Welcome on Sam Machin

Bleepie is a POCSAG/FLEX pager transceiver that plugs into your Tildagon badge as a hexpansion.

BleepieAPRS is alternate firmware for your Bleepie hardware.

6 Years ago this month I published one of my first Alexa hacks, Alexa In The Browser This was one of the key projects that got me into Alexa Development and lead to me being nominated as one of the first Alexa Champions.

This is the 3rd or 4th incarnation of my site, most of the content has been migrated over in each iteration but some things like links or images might be broken.

Super simple service to return a blob of JSON thats been encoded in the request URL, with a basic webpage to create the encoded urls

NodeRED and Zapier integration packages allowing you to connect between NodeRED flows and Zaps.

My Entry for TAD Hack Orlando 2020 (remote) Is a Node-RED package for controlling calls on Asterisk in real time.

A skill I created at the ReInvent Alexa Hackathon Alexa Skils Store

Something I started working on but never got around to releasing

The Echo Show is the first Alexa enabled device from Amazon with a screen, with this device Amazon introduced some new capabilities within the Sklls SDK particularly around video, one of these is the ability to view home security cameras such as the Nest…

Its over a year now since I released the first version of my AlexaPi code that turned a Raspberry Pi into your own Amazon Echo like device via the Alexa Voice Service API.

The Friday before Christmas was the Christmas Party at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, Unlike most office parties which involves a couple of boxes of cheap wine and drawing some holly on the meeting room whiteboard The Studio encourages residents to

For the 3rd instillment of my “Putting Alexa on all the Things” series I’ve got Alexa up and running on a CHIP.

Following on from my previous hack allowing you to access Alexa from your phone with Twilio I present Alexa Web, accessing Alexa via your web browser.

I’ve been doing a lot of stuff with the Amazon Echo and the underlying Alexa service which sits behind it.

Let face it the world runs on spreadsheets.

I attended my first TAD Hack event back in April, TAD Hack is a hackday aimed at telecom application developers, so in general its going to be people that like playing with things like SIP and WebRTC, possibly dabbling in a little light SMS!

Plenty of articles have been written on the UX of train ticket machines, while they tend to vary by train operating company they’re usually one of 2-3 varients and usually generally awful to use!

Spock: Captain, Klingon Bird of Prey de-cloaking off the port side Kirk: Mr Sulu, ready photon torpedos Sulu: Captain, there’s a problem, Kirk: What Mr Sulu?

Lots of people are getting excited about one of the features of the new iPad Air 2 - The Apple Sim, its being pitched as a single sim card that allows you to switch carriers as you please, I suspect that under the hood its a special kind of multi profile…

For quite a while now I’ve been thinking, talking and hacking away on something I’m calling The Talk Project, I won’t go into too much detail about that here, you can read some more on the sites own page, and I’m intending to add a lot more to that site in

For a long time I’ve always felt that telecoms and banking/payments are pretty similar industries when it comes to technology, both handle massive amounts of real time transactional data, making a payment in a shop using a visa card is fairly similar to t…

Yesterday evening I noticed some problems with our mains supply at home, the lights were dimming for a short period of time maybe 2-3 minutes.

I’ve been lucky enough over the past few weeks to trial Three’s InTouch app, which allows you to make and receive calls and SMS on your phone over WiFi, ideal for times when you don’t have coverage.

Back in January at CES 2014 the organisers added a feature to the event app whereby you could unlock badges in the app by visiting different areas of the show floor and unlocking the badges by your phone detecting an iBeacon, I managed to write a simple h…

I finally decided I needed to overhaul my ‘site’ I had a very ageing wordpress blog that hadn’t seen much of an update in several years and really just needed taking out an shooting.

Ever since we moved into our house over 7 years ago now we’ve had a real problem with phone spam on the home number, we took over the same number as the lady who lived here previously as it was the fastest way to get a connection so that I could order ADSL

A few months back I changed ISP over toAndrews and Arnold, they’re great by the way, not the cheapest but I’m a big believer in you get what you pay for and they certainly delivery a quality product.

A few months back there was a serious possibility that we were going to have to move house as a result of my wifes' job, she’s an A&E Doctor and I won’t bore you with the details but the way that medical recrutment works is its all done on regions and you…

Over the easter weekend I was looking for an idea of something to build, somehow I came up with the idea that it would be kind of cool to be able to make ‘announcements’ around my house when I’m not there, not really sure why but I’m sure there’s some use…

Theres a lot of hype around NFC & mobile payments going around, analyst are predicting it as the next big thing and rumour mills are churning out stories about the iPhone 5 having NFC faster than a Foxconn plant on double time.

One of the new features announced by Google yesterday was support for “Buyer Currency” now this may come as something of a shock to iPhone users but chargeable apps in the Android Market have been billed in the developers currency since launch!

Last week I went to DroidCon in London, as I had an early start and I got the venue with half an hour to spare I had breakfast at the Breakfast Club Cafe in Angel, unfortunately our expense system only allows 50 characters in the description field when cl…

There’s been some recent discussions around contact syncing and particularly issues wiht the HTC Hero’s latest update.

I recently managed to get my wife to become a regular user of mobile data, great I thought this stuff is finally getting mainstream traction, Until we got this months bill…

We had a very interesting discussion at OpenMIC 2 today, I put the topic up as “Lets Design the Perfect Mobile Data Charging Model” quite a daunting task but I thought it might attract attention

I’ve been experimenting with my unlocked 3.0 iPhone 3G for a week or so now and I’ve just got the MMS Settings sorted.

So the G1 is out, I’ve had a chance to play with one in a T-Mobile store and it seems like a nice OS, however it doesn’t look like an iPhone killer yet.

Its been a long time since I last wrote a proper post and I doubt this will be that, however having just spent the afternoon chatting with the guys at carsonifiedabout whats happening in the mobile industry I’m feeling all inspired.

Better late than never, Ive put down some of my thoughts as to what _might_happen in the mobile industry in 2008.

I’ve been thinking about my whole web2.0 life for a few weeks now and the multitude of different platforms out there.

So What is twitter?