Building An IoT Gateway Device for local Alerting and Data Downsampling

There are all sorts of ways to architect your IoT Deployment, and what’s right for one enterprise will not necessarily be right for another. Depending on the size and complexity of your IoT project , there can be, of course, a lot of components. One of the more universal architectures is to deploy sensor hubs or gateway devices to collect data from a number of sensor nodes and then forward that data on to an upstream data collection system for the enterprise.

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December 18, 2017 Read
Getting Started with the Renesas IoT Fast Prototyping Kit

I’ve been meaning to get to this for a couple of weeks, and have been waylaid by a bunch of other things that kept popping up, but I’ve been working away with these, and thought I’d post at least an initial post about these kits. Renesas was kind enough to give me both theS3 IoT Fast Prototyping Kit and the S7 Starter Kit, both of which are really really nice boards for doing IoT prototyping.

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July 25, 2017 Read
InfluxDB on ARTIK-520 Redux

Last week I wrote a piece on installing and running the InfluxDB time series database, ingestion, dashboard and action packages on your ARTIK-520, but I need to update that post, and it’s a bit more than just a few edits. Influx Data supplies the Linux binaries as packages for most of the major distributions, but the ARM distribution is just as a binary, with no package installation scripts, etc. I thought I’d show you how (and why) I fixed that for my ARTIK-520.

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July 20, 2017 Read
Running InfluxDB on an ARTIK-520

Let’s face it, the IoT is about data. I said it just a few weeks ago. It’s about collecting data. Lots of data. But it’s actually about a lot more than just collecting data. Simply collecting data doesn’t really get you anywhere if all you do is collect it. To be useful, IoT data has to be relevant, accurate, and actionable. That last part is the key, really. Actionable data. In order to make your data actionable, you have to be able to analyze it, in real time preferably.

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July 14, 2017 Read
You Haven't Seen Big Data Yet

Yeah, I know, “Big Data” as a buzz-word is so 5 minutes ago. The tech world is chronically ADD and prone to being distracted by the next shiny object (OOh! Look, IoT!, Wait, AI! SQUIRREL!!) But stay with me on this. It’s all connected. I’ve been saying since at least 2005 (back when Big Data was all the rage) that you haven’t seen truly big data until the IoT truly gets going in full force.

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June 23, 2017 Read
Playing With Distance

I’ve been playing with a bunch of different sensors lately (see here) so I thought I’d do another little write-up of it. I dug my Particle Photon out to play with after being inspired at an NC RIoT event a few weeks ago and it had been a long time since I’d had it out. I’m not going to share the exact problem I was trying to solve with this little application, as it’s still a work in progress and may very well end up being a product soon, but I’ll tell you how I’m doing it.

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June 1, 2017 Read
The (Updated) Big Board of IoT

You may recall that at one point a year ago I posted a picture of my “Big Board of IoT Development”. I had a half dozen or so IoT development nodes and some sensors on it that I was working on. Since then, things have gotten significantly worse – or better, depending on your point of view. So I thought I’d drop another picture on you. {width=“600” height=“450”} So obviously I can’t use all those boards on the giant breadboard.

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May 2, 2017 Read
Accessing your Raspberry Pi Zero W

If you’ve been lucky enough to get your hands on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, then you might enjoy this. If you’re still waiting for one, bookmark this. Unless you happen to have extra HDMI monitors, keyboards and mice lying around. I don’t, so configuring mine was a pain in the ass. I’ve solved that pain for you, so read on. First, of course, you’ll need to download and install the latest Raspian-OS.

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April 12, 2017 Read
ARTIK-520 as a Droplit.io Edge Device

Doing some further work with my trusty ARTIK-520 (hey, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail! Back up off me! ) I decided to try installing another IoT Gateway framework on it. (I’ve done that before.) Equal opportunity and all that. And I’ll be doing more of them as soon as I get more mini-SD Cards in-house. But I digress. I originally just followed the basic install instructions for deploying a Droplit.

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March 28, 2017 Read
OpenHAB Server on ARTIK-520

As I said earlier, when you have a hammer … So I decided to set up Yet Another IoT Gateway. This time I took a look at OpenHAB the “vendor and technology agnostic open source automation software for your home.” Why not, right? I’ve already set up a Droplit.io edge server, and an Eclipse Kura server, so why not give one more a try right? Right. So let’s dive in.

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March 28, 2017 Read
Make your ARTIK-520 Scream

If you read last week’s post about making an ARTIK-520 an IoT gateway device using the Eclipse Kura project, then this will be a noticeable improvement for you if you’re going to try it yourself (and why wouldn’t you? It was an excellent little How To on getting started with ARTIK-520 and IoT!) It was suggested to me (these little birdies keep feeding me interesting nuggets to try) that I try the Azul Zulu Embedded JVM as an alternative to the OpenJDK JVM that is installed by default.

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March 6, 2017 Read
Building an App with Apache MyNewt

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few months working on the Apache MyNewt IoT OS. If you don’t know what that is, then you really should! It’s a fairly new Apache Project, still in the ‘incubating’ phase, but they’re about to release their second beta of the 1.0 release (I think all the votes are in to approve it). Yes, there are some things still missing, and some rough edges, but it’s coming together nicely and if you’re looking for an Open Source IoT OS for your device, MyNewt may just what you’re looking for.

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February 9, 2017 Read