When we were developing Watchduino2 we required to forward messages for all notifications we receive in our phone by using the NotificationListenerService available on Android.

We managed to do this in the first version of our companion app on native code, unfortunatelly, we realised this feature was not available yet on Cordova, the new framework we use for building our cool responsive companion app.

The solution? Roll our own Cordova plugin to provide this functionality!

You may have noticed that the blog has been quite quiet during the last month. The reason being we were focusing our efforts on doing some epic Watchduino development, as contestants for the Hackaday Prize 2015. Sad news in the end though, as we didn’t make it to the finals.

But that’s ok though. Regardless of the result, this has been a good excercise for us, and the contest has pushed us to keep working hard on the Watchduino project. That’s why we want to sum up all we have learned and all we have improved on the project during the course of the contest.

We’ve shown you in the past how to create chiptune-style music both with a DAW program, and with old-school trackers.

There’s still another way to do it: via code. Particularly suitable for videogame music in particular, as you can have fine-grained control over the music that you autogenerate, giving it the ability to be dynamic.

Every programming language worth their name will have a basic sound synthesizing library, which will be more than what to need to make chiptune sounds.

A few months ago we were requested to add a list of featured posts to an index page in Octopress. So we did a bit of research about how Octopress + Jekyll + Lyquid template internally works. And we ended up with a nice solution that you can easily replicate in your own blog.

In this post we will show you how to add your own custom list of featured octopress posts like in Coconauts

We are really excited to announce that WatchDuino 2 has passed to the semi-finals of the 2015 edition of the Hackaday Prize! It was selected amongst the best 100 of a total of more than 900 projects. To see this kind of recognition out of a community that we admire is absolutely thrilling, thank you so much =)

This means that now we will have to give our best we want to be good enough to be in the finals. Many other excellent projects are competing!

Keep an eye on the project page on Hackaday, as it is likely to be holding exciting updates and advancements during the following month. And give us your skulls and likes if you have an account! =)