This article was originally written in 2018 and there have been a number of additions to the API since then. Azure Maps is a suite of services for working with constantly changing location-based information. These cover everything you’ll need whether managing systems with moving elements (Route, Traffic), finding contextual information (Search, Time Zone) or presenting […]
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This Year, Next Year, Sometime…?
One of the books I read when I first got interested in computers was from the Ladybird books How It Works series. The volume covering “The Computer” was published in 1979 and, as you can imagine, features plenty of suitably dated illustrations of computers of the time. It ends with a page speculating about the […]
I’d completely forgotten about Pi day until I saw someone post about it online and I thought I should write about the happy coincidence that I’ve been working with a Raspberry Pi today. Last week I took delivery of a new Raspberry Pi. I have an older Pi 2 but I wanted to have a […]
There is a particular issue when writing any code which will run on Android which presents external UI through an Intent or uses broadcasts in that you need to have a reference to the current Activity. I covered this in my last post. Following on from that I moved the code to a new library […]
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Dot Net DLLs, Droid, Dependencies
Natively, Android apps are built around activities. These are distinct parts of an application which include UI and are designed to perform a particular task. Android allows you to start activities and pass data between them. A number of system dialogs are just activities which run and return a result. Across Platforms When using a […]
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Manage a Parking Lot with Azure Sphere
This article was originally written in 2018 and there have been many updates to Azure Sphere between then and now so some changes may be required. I thought it would be useful to share this as-is (and the code) in case it was of use to others who wanted to take advantage of an ultrasonic […]
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12 Days of Bluetooth – #12 Summary
Bluetooth is Big, Really Big Looking back over the different functionality I’ve covered in these past few posts has highlighted that Bluetooth is used for a wide range of scenarios, and it has grown massively from its simple beginnings. It is fair to say that looking at the evolution of each specification version that more […]
When we last looked at Bluetooth Low Energy we looked at the code required to read the battery level from a device. There are two things we didn’t cover – writing values and sending commands to a device. Writing in the Air If you’re familiar with the service that you are writing to the process […]
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12 Days of Bluetooth – #10 Hands-Free
Bluetooth Classic contains a handful of profiles which use AT commands to work with telephony devices over an RFComm connection. We discussed these briefly in #3 of this series and today will look in more detail and the most commonly implemented one – Hands Free Profile. Look No Hands! Two similar profiles exist in Headset […]
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12 Days of Bluetooth – #9 Pairing
Both Classic and Low Energy devices can provide functionality to unpaired devices or require pairing first before exchanging sensitive information. However, what exactly is pairing? Stick a Pin in it The original mechanism for pairing uses a four digit PIN code. One device would need to be discoverable, and the other device upon discovering it […]
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