Raspberry Pi + Azure + iPhone App = Happy Horse

Bored for a day, Raspberry Pi, Azure and Cordova(PhoneGap)

As I had a day off between Christmas and New Years , I decided I’d fill my day learning something new. I gave myself just 1 day to create an iPhone app to help decided which rug to put on the horse during the day and night. Anyone with a horse knows about the hard decision, which rug to put on your horse. You don’t want them getting to cold and you don’t want them getting too hot and cause stress colic.

I received a Raspberry Pi A+ (£15.51) for Christmas and ordered a waterproof temperature sensor from Amazon for next day prime delivery.

So where to start?

1) Install Linux and setup a Raspberry Pi

2) Write python script to read the temperature values

3) Connect temperature sensor to the Raspberry Pi

4) Create a free RavenDB at RavenHQ

5) Create a free Windows Azure Website

6) Find extra weather data for the area surround the horse’s stable.

7) Create a simple iPhone app with Visual Studio Cordova (normally I would default to Xamarin, but I wanted to try something different)

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,900 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Daily Fitbit stats

My fitbit #Fitstats_UK for 12/30/2013: 6,814 steps and 3.1 miles traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/26TKVH

Daily Fitbit stats

My fitbit #Fitstats_UK for 12/29/2013: 16,808 steps and 7.7 miles traveled. http://www.fitbit.com/user/26TKVH

New personal best

Well I received the stats from Strava.com (they did an excellent job in resolving the data issue).

Keeping fit for work.

Hello you,

Recently I decided to get in to better shape. A number of other devs have decided to do the same thing and they feel a lot better for it.

So I thought i’d share a few bit and bobs as I go along, these are post mainly for me as a diary and to see if it helps my creativity and energy levels.

My first personal goal is to get in to the top 10 of people to complete the Pedley Hill Sprint.

Base64 CSS Images for speed MSTASK

Hi all,

Following on from previous posts and the possible cheap ways to increase your web-site load times. I thought I’d share a little bit code that helps reduce the number of calls your web pages make when loading images either from CSS or in the HTML itself.

The process is straight forwards enough; It’s just a case of where you want to implement it, either during the build process or at runtime.

iPhone Apps built with Monotouch

My MonoTouch iPhone app is live

Recently I was very fortunate to work on contract for one of the UK’s leading nationwide used car sales company, Carcraft.

During my time with Carcraft, I worked on number of exciting and fun web projects with a really great bunch of people. One of the more interesting projects was the development of the Official Carcraft iPhone app.