Building a Windows 10 IoT C# traffic monitor: Part I

FoxDeploy4 Comments

We’re counting down here at FoxDeploy, about to reach a traffic milestone (1 Million hits!) , and because I am pretty excited and like to celebrate moments like this, I had an idea…

I was originally inspired by MKBHD’s very cool YouTube subscriber tracker device, which you can see in his video here, and thought, boy I would love one of these!

It turns out that this is the La Metric Time, a $200 ‘hackable Wi-Fi clock’.  It IS super cool, and if I had one, I could get this working in a few hours of work.  But $200 is $200.

I then remembered my poor neglected rPi sitting in its box with a bunch of liquid flow control dispensers and thought that I could probably do this with just a few dollars instead(spoiler:WRONG)!

It’s been a LONGGG time since I’ve written about Windows IoT and Raspberry Pi, and to be honest, that’s mostly because I was getting lazy and hated switching my output on my monitor from the PC to the rPi.  I did some googling and found these displays which are available now, and mount directly to your Pi!

Join me on my journey as I dove into c# and buying parts on eBay from shady Chinese retailers and in the end, got it all working.  And try to do it spending less than $200 additional dollars!

Necessary Materials

To properly follow along, you’ll need a Raspberry Pi of your own. Windows 10 IoT will work on either the Raspberry Pi 2B + or Raspberry Pi 3, so that’s your choice but the 3 is cheaper now.  Click here for one!

You’ll also need a micro SD card as well, but you probably have one too.  Get an 8gb or bigger and make sure it is fast/high-quality like a Class 10 Speed card.

Writing an SD Card is MUCH easier than it was in our previous post.  Now, it’s as simple as downloading the ‘IoT Dashboard‘ and following the dead simple wizard for Setting up a new device.  You can even embed Wi-Fi Connections so that it will connect to Wi-Fi too, very cool.  So, write this SD Card and then plug in your rPi to your monitor or… Continue reading →

Advertisements

The quest for true silent MDM Enrollment

FoxDeployLeave a comment

If you’ve been reading my blog recently, you’ve seen a lot of posts about MDM and Provisioning Options for Windows 10.  Previously we’ve covered:

And in this post we will dig further into the options available to us to deploy a Provisioning Package with the goal of allowing for silent MDM Enrollment and Silent application of a provisioning package!

Continue reading →

POWERSHELL DECONSTRUCTED

FoxDeploy5 Comments

DECONSTRUCTED

We’re all adventurers.  That’s why we wake up in the morning and do what we do in our fields, for that feeling of mastery and uncovering something new.  Some of us chart new maps, cross the great outdoors, or climb mountains.

And some of us explore code.

In this post, I’ll outline my own such PowerShell adventure, and show you the tools I used to come out the other side with a working solution.  We’ll meet in basecamp to prepare ourselves with the needed gear, plan our scaling strategy and climb the crags of an unknown PowerShell module.  We’ll belay into treacherous canyons, using our torch to reveal the DLLs that make Windows work, then chart new ground using DotPeek and eventually arrive on the summit, victorious and armed with new tools.

 

Continue reading →

Extracting and monitoring web content with PowerShell

FoxDeploy2 Comments

 

Extract PowerShell

This kind of request comes up all the time on StackOverflow and /r/PowerShell.

“How can I extract content from a webpage using PowerShell”.

And it’s an interesting problem to solve.  However, nothing motivates like greed, and I recently revisited this topic in order to help me track down the newest must-have item, the Switch.

In fact, this post COULD have been called ‘Finding a Nintendo Switch with PowerShell’!

I have been REALLY wanting a Nintendo Switch, and since I’ll be flying up to NYC next month for Tome’s NYC TechStravaganza (come see me if you’ll be in Manhattan that day!), it’s the perfect justification for She-Who-Holds-The-Wallet for me to get one!

But EVERYWHERE is sold out.  Still!  😦

However, the stores have been receiving inventory every now and then, and I know that when GameStop has it in stock, I want to buy it from them!  With that in mind, I knew I just needed a way to monitor the page and alert me when some text on it changes.

Web scraping, here we go! Continue reading →

Advanced Autocompletion: adding output types

FoxDeploy1 Comment

upgrade-your-code

This post is part of the series on AutoCompletion options for PowerShell! Click the banner for more posts in the series!

Previously in this series, we reviewed a few ways to add AutoComplete onto your functions, covering Param AutoCompletion and Dynamic Parameters.  In this post, we’ll spend a LOT of time typing in the present to help our future selves save fractions of a second, because there’s no way we’ll become less lazy, right?  At the end of the day, we will have achieved the holy grail of Attaboys, and have Output Autocomplete working in our function.

Output AutoComplete

You know how in PowerShell you can type a cmdlet, then pipe into Select-Object or another cmdlet and start tabbing through property names?  This is the type of Autocompletion we are going to add to our function in this post!

gif

Not only does this save you from making mistakes, but it is amazingly convenient and really gives our functions a polished and professional look and feel.  PowerShell’s ability to do this highlights one of its distinguishing features as well!

Dynamic Type System

Warning: this next part is probably kind of boring

If you’re like me, you read things and then just gloss over all of the words and symbols you don’t know, assuming they’re unimportant.  If I just described you, then I hate to be the one to tell you this, but that is kind of a tremendous character flaw.  I’ll get around to why this is bad and how it relates to PowerShell, but first, take us on a detour into my past. Continue reading →