Just How Fast Is Faster?

After I installed and tried the Zulu Embedded JVM on my ARTIK-520 this morning I noticed that it felt faster. It seemed faster. But was it really faster? And if so, how much faster? So I went looking for some Java Benchmark tests to run. I chose the DaCapo Benchmark for this. Why? Because google, that’s why. Here’s what the DaCapo Benchmark says about itself*: This benchmark suite is intended as a tool for Java benchmarking by the programming language, memory management and computer architecture communities.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

March 6, 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.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

March 6, 2017 Read
Making an ARTIK-520 IoT Gateway with Kura

There are about a million ways to build or buy an IoT Gateway Device. (Actually, more like 586,000, but let’s not quibble). Each has it’s own merits, or pitfalls. You could buy one, and risk being locked into a single-vendor solution. You could build one from scratch and then be saddled with having to source the hardware, build the software, and then maintain it all and hope that you made the right choices and that it will scale.

Reading Time: 8 minutes

March 2, 2017 Read
Introduction

I said a bit about myself on my home-page, but apparently you want more information. So OK, here’s more information. The Recent Past For about 2.5 years I was the Senior Developer Evangelist for InfluxData. It pushed me past my million miles on American Airlines (not that it gets you much, really) and has allowed me to do some really cool IoT and more specifically IoT Data stuff. See my blog for more on that!

Reading Time: 7 minutes

March 1, 2017 Read
Mad Skillz

David G. Simmons davidgs@davidgs.com What Do I Want? To do really cool stuff, have fun doing it, and make you the cool kids. When Do I Want It? Now, duh. tl;dr I can literally build it, demo it and explain it to anyone, and make them want it more than they want ice cream. Geek Speak Java for days, C when it’s needed, Script-kiddie in Python, Bash, Javascript and a bunch more.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

March 1, 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.

Reading Time: 18 minutes

February 9, 2017 Read
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.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

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!

Reading Time: 3 minutes

December 16, 2016 Read
The Growth of an Open Source RTOS

I saw a cool animation someone did on the git activity of an open source project, so I decided to do one of my own. I’ve been contributing to an open source RTOS for IoT called MyNewt (pronounced minute, as in really small) so I decided I’d see what a visualization of the project looked like over the past year. It’s mesmerizing. As you can see, the growth of the project over the past year is pretty nice, and watching it grow is really cool.

Reading Time: 1 minutes

June 22, 2016 Read
Solving a Traveling Salesman Problem

It’s not IoT, but still … Here’s the background on this project, and why I undertook it. For the past 3 years or so my wife and I have been volunteering with the blind in our community. Every month our church organizes a dinner for the blind in the area and we drive around and pick up participants, take them to the church where we serve everyone dinner, and the drive them all home.

Reading Time: 10 minutes

June 16, 2016 Read
Using Raspberry Pi for a Dedicated Pandora Player

Let’s call it a Pandora Pi, shall we? Anyway, I have a (non-technical) friend that was always envious of the music setup I have in my house. I have a bunch of Bose Series III speakers set up around the house, connected to Airport Express Basestations so that I can broadcast music throughout the house. There’s always music playing around here, usually throughout the whole house — kitchen, living room, office, etc.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

May 23, 2016 Read
The Art of the Resume

If you ask 100 people about what a resume should be, you’ll likely get close to 100 answers. “It should be no more than 1 page long” “it should have a statement of objective” “never put your interested on a resume” “only list your last 3 jobs” And on and on. Most of it is conflicting, and pretty much none of it will work for everyone. These days, resumes are a crap-shoot.

Reading Time: 2 minutes

April 6, 2016 Read