https://olivalabs.com Pondering, Playing and Posting Tue, 03 Nov 2026 08:48:30 -0500 https://olivalabs.com/rebooting-again/ 6ae99040584651000108adc8 Tue, 03 Nov 2026 02:48:31 -0500 John Oliva It has been a  long time since this blog was updated and in fact the original content was lost - again. The difference this time is AI and the Wayback Machine. Using a Hermes agent I was able to get a new version of Ghost installed on my server and then https://olivalabs.com/watch-escapement-desk-toy-part-2/ 6ae94f76f2be2f0001745964 Fri, 22 Jan 2021 22:01:51 -0500 John Oliva Part 2 - Fabrication. The Watch Escapement Desk Toy is comprised of three sub-assemblies:  - Mainspring  - Gear Train  - Balance As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, this design and the 3D printable STL files may be found on Thingiverse.  All of the plastic parts were printed using PLA plastic on https://olivalabs.com/watch-escapement-as-desk-toy/ 6ae94f74f2be2f0001745957 Mon, 11 Jan 2021 20:54:49 -0500 John Oliva Part 1 - Inspiration I am a fan of the kinetic sculptures produced by David C. Roy.  David produces beautiful wood kinetic sculptures with most of them powered by a watch escapement type of device as a motion power source. I am planning on creating some modest kinetic sculptures and would https://olivalabs.com/dockerized-pigpio/ 6ae94f5df2be2f000174590d Mon, 11 Jan 2021 12:22:49 -0500 John Oliva Originally shared via Github in 2018. Docker based pigpio daemon running in a Python3 environment on Raspberry Pi. This is part of the custom firmware used for my Donkey Car. From the pigpio library webpage: pigpio is a library for the Raspberry which allows control of the General Purpose Input https://olivalabs.com/mysensor-slim-enclosure/ 6ae94f6bf2be2f0001745927 Mon, 11 Jan 2021 12:12:45 -0500 John Oliva Originally shared via Github and Thingiverse in 2019. Summary Sensor housing for MySensor slim sensor module. Shown as a contact sensor but can be used for other sensors as well. Designed using OpenSCAD 2018.03.17. Incorporates the following third-party libraries: * Belfry OpenScad Library, https://github.com/revarbat/BOSL https://olivalabs.com/raspi-zero-mysensor/ 6ae94f71f2be2f0001745941 Mon, 11 Jan 2021 12:04:39 -0500 John Oliva Originally shared via Github and Thingiverse in 2019. Summary Raspberry Pi Zero W based MySensor controller/gateway with Long Range NRF24L01 + PA + LNA RF Transceiver. [Archived image unavailable: Image not preserved in the Wayback archive] [Archived image unavailable: Image not preserved in the Wayback archive] [Archived image unavailable: Image not https://olivalabs.com/adaptive-ai-for-javascript/ 6ae94f58f2be2f00017458e8 Mon, 11 Jan 2021 11:16:19 -0500 John Oliva Originally shared via Github in 2013. Javascript port of C++ Adaptive AI library into a Common.JS module. Adaptive AI is a library for implementing adaptive/statistical finite state machines (ASFSM). joliva/adaptive-ai-jsJavascript port of Adaptive AI library into a Common.JS module. Adaptive AI is a library https://olivalabs.com/genoscope/ 6ae94f5ff2be2f0001745918 Mon, 11 Jan 2021 11:03:37 -0500 John Oliva Originally posted to Hackaday for their Circuit Sculpture Contest in January 2019. This art-tech sculpture was inspired by the shape of the DNA molecule. As can be seen in the lead image, the sculpture is a single helix of AWG8 copper wire with AWG20 copper & brass rungs with https://olivalabs.com/3d-printed-sensor-enclosure/ 6ae94f44f2be2f00017458de Mon, 11 Jan 2021 10:44:00 -0500 John Oliva This is a presentation I originally delivered to a 3D printing meetup group in August 2017. https://olivalabs.com/openscad-tutorial/ 6ae94f6ef2be2f0001745939 Mon, 11 Jan 2021 10:41:19 -0500 John Oliva This is a presentation I originally delivered to a 3D printing meetup group in February 2017. https://olivalabs.com/petg-for-3d-printing/ 6ae94f6ff2be2f000174593d Mon, 11 Jan 2021 10:37:56 -0500 John Oliva This is a presentation originally delivered to a 3D printing meetup group in November 2016. https://olivalabs.com/getting-started/ 6ae94f61f2be2f000174591d Sat, 02 Jan 2021 12:09:10 -0500 John Oliva It has been a  long time since this blog was updated and in fact the original content was lost.  Therefore, I have updated to the latest version of Ghost and am starting anew. This blog will mainly serve as a personal journal of experiments and adventures with technology and science https://olivalabs.com/docker-based-pwm-manager/ 6ae94f5cf2be2f0001745900 Tue, 19 Jun 2018 12:29:00 -0400 John Oliva Originally shared via Github in 2018. Provides access to Raspberry Pi GPIO servo PWM routers via REST API. Runs as a Docker container on a Donkey Car and allows a custom version of the Donkey Car software to select whether the servo PWM signals driving the throttle and steering come https://olivalabs.com/solar-pebble-watchface/ 6ae94f73f2be2f000174594e Thu, 13 Nov 2014 11:34:00 -0500 John Oliva Originally shared via Github in 2014. Pebble Watchface displaying date and time as orbits. * The outer number ring shows the month. * The center number shows the day. * The outer circle shows the hour. * The inner circle shows the minute and second. joliva/solarPebble Watchface displaying date and time as orbits. https://olivalabs.com/tishadow-for-titanium-development-part-4/ 6ae95013f2be2f000174598d Mon, 04 Nov 2013 09:57:00 -0500 John Oliva In Part 3 of this series on TiShadow, we covered TiShadow’s support for native modules and appified apps. In this post we will look at TiShadow’s support for Behavior-driven Development (BDD) using Jasmine and some debugging techniques. Behavior-driven Development with Jasmine TiShadow embeds the Jasmine BDD https://olivalabs.com/tishadow-for-titanium-development-part-3/ 6ae95011f2be2f0001745988 Thu, 24 Oct 2013 05:24:21 -0400 John Oliva In Part 2 of this series on TiShadow, we covered the basic usage of TiShadow for accelerated Titanium development. In this post we will dig somewhat further into the usage of TiShadow to support native modules and appified apps. Customizing TiShadow app with Additional Native Modules In the last post https://olivalabs.com/tishadow-for-titanium-development-part-2/ 6ae95007f2be2f0001745983 Wed, 23 Oct 2013 13:25:39 -0400 John Oliva In the first post in this series on TiShadow, we covered TiShadow’s component architecture. In this post we will cover the basic usage of TiShadow for accelerating our Titanium development process. Motivation TiShadow offers a number of useful capabilities but the thing that strikes you first is how fast https://olivalabs.com/tishadow-for-titanium-development-part-i/ 6ae95015f2be2f0001745992 Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:37:46 -0400 John Oliva This is the first part of a series of posts dedicated to understanding the capabilities of TiShadow by David Bankier, and how it helps accelerate the development of Titanium applications. From the documentation: “TiShadow provides Titanium developers the ability to deploy apps, run tests or execute code snippets live across https://olivalabs.com/prototyping-on-paper/ 6ae95003f2be2f0001745979 Fri, 09 Aug 2013 13:25:50 -0400 John Oliva I recently tried Prototyping on Paper (POP) while designing a simple iOS/Android application named ‘Piglet’. POP is a an iOS and Android application intended to quickly prototype the look and feel of a mobile application. The concept is simple – you hand draw the layout for each screen, use POP https://olivalabs.com/nlp-nltk-demo-application/ 6ae94f6cf2be2f000174592c Fri, 17 May 2013 11:22:00 -0400 John Oliva Originally shared via Github in 2013. Application using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and Weka machine learning library to perform document analysis and categorization of documents using a variety of machine language algorithms. joliva/nlp-nltk-demoApplication using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and Weka machine learning library to perform https://olivalabs.com/avr-application-framework/ 6ae94f5af2be2f00017458f4 Fri, 17 May 2013 11:19:00 -0400 John Oliva Originally shared via Github in 2010. This library is intended to simplify programming AVR microcontrollers. It provides an API with methods for configuring and interacting with the AVR internal peripherals. joliva/avr-app-frameworkAVR microcontroller application framework. Contribute to joliva/avr-app-framework development by creating an account on GitHub. https://olivalabs.com/some-wisdom/ 6ae95005f2be2f000174597e Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:36:03 -0400 John Oliva Here are a some points of wisdom from Data Analysis with Open Source Tools which I believe apply to many facets of life: * Simple is better than complex. * Cheap is better than expensive. * Explicit is better than opaque. * Purpose is more important than process. * Insight is more important than precision. https://olivalabs.com/bracket-an-open-source-code-editor-for-the-web/ 6ae94f7ff2be2f000174596f Thu, 26 Jul 2012 22:21:00 -0400 John Oliva I just attended a Meetup in NYC, where Adam Lehman of Adobe spoke about the new Bracket editor for the web. Bracket is written in Javascript, HTML and CSS and is intended for coding the same. It has the ability to connect with the Chrome browser, using the external debug