that the conference organizers approached me about speaking on behalf of my former employer about some topics that honestly I was given just a few weeks to investigate and could only report back with failures even now, I managed to convince them that I was fluent in other things that were more generic -- unrelated to the job I knew I was about to quit. (Note: My thoughts and jots for the Thursday 5/16 panel are coming later.) Business Calculations The first question we were tasked with answering in this panel related to the business calculations that must be made before taki...

I've had a Sparkfun ESP32 Thing laying around on my desk since back in May when I met the fellow from Iron Transfer at a pinball convention, and we got to talking about IoT and his devices to remotely administrate pinball machines.  However, I spent tons of time this year planning for exhibitions, and didn't really get to do anything with it -- until now. Before You Begin There are a few choices you need to make up-front about which IDE you wish to use for development, plus which development framework.  I have chosen Microsoft's Visual Studio Code since it is cross-platform, feature-rich without hogging resources, free to download, and based on an open-source product similar to how Google Chrome is derived from Chromium.  It comes with extensions for language support and IntelliSense, which are must-haves when authoring code.  You are free to use an IDE of your choice; it won't really hamper your ability to enjoy the rest of this article. The other decision ...

From walking the show floor at Texas Pinball Fest 2016, I couldn't help but get the vibe that something novel and big would be in store for TPF 2017 -- something beyond the big but also typical/expected releases of commercial games such as The Big Lebowski and Ghostbusters  (more on those later), but in fact the ushering in of a new era: totally home-brew and open-source pinball.  As the re-themed games became more impressive from 2015 to 2016, and with easy access to leaning about hardware, fabrication techniques to develop new things and restore/renew/improve on old things, and a rejuvenated fascination with pinball in general, it was not surprising to me in the least that we would see someone totally knock it out of the park like Scott Danesi did at TPF 2017 with Total Nuclear Annihilation . However, just in case Scott wasn't there with his amazing game (for which I placed one of the pre-orders slated to ship sometime in 2018), I wanted to produce some work as well in or...

The physics of sound in our house lend well to Stacy being able to shout up to me from downstairs, but not so well for me shouting back downstairs.  It makes communication inefficient, and often times she's not exactly watching for messages on GChat either.  I don't like going halfway downstairs when I'm trying to hold very skinny wires in a special arrangement when poking around for defects in LEDgoes, much less just to get a Yes/No answer on a simple question. Recently, we picked up a Yamaha HTR-4065 stereo receiver for our living room.  Stacy was not happy with the sound quality of the original receiver, and hearing how the Yamaha can fill up the room while not vibrating every tiny appendage on your body with obnoxious bass, it was definitely money well-spent.  Hopefully it will add some more years to our natural hearing capability before we have to get hearing aids or whatever magical, mystical implant they develop by the time we're that old.  However, th...