How Nokia has Blown the Withings Acquisition

I’m not usually one to publicly take a company to task like this, but, well, this is a rather special circumstance. I’ve been an avid Withings fan, and advocate, for years. I was one of the very first people to get a Withings Activité watch. Since then, I’ve actually invested pretty heavily in Withings gear. I bought my wife a Withings Pop. I bough a Withings Body Analyzer Scale. I bought a Withings Wireless Blood pressure Cuff.

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July 5, 2017 Read
How To Save (Backup or clone) Your ARTIK-520

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you have a Samsung ARTIK-520 (I assume this will work on other ARTIK modules aside from the ARTIK-0 ones) and you have it all configured the way you want, and don’t want to lose anything. Or maybe you just want to replicate it a dozen times onto a dozen different ARTIK-520s. As it stands right now, apparently, the answer is “good luck with that” as there is no mechanism to actually dump a running ARTIK-520 to a Mini-SD Card that can then be used to install it again.

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March 11, 2017 Read
Just How Fast Is Faster?

After I installed and tried the Zulu Embedded JVM on my ARTIK-520 this morning I noticed that it felt faster. It seemed faster. But was it really faster? And if so, how much faster? So I went looking for some Java Benchmark tests to run. I chose the DaCapo Benchmark for this. Why? Because google, that’s why. Here’s what the DaCapo Benchmark says about itself*: This benchmark suite is intended as a tool for Java benchmarking by the programming language, memory management and computer architecture communities.

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March 6, 2017 Read
Making an ARTIK-520 IoT Gateway with Kura

There are about a million ways to build or buy an IoT Gateway Device. (Actually, more like 586,000, but let’s not quibble). Each has it’s own merits, or pitfalls. You could buy one, and risk being locked into a single-vendor solution. You could build one from scratch and then be saddled with having to source the hardware, build the software, and then maintain it all and hope that you made the right choices and that it will scale.

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March 2, 2017 Read
The Growth of an Open Source RTOS

I saw a cool animation someone did on the git activity of an open source project, so I decided to do one of my own. I’ve been contributing to an open source RTOS for IoT called MyNewt (pronounced minute, as in really small) so I decided I’d see what a visualization of the project looked like over the past year. It’s mesmerizing. As you can see, the growth of the project over the past year is pretty nice, and watching it grow is really cool.

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June 22, 2016 Read
Using Raspberry Pi for a Dedicated Pandora Player

Let’s call it a Pandora Pi, shall we? Anyway, I have a (non-technical) friend that was always envious of the music setup I have in my house. I have a bunch of Bose Series III speakers set up around the house, connected to Airport Express Basestations so that I can broadcast music throughout the house. There’s always music playing around here, usually throughout the whole house — kitchen, living room, office, etc.

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May 23, 2016 Read
IoT Slam 2015

In case you haven’t heard about it yet, there is going to be a large virtual IoT Conference this year called IoT Slam ’15. If you haven’t submitted a topic for a session yet well, it’s too late. The Call For Papers closed last week. I thought about submitting a topic, but I was just too busy with engineering work, at the time, to pull it off. As you know, all that changed.

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October 11, 2015 Read
How Do We Get to 20 Billion?

During an interview today, I was asked the question “So where do these numbers come from? How do we get to 20 billion IoT devices?” Great question! How, exactly, do we get to 20 billion (or 30 billion, or a trillion) IoT devices? We’re certainly not going to get there with wearable devices and other personal gadgets. Well, we might but it would be a stretch, and the probability is near-zero.

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April 6, 2015 Read
Here Comes IoT ... Ready or Not!

As I’ve said before, everyone is talking about the Internet of things (IoT). It’s the buzzword du jour. It’s going to be huge, HUGE I tell you!! Billions and billions of devices connecting to the internet over the next 6 years. And that’s just the devices side of things. Then there’s the software side. The API services. The data analytics side of things. The Authentication and Identity Management areas. To say nothing of the cloud storage requirements.

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December 8, 2014 Read
New Blog

New Blog! As the year draws to a close, I had this wild idea to revive my personal/professional blog. I have no idea why, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. So I rebuilt the template I had made years ago to go with my website and here we are! Yes, I do occasionally blog for my job as a Technology Evangelist at Riverbed, but there are lots of other topics I’d like to blog about that don’t seem to be right for that venue, so I’ll put them here.

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October 23, 2014 Read