Welcome to SWB Labs Displaying: Software

One of the capabilities that is missing from the Amazon Echo is the ability to initiate spoken notifications even when the user hasn't addressed the Echo. Although Amazon will likely address this at some ... [More]

I noticed Rich Hawkes project on Hackaday for a WS2812 LED Tree and then reading comments further found a lasercut tree on Hackaday.io. The 7 rings were a little pricey but I found this 93 LED 5-ring set ... [More]

Quite a while back at one of our meetup groups one of the attendees wanted a way to monitor and document sound levels. We discussed a couple of approaches. One would be to use a microphone and monitor ... [More]

A couple of years back my daughter picked a science project that involved growing beans in varying magnetic fields. I thought it might be interesting to film the beans growing over a period of weeks. An ... [More]

The Amazon Echo can be extremely useful for triggering home automation. This ranges from custom homebrew devices to widely used devices like Insteon, Wink, etc. I happen to have a mixture of devices including ... [More]

When I asked my daughter what she wanted to be on Halloween she said she wanted to have an LED dress like Katy Perry. After some discussion, it seemed that we’d need a white dress that both diffused but ... [More]

At our daughter's school, all the 2nd graders put together a "state board" project. They are randomly assigned a state (in our daughter's case, Vermont) and the students work to put together a poster on ... [More]

In my last post, I explored alarm monitoring using the Raspberry Pi and Arduino.  I thought I'd give the Electric Imp a try as well.  The Electric Imp is a WiFi module and Cortex-M3 processor built into ... [More]

I spotted a post by Lior Hass on Hackaday a little while back where he described his Alarmino project where his alarm system now connects with an Arduino and a custom board to simulate the phone line and interpret Contact-ID ... [More]

I wanted to control my Romo (the cellbot from Romotive) from my PC.  But I like Romotive's control app and didn't really want to write my own at this point using their SDK.  Instead, I just wanted to control ... [More]