This will cover a simple example of how to get a credit card payment source token from Stripe that you can use to associate a Stripe customer with a payment source. This is good for subscription services where you need to store the payment source to later add subscriptions to.

We will look at the process for using Stripe.js Elements to create a credit card form that will obtain the token we need.

This guide will walk through the steps needed to setup WordPress on a Windows desktop by installing everything manually, as opposed to using something like WampServer or Xampp. There is nothing wrong with those options and I highly recommend them if you want a convenient solution.

With Angular 7, when you create an app with the default app generator, it creates two basic environment files: development and production.

When you run ng serve it serves with the development environment settings. To build production you run ng build --prod.

My problem was that I wanted more environments, particularly, a local, development, and production environment. So I wanted to add a new settings file for local work and have ng serve use the local settings.

This will look at how to create additional environment settings files, how to use ng build with your custom environment, and how to use ng serve with the custom environments too.

The serve command first calls build, so we will first look at how to update the build step and then the serve action.

There is an official Arduino CLI application that allows you to compile and upload sketches from the command-line without IDE.

This guide will walk through the process of installing and configuring the CLI tool as well as compiling and uploading sketches. It will also cover third-party boards and libraries like the ESP8266, Adafruit PyPortal, and Seed Studio boards like Seeeduino Nano.

Serial communication, while old, is still used in many embedded systems and microcontrollers. It is commonly used with Arduino, CircuitPy, and similar boards. We will look at how to connect, send, and receive data using serial.

I subscribe to Adafruit's AdaBox and I get a fun project every 3 months mailed to me. A little while back I received AdaBox 010 which came with a NeoTrellis M4 board as the centerpiece. The board comes with a microcontroller that can be programmed with Python using CircuitPython.

The NeoTrellis M4 comes with a grid of 32 NeoPixels, which double as buttons. On top of that, it has an audio processor with an 1/8" audio output jack so it can play sound files and generate noise. Furthermore, it even has an accelerometer that can detect motion in three direction so you have even more input available to control the audio and lights. It also comes with a microphone. To top it off, it can act as a MIDI device! It can use the USB port as the MIDI interface or it can use the UART connector for MIDI.

The micro-USB connector is used for power but also acts as a USB removable drive for easy access to the source code files and easily upload sound files. It can also serve as a MIDI USB interface to interact with MIDI software. The USB can also serve as a generic USB HID (Human interface device) like a mouse or keyboard to send events to a computer that it understands like a keypress or a mouse event.

In this tutorial, I try to provide an overview of all the capabilities and give you an idea of all the possibilities with this board. You will find several code examples that focus on one specific aspect of the board.

When writing a Python application sometimes it can be useful to get the name of the Python file where the code is stored. To take it further, you might want to get the full absolute path of the Python file or just the directory of the Python file. This can be particularly useful if you want to reference resources relative to the Python file, wherever it may reside.

SQLite3 is an awesome cross-platform relational database. Some of the major benefits of SQLite include its simplicity and easy management. Everything is stored in a single file and there is no authentication.

One of the big drawbacks with a SQLite database is that there is a global write-lock. Only one write operation can occur at any time. This can create a bottleneck for very write-intensive applications.

SQLite is used in production in many embedded and web applications. For example, you can use SQLite in combination with the Sinatra web application framework to persist data. If you are interested in learning how to use Sinatra, check out my Sinatra Tutorial.

Ruby is an incredibly productive and useful language. Combining Ruby with SQLite3 is a natural fit that opens many possibilities. Add in a simple web framework like Sinatra and you have an incredibly powerful but simple set of tools for building a web application.

You can read more on the official SQLite3 website and on the SQLite Wikipedia article.

If you need a database-agnostic library, something that you can use with SQLite and then easily configure to start using MySQL without rewriting all of your code, you want to use an ORM. ORM stands for Object-Relational-Mapping and the most popular one for Ruby is ActiveRecord.

Sinatra is a minimalist web framework for the Ruby programming language. It is known for being very simple and easy to use. If you are familiar with express.js, it was inspired by Sinatra. I have found it to be incredibly useful and fast to work with. This tutorial will cover some of the common tasks that I have used.