LED Clock – Part 2

In part 1 of this series I demonstrated how I created a clock using my 64x32 LED panel. In this blog I will expand upon this experiment and add current weather observations as a scrolling ticker across the bottom of the panel. The first step to add weather observations to the clock is to register … Continue reading LED Clock – Part 2 →

LED Clock – Part 1

Over the Christmas break I had some fun with my MLB LED scoreboard (see that blog for a BOM and specifications). The LED panel doesn't get much use during the offseason, so I decided to learn how to program it as a clock when it wasn't functioning as a scoreboard. The next few blogs will … Continue reading LED Clock – Part 1 →

Blackjack (a.k.a 21) Simulation

I had so much fun with the War simulator I decided to write another simulator for Blackjack (or 21). It offered a more challenging set of rules to implement, and I was curious whether playing "by the book" actually improved your odds of winning or not. Like the War simulator, I implemented this simulator in … Continue reading Blackjack (a.k.a 21) Simulation →

War Sim (the card game)

After playing the card game War recently, I wonder about the probability of winning, and on average, how many "battles" were fought and how many wars waged in a single game? Intuitively, I figured the odds of winning were 50-50 because there really is no strategy to the game; it's all chance. To explore my … Continue reading War Sim (the card game) →

Another Nifi Experiment: Hashing Files – Part 3

In the first two installments (1, 2) of this series on Nifi, I demonstrated how I used Nifi to generate MD5 hashes for all the files on my hard drive and save them to a MongoDB for quick reference. I also demonstrated how I checked the database for the existence of the hash value before … Continue reading Another Nifi Experiment: Hashing Files – Part 3 →

Another Nifi Experiment: Hashing Files – Part 2

In part 1 of this blog I explained how I used Nifi to read files from my hard drive, create MD5 hashes for them, and check a database to determine if they were duplicates. I also reviewed how I used Wait/Notify processors as a gate to ensure only one file at a time was processed … Continue reading Another Nifi Experiment: Hashing Files – Part 2 →

Another Nifi Experiment: Hashing Files – Part 1

I had some more fun experimenting with Nifi this week. I set out to create a database containing MD5 hash values of all the files on my hard drive. I wanted to use only Nifi out-of-the-box components and was encouraged to find processors already designed to read files from a file system, create hashes, and … Continue reading Another Nifi Experiment: Hashing Files – Part 1 →

YOLO and Nifi: You Only LOOK Once – Part I

YOLO, You Only Look Once, is a real-time object detection system. You can read the research paper or watch the videos on the website to get a feel for what this system offers. Best of all, the source code is completely free! This blog will not get into retraining the system or implementing it for … Continue reading YOLO and Nifi: You Only LOOK Once – Part I →

Apache Nifi – Part 1

For the past few days I've been experimenting with Apache Nifi. Nifi is a scalable, visual programming tool for developing and running data migration, transformation, and processing dataflows within and among systems. Dataflows are built by dropping pre-built processors on a canvas, configuring them, and connecting their inputs and outputs as necessary. Each processor is … Continue reading Apache Nifi – Part 1 →

Apache Nifi – Part 2

In my last blog about Nifi, I demonstrated a simple dataflow to obtain current weather data from Open Weather Map and write it to a JSON file. Recall the overview of the dataflow shown in the figure below. Nifi dataflow to query http://www.openweathermap.org for local weather, save data as JSON, and display results in web … Continue reading Apache Nifi – Part 2 →