My Winter Vacation (what I did with IoT and ARTIK-5)

I don’t know about you, or what you did with your winter vacation (or if you even got one, and if you didn’t, I’m sorry) but one of the fun things I did with mine was to spend a little time with my Samsung ARTIK Dev Kit. If you read the Hardware Extravaganza Post, you’ll know that I got an ARTIK-0 and an ARTIK-5 developer kit not long ago. I’ve been up to my ears in MyNewt though and haven’t had time to do much with them, sadly.

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January 2, 2017 Read
Mynewt iOS And Mac Apps

I’ve been doing a lot of work on the Mynewt OS Project over at the Apache Software Foundation. It’s still ‘incubating’ so it’s not a full-fledged Apache project yet, but we’re making huge progress and it’s coming along nicely. In fact, we’re just releasing our first beta versions of the 1.0 release! If you’re an IoT hacker, and are looking for a small, fast, highly configurable (and open source!) RTOS, MyNewt it the ticket!

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December 16, 2016 Read
The Big Board of IoT Devices

Just for future reference, here’s the development board that sits on my desk: What’s on it? Well, here’s the list: Intel Edison: One on the (mostly useless) Intel Mini Breakout board and one on a Sparkfun Block (more on this one in a later post) Electric Imp A couple of Arduinos — they’re actually RFDuinos, which I backed on Kickstarter. A Particle Photon A NodeMCU Some random sensors I’m working with.

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March 30, 2016 Read
Why I'm Switching from Tile to Trakr

I’ve been a loyal Tile user since I first baked their Kickstarter project. I love the idea of being able to locate things I lose all the time, like my keys, and to keep track of stuff I might lose, like my DSLR, my GoPro, etc. I even used them to keep track of my cats when they wee indoor-outdoor cats. I at least knew when they were around even if I couldn’t find them.

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January 8, 2016 Read
Intel Edison Update

I need to amend my previous post about the Intel Edison. It turns out it may not be the Edison module itself but rather the Intel Mini-Breakout Board that is at fault when t comes to at least the I2C failure. I still have to see about the SPI failures. Here’s why I have reached that conclusion: I ordered some of the Sparkfun Blocks for Intel Edison© and went back to fooling with them.

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January 6, 2016 Read
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
Some Minor IoT Calculations

Batteries will be a limiting factor in IoT deployments There’s a lot of hype about the Internet of Things (IoT) as I’ve said repeatedly — and as anyone who’s reading anything about technology these days already knows. There’s wearable tech, there’s healthcare IoT, there’s M2M IoT and a host of other areas of the IoT that are all projected to explode over the next 10 years. Billions and billions of devices are forecast.

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January 30, 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
Is IoT Happening or Not in 2015?

It’s clear that IoT is the buzzword of the minute. Maybe the buzzword of the year. Everyone’s talking about it, mentioning it, making predictions about it and claiming to be a player in it. I am among those, but I have the background and the history to back it up. But after reading this article from Electronics Weekly.com, I’m just aggravated. It is annoyingly titled “The Internet of Things is Not Happening” which is just plain wrong.

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January 2, 2015 Read
The IoT Ecosystem

What is the Internet of Things (IoT) anyway? And what makes up the IoT ecosystem? Yes, IoT is the buzzword of the year. Yes, everyone thinks everything is IoT these days. But just because a thing connects to the internet doesn’t mean it’s IoT. In thinking about this idea, I put together the following presentation, of sorts. It’s HTLM5, and can take a while to load, but check it out and let me know what you think in the comments section.

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December 16, 2014 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