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Tutorials, demos, and code walkthroughs for a wide variety of real-time web, mobile, and IoT projects.

BuildOct 26, 2016

Enable Text-To-Speech in Real time Apps in 70 Lines of Code

Hello, and welcome back to our series on Voice Activation in Real time web applications. In this article, we dive into a simple example of how to enable text-to-speech in a real-time AngularJS web application with just 70 lines of HTML and JavaScript. This application lets the user type in a message...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildOct 24, 2016

4 Noteworthy Voice-Enabled Technology Stacks

Over the past few years, there has been increasing attention placed into speech and voice enabling technologies, whether for convenience, accessibility, or safety/hands-free driving and machine operation. As devices such as Amazon Echo that operate entirely through voice control gain popularity, user...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildOct 19, 2016

Building a Dash Cam with Raspberry Pi, JavaScript

Dash cams have become very popular in the last few years. They even captured a giant meteor in Russia a few years ago. Seriously, a meteor! Why are they so popular? They are both useful and pretty simple. So simple, in fact, you can build your very own using JavaScript, a Raspberry Pi and some UI code,...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildOct 18, 2016

Easily Build Voice-Enabled Apps with Twitter Fabric, Digits

Hello, and welcome back to our series on Android development with Fabric and PubNub! In previous articles, we’ve shown how to create a powerful chat app with Android, Fabric, and Digits. In this blog entry, we highlight 2 key technologies, Twitter Fabric (mobile development toolkit) and Nuance...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildOct 13, 2016

DIY Android App Compares Bus Routes to Uber in Real time

As a city dweller, this definitely falls in the category of #firstworldproblems. Do I wait for the bus, hail a taxi, or call an Uber? I thought it would be neat to solve this problem using PubNub’s Project EON on the mobile platform (in this case, Android, because I had already used EON on iOS in a past...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 27, 2016

Build a Smart Home UI to Control Your Garage Door

Welcome back! In the previous article, we explored smart home automation via a garage door opener service using LiftMaster, PubNub, and Node.js. The context is the growing popularity of two main areas, the Smart Car and Smart Home. Integration of Smart Home door and access control seems like a natural...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 26, 2016

Create a New Language in Less Than 200 Lines of Code

Have you ever wanted to design your own programming language? It seems like such fun, but if you’ve ever tried you probably got stuck right around the time you read “LLR Decent Parsers and Abstract Syntax Trees.” Traditionally designing your own language was hard because it requires a very specialized...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 21, 2016

This Serverless Whack-A-Mole Game is Your Next Game Night

This blog is based on my talk from NodePDX 2016. You can watch the full video of my session, or read my other writings on my personal blog. Today I’m going to build a casual Massively Multiplayer Online game. Something that can have 50 or more people playing at the same time. And I’m going to do...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll
BuildSep 20, 2016

Real-time Garage Door Control with a LiftMaster and PubNub

Household appliances are not the kind of thing consumers really get excited about; they’re no iPhone. But thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), that seems to be changing. It is now easy, inexpensive, and a lot more fun to create connected devices in every area of life, from cars and homes to...
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll