Jan 1st: Finally got the firmware updated on one of my Bluz DK development boards. I thought I had bricked it and was going down the path of doing a firmware update using a serial adapter. The board showed stuck in safe mode however after leaving it on the Particle cloud for over an hour it magically seemed to connect fully and I was able to flash some code and publish data back to the Particle cloud.

Jan 2nd: The goal of today was getting my Digistump Oak boards connected to the Particle cloud. Thankfully I had gotten up to speed on doing a serial firmware update with the Bluz DK (which I didn't need to to) so the process went super quick with the Oak. Note: Even after I got the firmware updated over serial on the Oak I couldn't get the board connected using my laptop. I used my phone to connect and it took 30 seconds and worked the first time. See the troubleshooting section of the Oak Wiki for instructions. I downloaded the .zip file after downloading Python and the serial add on.

Jan 3rd: Today was spent loading different libraries to both my Bluz and Oak for the basic sensors I had. Quickly learned that Oak has almost zero libraries on the Particle cloud.

Jan 4th: Downloading the Oak CLI and using Arduino 1.6.5 is the only way to program your Oak. After spending much of the day before using Particle (and failing), today went great and I was uploading all my libraries from Arduino and publishing data to the Particle cloud. I am still trying to figure how to use or what "OakTerm" is.

Jan 5th: Didn't have much time tonight so I thought I would try out the Adafruit Circuit Playground which I purchase before Christmas. I failed after spending 15 minutes of looking for a microUSB cord that wasn't charge only. Tip: Mark your cables as "charge only". Now off to Amazon to get a proper sync cord.

Jan 6th: I ended up finding a proper sync cable to connect by Circuit Playground to Arduino and played around with the great examples. I wish this board existed a couple years ago when I started learning Arduino since it would have made my on-ramping much quicker. I recorded a video of the "mic_meter" example in action, I will try and get it uploaded tomorrow.

Jan 7th: Upload of the video I made yesterday. I love this board.

The rest of the morning I spent taking time to re-organize all the stuff I have in support of my projects. I have decided I am going to start posting all the tools and equipment I have purchased in the "components" section of this project. I am also going to post the future projects I plan to work.