Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

Arduino Projects to Save the World shows that it takes little more than a few tools, a few wires and sensors, an Arduino board, and a bit of gumption to build devices that lower energy bills, help you grow our own food, monitor pollution in the air and in the ground, even warn you about earth tremors.

Arduino Projects to Save the World introduces the types of sensors needed to collect environmental data—from temperature sensors to motion sensors. You’ll see projects that deal with energy sources—from building your own power strip to running your Arduino board on solar panels so you can actually proceed to build systems that help, for example, to lower your energy bills. Once you have some data, it’s time to put it to good use by publishing it online as you collect it; this book shows you how.

The core of this book deals with the Arduino projects themselves:

• Account for heat loss using a heat loss temperature sensor array that sends probes into every corner of your house for maximum measurement.
• Monitor local seismic activity with your own seismic monitor.
• Keep your Arduino devices alive in the field with a solar powered device that uses a smart, power-saving design.
• Monitor your data and devices with a wireless radio device; place your sensors where you like without worrying about wires.
• Keep an eye on your power consumption with a sophisticated power monitor Download Now »

Book Description

If you thought your phone was smart, you should see the new Android tablets! Based on Android 3 Honeycomb, these tablets provide all the computing power you’ll need on a device light enough to carry wherever you go.

Get the most out of your Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet with Android Tablets Made Simple—learn all the key features, understand what’s new, and utilize dozens of time-saving tips and tricks.

Android Tablets Made Simple includes over 500 pages of easy-to-read instructions and over 1,000 carefully annotated screen shots to guide you to Android tablet mastery. You’ll never be left wondering, “How did they do that?”

This book guides you through:

• Finding and purchasing the right Android tablet
• Understanding the Android Honeycomb interface
• Downloading and using tablet apps

What you’ll learn

• Connect your tablet to wireless networks, including 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi
• Make video calls to your friends and colleagues
• Download and read eBooks, newspapers, and magazines in your new compact library Download Now »

Book Description

Build a robot that responds to electrical activity in your brain—it’s easy and fun. If you’re familiar with Arduino and have basic mechanical building skills, this book will show you how to construct a robot that plays sounds, blinks lights, and reacts to signals from an affordable electroencephalography (EEG) headband. Concentrate and the robot will move. Focus more and it will go faster. Let your mind wander and the robot will slow down.

You’ll find complete instructions for building a simple robot chassis with servos, wheels, sensors, LEDs, and a speaker. You also get the code to program the Arduino microcontroller to receive wireless signals from the EEG. Your robot will astound anyone who wears the EEG headband.

This book will help you:

• Connect an inexpensive EEG device to Arduino
• Build a robot platform on wheels
• Calculate a percentage value from a potentiometer reading
• Mix colors with an RGB LED
• Play tones with a piezo speaker
• Write a program that makes the robot avoid boundaries
• Create simple movement routines

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Building the Chassis Download Now »

Book Description

With the iOS5 software and the new iPhone 4S device, Apple has another world-class hit on its hands. This sleek, highly refined pocket computer comes with everything—cellphone, iPod, Internet, camcorder—except a printed manual. Fortunately, David Pogue is back with the latest edition of his witty, crystal-clear, colorful guide: the world’s most popular iPhone book.

• Use it as a phone. Learn the basics as well as time-saving tricks and tips for contact searching by voice, texting, and more.
• Manage hour stuff in the cloud. Sync and back up your contacts and media across all of your devices with iCloud.
• Get things done. Ask Siri to send reminders, place calls, and more.
• Master notifications. Use the Notification Center to find missed messages, calendar invitations, friend requests, and more.
• Connect with other iPhone owners. Send unlimited iMessages to friends, family, and colleagues who are also running iOS5.
• Treat it as an iPod. Master the ins and outs of iTunes, and listen to music, upload and view photos, and fill the iPhone with TV shows and movies.
• Take the iPhone online. Make the most of your online experience to browse the Web, read and compose email, use social networks, or send photos and audio files.
• Go beyond the iPhone. Learn how to use the App Store, and how to multitask between your apps, organize them in folders, and read ebooks in iBooks. Download Now »

Book Description

Want to create devices that interact with the physical world? This cookbook is perfect for anyone who wants to experiment with the popular Arduino microcontroller and programming environment. You’ll find more than 200 tips and techniques for building a variety of objects and prototypes such as toys, detectors, robots, and interactive clothing that can sense and respond to touch, sound, position, heat, and light.

You don’t need experience with Arduino or programming to get started. Updated for the Arduino 1.0 release, the recipes in this second edition include practical examples and guidance to help you begin, expand, and enhance your projects right away—whether you’re an artist, designer, hobbyist, student, or engineer.

• Get up to speed on the Arduino board and essential software concepts quickly
• Learn basic techniques for reading digital and analog signals
• Use Arduino with a variety of popular input devices and sensors
• Drive visual displays, generate sound, and control several types of motors
• Interact with devices that use remote controls, including TVs and appliances
• Learn techniques for handling time delays and time measurement
• Apply advanced coding and memory handling techniques

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Getting Started
Chapter 2. Making the Sketch Do Your Bidding Download Now »

Book Description

OpenCL in Action is a thorough, hands-on presentation of OpenCL, with an eye toward showing developers how to build high-performance applications of their own. It begins by presenting the core concepts behind OpenCL, including vector computing, parallel programming, and multi-threaded operations, and then guides you step-by-step from simple data structures to complex functions.

Whatever system you have, it probably has more raw processing power than you’re using. OpenCL is a high-performance programming language that maximizes computational power by executing on CPUs, graphics processors, and other number-crunching devices. It’s perfect for speed-sensitive tasks like vector computing, matrix operations, and graphics acceleration.

OpenCL in Action blends the theory of parallel computing with the practical reality of building high-performance applications using OpenCL. It first guides you through the fundamental data structures in an intuitive manner. Then, it explains techniques for high-speed sorting, image processing, matrix operations, and fast Fourier transform. The book concludes with a deep look at the all-important subject of graphics acceleration. Numerous challenging examples give you different ways to experiment with working code.

A background in C or C++ is helpful, but no prior exposure to OpenCL is needed.

What’s Inside Download Now »