December 2015 Summaries

Matt Brailsford, known as Circuitbeard, is the creator of Petduino, an Arduino-based electronic pet kit that users can assemble and program themselves, designed to help people engage with the maker community by providing a tangible goal. Branding himself as Circuitbeard, combining his passion for electronics and a distinctive physical feature, Matt developed Petduino to address the challenges he faced when entering the maker scene, where he found powerful tools like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis daunting without clear applications. Petduino aims to offer an approachable entry point into electronics, with the potential to integrate with other hardware, such as Raspberry Pi, for expanded capabilities. The kit encourages learning through practical skills like soldering and coding while providing opportunities for customization and creativity. Matt also highlights the supportive community around Petduino, where users can share their creations and ideas, and he continues to explore new projects and enhancements for the kit. Petduino is available in various colors and styles for purchase from the Circuitbeard website, with additional tutorials and community engagement through forums and social media.

The tutorial provides a comprehensive guide to building a basic video-sharing application prototype using Ruby on Rails, incorporating features such as user authentication with Devise, video uploading and encoding using ffmpeg, video playback with Video.js, and real-time notifications using PubNub. It outlines the setup requirements, including the installation of necessary gems like HAML, Paperclip, and Sidekiq, and demonstrates the creation of models, controllers, and views to manage users and videos. The tutorial also explains the use of Sidekiq workers for background processing, Sidetiq for scheduling tasks, and the integration of PubNub for notifying users about video encoding progress and updates to like counts. It emphasizes a practical approach, allowing users to sign up, upload videos, and receive notifications, while suggesting further enhancements like adding a comment section or converting the application into a single-page application (SPA) using an API and PubNub for communication.

The tutorial outlines the creation of a Windows service application designed to monitor server load and memory usage, sending alerts to a Windows Phone 8.1 via PubNub's Data Stream Network. Developed with Visual Studio 2015 and .Net Framework 4, the service uses a thread to track CPU consumption and available memory against set thresholds, triggering alerts when these are exceeded or fall below specified levels. Parameters such as MaxCPUUsage, MinRAMAvailable, and monitoring Period can be configured via RegEdit. The service subscribes to the PNRTPM channel, initiating a thread to oversee server performance and dispatch alerts as necessary. A Windows Phone 8.1 app complements this setup, capable of receiving messages from multiple servers, and allows users to start or stop monitoring through a straightforward interface. The tutorial also suggests potential enhancements, such as email notifications and a detailed server process view on the mobile app, and provides links to download the project files.