Adventures in Golang

I’m not a Golang developer. Let’s just get that out of the way up front. I’ve developed a few things in Go, but a Go developer I’m not. I sort of need to be, but it hasn’t been essential. I decided that it was really time to take the plunge and get serious about Go. Seriously, there’s only so much you can learn by reading the internet. To that end, I have taken 2 actions:

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August 20, 2018 Read
Building an InfluxDB IoT Edge Data Collection Device

I’ve been saying I was going to write this whole project up for some time now but it has been such a daunting task that I’ve been putting it off, starting and stopping, and generally not getting it done for a few months. Finally, I have it! This is both a hardware build and a software build, and there are a lot of moving parts, so be prepared! Overview I wanted to build a demonstration system that would show off the capabilities of using InfluxData — the entire TICK Stack — on the extreme edge of an IoT Architecture.

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July 20, 2018 Read
Programming the ARTIK-0 IoT Devices

If you’ve read this blog much at all you’ll have noticed that I’ve been a fairly big fan of the ARTIK line of IoT boards (see here, here, here, here, here, here , here and here) but I really need to clarify that a bit now. I love my ARTIK-520 board. It runs the entire InfluxData stack nicely and is a solid, reliable place to deploy IoT-Edge software. I really like it.

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July 1, 2018 Read
Here's Why I'm giving up on MyNewt (for now)

With all these sensors and platforms lying around, I wanted to just pick one and build a quick sensor demo. It should be easy, right? The basic idea As you may (or may not) know, I spent a lot of time with the Apache MyNewt project a year or so ago. It has enormous potential. It’s small, fast, and very lightweight. I even wrote a tutorial on developing an app with MyNewt.

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April 4, 2018 Read
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
Time to Awesome with InfluxDB

InfluxData has a thing about Time to Awesome™. So much so that they Trademarked it. No, seriously, they did. And they mean it. So let’s go from Zero to Awesome! We are singularly focused on reducing the Time to Awesome™, we truly care about helping developers and businesses get to results faster with less complexity and less code. That’s directly from the About section of their website and they really do mean it!

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December 1, 2017 Read
Time for a Twitter Transition

I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. A really long time. Longer than my actual twitter profile would indicate. (I think I first joined in late 2006.) At one point, I had over 5,000 followers, but, well, basically twitter’s security and policing was so atrocious that, for reasons of personal safety, I quit twitter and deleted my account. I was gone for about 2 years. I came back and started fresh in 2012.

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October 25, 2017 Read
Time Series Data

I’m just going to drop this here. Don’t need to say much about it, as it’s pretty thorough. Go read it!

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September 27, 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
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