soldering

Harbinger of the Internet of Dings

Last year, I built the first version of what I call the "Raspberry Pi Bell Slapper." It was named that because it used a servo and a metal arm to slap the top of the bell in response to a stimuli—in this case, an email from a donation notification system for a local non-profit radio station.

This year, that same radio station had another one of their fund-raisers (a radiothon), and to celebrate, I thought I'd do the thing justice, with a better circuit (using a solenoid instead of a servo) and a 3D printed enclosure. And this is the result:

There is a Raspberry Pi Zero W with a custom solenoid control HAT on top inside the case to the left, and the solenoid right up against the bell, which is mounted on the right.

I also posted a video on YouTube exploring the project in detail: The Raspberry Pi IoT Notification Bell.

I've been a Mac user for years, and I've repaired hundreds of different Macs, from the early II series to the latest 2015 and 2016 model MacBook Pros, iMacs (and other Apple hardware to boot!), and there is almost never a hardware situation where I've thrown in the towel and told someone to ditch their Mac.

The 2011 MacBook Pro has, for almost a decade, been the exception to that rule. There was a major flaw in the AMD Radeon GPUs included with that model year's logic board which seemed to cause GPU failure either due to overheating, internal chip problems, BGA solder joints getting broken, or a combination of the above. The problem was so rampant, Apple was forced to set up a free repair program for affected MacBook Pros—though the 2011 model has since been dropped from that program. I've handled three 2011 MacBook Pros (none of them my own—I had an Air back then), and all three of them were scrapped because of the GPU issue.