When I first got my Nexus 4 phone almost 3 years ago, I was very impressed by its speed. This was a massive upgrade from my HTC Glacier and I was really excited to get the full unhindered power of vanilla Android. Today, I'm still very impressed by the phone. Sure, it's showing its age (mostly the original battery, the accidentally shattered back, and the very displeasing Zagg cover), but the phone still runs decently fast. I'm surprised that Google supported it for this long. I'm pretty sure the last update we're getting is to Android 5.1.1.
I have noticed, however, that even the quad core processor can't seem to update Facebook without slowing the whole phone down very noticeably. It basically becomes unusable. This is really the only app I have this issue with, so I've concluded that it's probably the apps fault. I chalked it up to it being a very complex app with almost all of the features of the website (there are tons).
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Sunday, November 15, 2015
How to make your Android Phone Really Wake You Up!
This project requires a some hardware. Despite this being a software blog, I figured we could mix the two together eventually. Let this be the first cross over into metal! Huzzah!
Basically, because I work better at night than I do during the day, I had trouble waking up for my 8:00AM class. I also had this LED light strip hanging over my bed. Not only did this thing have 16 fantastic colors on it, but it also had another set of LEDs that were bright white. Like, really really bright white. I figured I could get these to wake me up! So I set out on a mission to get my phone alarm to trigger something to make these bright beasts turn on to get me out of bed.
The easiest bridge I could think of (seeing as my phone, the Nexus 4, doesn't have an IR Diode on it) was an Arduino. I have experience with DFRobot's Blunonano and I love it. It's about $35 on their website (which is where I got mine) which isn't bad considering the regular Arduino Nano is $30 from this seller on Amazon. Of course, you can use any Arduino you want with some sort of Bluetooth Shield, but I think it's easiest to use the Blunonano. That's what this tutorial is written for.
Basically, because I work better at night than I do during the day, I had trouble waking up for my 8:00AM class. I also had this LED light strip hanging over my bed. Not only did this thing have 16 fantastic colors on it, but it also had another set of LEDs that were bright white. Like, really really bright white. I figured I could get these to wake me up! So I set out on a mission to get my phone alarm to trigger something to make these bright beasts turn on to get me out of bed.
The easiest bridge I could think of (seeing as my phone, the Nexus 4, doesn't have an IR Diode on it) was an Arduino. I have experience with DFRobot's Blunonano and I love it. It's about $35 on their website (which is where I got mine) which isn't bad considering the regular Arduino Nano is $30 from this seller on Amazon. Of course, you can use any Arduino you want with some sort of Bluetooth Shield, but I think it's easiest to use the Blunonano. That's what this tutorial is written for.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)