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
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
NCRIoT Meetup

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll already know that I was at the NCRIoT IoT Meetup yesterday at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, NC. You may not know what NC RIoT is. Hell, until recently, I didn’t either, which is a crime really because it’s an amazing group of IoT fanatics doing some really cool stuff with IoT. I even met a guy who does as many crazy things with IoT as I do – you should follow @LogicalDan on twitter, and tweet at him in case he’s wearing his shirt that lights up when you tweet at him.

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May 17, 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
Coffee Beans

Why the Beans? People are always asking me about the Coffee beans on this site. Am I a Barista? Am I just really into coffee? What? If you look through this site for a while, you’ll notice that I have been involved with the Java Programming Language and Java Technology since, well, since just a little bit before Java was actually released by Sun Microsystems, Inc. back in 1995 (has it really been that long?

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March 21, 2017 Read
Hobbies

Some of my Wood Working Projects Update:I’m now starting to sell some of my wood turnings. I’ve been doing woodworking of one form or another for a long time. I love the feel of wood in my hands, and creating something out of wood is one of my favorite things to do. So I do it whenever I can. This is but a small sampling of some of the things I’ve done, and more will surely follow.

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March 20, 2017 Read
Return to Evangelism

Things change. What’s that saying in Computer Science? “Variables won’t. Constants aren’t.” The only thing that never changes is that everything changes. And so things are (once again) changing for me. And I do mean in a good way! It’s been a few years, and it’s taken a fair amount of effort, but I’m moving back into the space I know the best, and where my heart lies: The Internet of Things (IoT).

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March 20, 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