Tag: iot

New Tiles, No New Firmware: My Pico W Cosmic Unicorn Display and the IoT Stack Behind It

How I built a home display from a Pimoroni Cosmic Unicorn and a Pico W: LVGL firmware with MQTT for control and HTTP for images, plus the EMQX, HAProxy, MySQL and Ansible stack and Python services behind it.

Mbed TLS Is Losing Its TLS Maintainers: Time to Look at wolfSSL

Mbed TLS maintainers stop work on the TLS and X.509 libraries in April 2027. What that means for embedded and Raspberry Pi Pico projects, and how to plan a move to wolfSSL.

I Got the Pico 2 W Down to 3.5 mA, Then the SDK Broke It

How I took a battery-powered Pico 2 W IoT node from 38 mA to 3.5 mA with Pico SDK 2.3.0 dormant mode and FreeRTOS, plus the two SDK bugs that crash Wi-Fi and how to work round them.

Four Halloweens, Four Creatures That Watch You: My Raspberry Pi Pico Halloween Builds

Four years of Raspberry Pi Pico Halloween builds, from an ultrasound Guy Fawkes mask to a skull that tracks you with radar. What each one taught me, and which to build this weekend.

How My Halloween Skull Hunts You: Predator Servos and a Radar Brain

Part 2 of my Halloween animatronic skull: servo easing for predator-like motion on a Raspberry Pi RP2040, and a 24 GHz radar that sees through plastic to track you. Code on GitHub.

This Skull Watches You, and There’s No Camera Inside

An empty Halloween skull that turns to follow you round the room, with glowing eyes that redden as you get closer. No camera, no PIR. Part 1: how I built the eyes on a Raspberry Pi RP2040.

ReXP1: The Feature That Nearly Killed Me

ReXP1, my Star‑Wars‑inspired droid, has been one of the most fun builds I’ve ever tackled — but one capability has driven me up the wall: tilt.