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Showing posts from September, 2015

How to OTA update your rooted Nexus. (quickly unroot)

Quite a few posts out there seem to think the only way to accomplish this is to do a factory reset and/or wipe all user data. As Android is moving to a faster release cycle, combined with the new measures to ensure an unaltered installation, this procedure is going to become more used. It might also be possible to flash the latest factory images non-destructively to emulate a OTA, but I'm not 100% sure of this (yet). That is not true, all you will need to do is to revert certain partitions on your phone to stock (boot, recovery and system), and you can do this without wiping apps or user data. This is because of new restrictions in Android Lollipop (for whatever reason) I had to flash a custom boot when 5.0 was released to be able to root my Nexus 5 using SuperSU. And this combined with the modifications this did to my system partition prevented the OTA update from working, resulting in an 'Error!' message during update. All you need to do is to download the orig...

Garage door opener using Arduino + SmartThings

I wired up and controlled my garage (two main doors controlling and one side door sensor only) with the following customizable source code running on an Arduino and the SmartThings platform (via a Z Wave shield. (The .groovy file you load on the web, and the .ino file you compile for the Arduino) These are the materials I used: $35 Smarthings Arduino Z Wave shield $25 Arduino Uno $10 Power supply for Arduino $10 Wire $20 Magnetic switches $8    Relay It was pretty easy, I developed all the source and did the installation in a single day (tweaked it a little the rest of the weekend) and it has been running stable for about 2 years now. The garage doors are toggles that I wired into my garage controller button wires, and they only show if the garage doors are ajar. (It does not indicate whether they are closing or opening... that was troublesome to detect with just a magnetic switch and the way garage doors open and close.) No express or implied warranty are atta...