Intel Edison Big Hat, No Cattle

It was almost exactly a year ago that I bought my first Intel Edison development kit. I was all excited about the prospects of it, as you can see here. It’s a nice, small, powerful (if power-hungry) IoT board that held a lot of promise for development and prototyping. I wish I were still as excited about it. I’ve tried, a couple of times, to use it for some development project or another.

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December 11, 2015 Read
New Hardware

I should have posted this back in October, but a few things happened. So I’m posting it now. I saw a few articles on the Spark.io board a while back, and had been anxiously awaiting its release. Then I got really really busy, and forgot all about it. Then I got unbusy again, and lo and behold, it was now called particle.io, and they had a few different boards. The Photon and the Electron.

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December 4, 2015 Read
Disney And #IoT

Over the holidays a friend of mine took her family to Disney World for a few days. They stayed at a resort in the park, paid extra for shorter lines at the rides, and were there in a group of 12. That’s a epic trip probably worthy of it’s own blog post — somewhere else. I couldn’t imagine the logistics of such a visit, but then again, it’s been 10 years since I’ve been to Disney World, and apparently a lot has changed in that time.

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January 9, 2015 Read
Intel Edison IoT Board

I’ve been reading about the Intel Edison development board for a while. I’m doing more IoT stuff again — purely for fun, since no one’s paying me to do it — and I’ve recently acquired the electric imp development kit and this Intel Edison kit, as well as an Arduino kit. The Intel Edison board is by far the most powerful of the bunch. It is an IoT SoC device that appeared to be extremely capable.

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December 4, 2014 Read
I'm an IoT Imp!

I got my electric imp and imp breakout board from SparkFun last week, and I decided to check it out today and see what I could do with it in an hour. I’m re-stocking my Internet of Things (IoT) bag of tricks, and this is the first device I’ve gotten in a while, so here’s how that went. Of course I have the requisite unpacking porn. It’s actually a pretty nice bit of kit, with a Cortex M3 stuffed into a SSD Memory Card form factor.

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November 24, 2014 Read
Drop a Brick On It

I’m all about connectivity. Yes, there are times to disconnect from the world, but that’s a personal disconnect. Applications and devices should, for the most part, be connected all the time. But connectivity is expensive and hard to maintain in remote places. If you’re connecting a server, or your house, there are many options available — let’s just go with that for now, shall we? The whole ISP monopoly issue will just get me wound up.

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November 19, 2014 Read
Making a Button

I can’t resist. I mean really. Who doesn’t need a big red button that you can program to … act like a big red button? But it’s so much more than just a button! I mean, a button is just something you push, right? This? This is so much more! The bttn communicates with the powerful bt.tn servers in the cloud. They dispatch messages and actions to almost any internet services so that what you want gets done.

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November 18, 2014 Read
Gadget Freak

I freely admit that I am a gadget freak. I’ll also (sometimes) admit that it’s a problem. I bought a Cookoo Watch as a Kickstarter Backer of the project. I own a FitBit — I’m on my third one, don’t ask. I’ll probably buy an Apple Watch. But one of the problems I have with most ‘wearable tech’ is that, well, it looks too much like tech. The Cookoo Watch was a great start, but the first version was really buggy and unstable — except as a watch — and I’ve come to find out that it’s un-upgradeable and is basically a paperweight.

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November 14, 2014 Read
Hardware Junkie

Ok, so in addition to being a gadget freak, I’m a hardware junkie. It’s been a while since I’ve actually done much hardware hackery, but that’s not because of a lack of desire. I bought an RFDuino dev kit last year as a Kickstarter backer that I just opened last weekend, and I haven’t done much with it so far. Turns out having nothing but BTLE is a lot less useful than I thought.

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November 14, 2014 Read
Hardware Extravaganza

It’s been a minute since I’ve posted anything new, and I apologize to anyone that follows along here and has missed my posting. I’ve been a bit busy lately with the MyNewt Operating System for IoT. It’s new, it’s cool, and it’s a lot of work right now. That being said, I thought I’d take a minute to show off some of the new hardware I have to add to the Big Board of IoT on my desk.

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January 1, 0001 Read