HOT ROD (and more) Christmas Cards!!!!

Hot Rod Christmas/ Cards

And More! At our Online store  On Zazzle.

The rise of the Wireless Speaker

The above is the 21cm cube that is the Naim MU-SU Qb . This is just one of the type of Wireless Speaker products that seem to fill the recent years electronics store catalogs.

This one is particularly expensive and by NAIM,  and not your more typical $199 JBL unit or a SONOS.   { The Naim unit is a Life Style product. A Life Style product is an accepted category for consumers, typified by Apple or Nike, where image and style is more important than cost performance.}  The single speaker produces Stereo.

I  expect they are popular as the current source of the owners music is their Phone Or Tablet and they want to listen without headphones.  Most of the wireless speaker units are portable and have a rechargeable battery so you can take it anywhere with a days battery life...

You can get a small Bluetooth receiver with line outs for about $50, to wirelessly play music from a phone into a Hi-Fi  (large or small), but those devices haven't taken off, or there would be a dozen choices in those same catalogs.

I like the concept of these things but don't have or need one.   I'm probably just not the target audience...

The Naim unit is far more than just a wireless speaker though, and supports steaming and all the modern conveniences. I just don't know why you would spend that much for a single speaker, but it is cool.



 

Heavy Metal Garage - The Hot Rod That Ate My Wallet Calendar 2017

I have made one of these one month per page again for my own use.  It has become important as to how I schedule things.

The CorelDraw I use contains a Calendar generating tool  that produces the grid for each month of the year with various formatting options that makes this practical to do.  Laying out the rest of each page is done manually though.

Have been doing this for a number of years, but currently aren't planning on releasing it as a PDF as I have done previously.  But things can change.

IoT - Something Something Something....

Have been involved with technical stuff for decades, and have seen the hype not match up to reality so may times......    

Internet Of Things, IoT is one such thing being hyped at the moment.  It will probably be become a thing, but don't see anything more than  suburb wide meter reading as a business any time soon, and that isn't something I'm involved with.

One of the touted approaches is a propriety  radio technology called LoRa.  That stands for Long Range. Now I have been developing electronics and firmware using this for over 12 months now and have working devices being deployed.  Have very detailed low level implementation experience in C and circuit design with the SX1276 radio chip in use with Arm processors making very low power (a few uA in standby) Remote devices, Repeaters and Gateways.   Others designed the Antenna and matching network though!

The application isn't what I would call IoT, and so far it has been absolutely amazing in our application compared to the existing technology radios.

We aren't currently using LoRaWan, and have rolled our own much simpler protocol closer to what the existing application and market actually needs.  Has worked very well so afar.

May move to LoRaWAN though for newer applications in our market. Do have  LoRaWAN gateway modules and have done some investigations, and read through lots of the C source code.  It is a question of overhead vs return.  Cool, but we need newer applications in our market to get a benefit for 8x the code and complexity...... something we are putting lots of thought into.  

Still would not call what we are doing  IoT though.   That seems too much like Multimedia, which was hyped as it was Something Something Something ..... which Steve Jobs described as a Zero Billion Dollar Business.

We can be contacted at Art & Technology.

Learning Freehand Airbrushing

Been learning freehand airbrushing over the last few months.  Have many more to go, as it is very much like learning to play the guitar, where you have to commit actions to muscle memory to be able to achieve what you want.  Here are some samples of our original Megacurve music, if your interested.  Usually listening to music while I practice.  Dagger lines, dots, lines and all those basic things are far from easy, even if using stencils and masking is.

So what can you do with it?   Custom T-Shirts using Createx Airbrush Color...

You spend almost as much time cleaning the airbrush as you do practicing.  And as we are using Createx paint, we have to thin it to not clog and working how much to thin with what affect also takes time.

Over 12 months ago we did a series of watercolors, but the reality of that is, that was very much like the illustration work I already do.

Airbrush isn't, even though I do a lot of airbrush in Photoshop, it is not the same and not as critical to do as the real thing.

And you have Undo with Photoshop and the airbrush will not spit if the nozzle gets blocked!

We can be contact at Art & Technology