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On USB transferring files with SBP

I regularly transfer files from my Windows computer to my Samsung tablet. Plugs Samsung tablet into PC and transfers files between devices seamlessly using the standard file browser.

For Apple iPad, I need to go to the Microsoft Store (which I rarely ever use), download an ‘Apple Devices App’, and then use this proprietary software to transfer files.

Turns out that this doesn’t even act as a file browser between the PC and the iPad, but rather an intermediary for yet another app. Good fucking grief. I’ll probably just use Dropbox or Google Drive, because USB file transfer to an iPad is just too much grief.

The standard file browser, which works with USB keys, drives and other devices shows the iPad as an ’empty’ device.

It also doesn’t help that Apple basic 10th gen iPad has a mere 64GB of storage and doesn’t even support 3rd party (very big and very cheap) microSD card expansion.

With a mere 5G of free iCloud, it’s far too easy to rack up a huge monthly bill for additional storage from Apple. In addition, you will need reliable Internet access to access it.

That’s planned obsolesence with monthly billing in a nutshell.

Oh, and my efforts for finding software in the Apple store for my (donated to me) 2016 Intel based Macbook Pro have been unsuccessful. Am not willing to make the time investment to break out of Apple’s walled garden.

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On Sound Reactive WLED

After spending a few years writing and sharing animations with the FastLED display library for addressable LED strips, I incorporated sound reactivity to WLED. This included both volume reactive routines as well as frequency reactive routines using various Fast Fourier Transform libraries.

My YouTube account has several animations:

https://www.youtube.com/user/atuline/videos

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IoT MQTT Panel Pro Device Prefix

As mentioned in my ‘Getting Started’ post, I create separate ‘devices’ for my different Arduino sketches, such as mqtt-LED, mqtt-fire2012xy, mqtt-mesh, and so on. In addition, I may have more than 1 of each type of lantern displaying at the same time. To do so, I will serialize each lantern (it’s in the code) and using a combo box widget, I can then select one or ALL of each device type and publish that to the broker, which will then get picked up by the subscribing device. I’ll then use another widget to send hue, brightness to other information to the selected devices.

In order to support these multiple device types (aka sketches), I’ll add a device prefix to the topic.

For a fire2012 lantern, the published topic can look like this:

  • fire/lantern
  • fire/hue

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