Category Archives: News

My own news on technology and all the one i’m specially sensitive
Petits mots sur mon actualité technologique où celles du monde auxquelles je suis sensible.

Eclipse IoT in Grenoble

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Yesterday, I was in Grenoble for the Eclipse IoT days. It was a great opportunity to listen and learn from some actors of the IoT movement. The day was on the campus where we have been invited to see some student work on home automation and robotic for telepresence (see my twitter photo feed). The day was intensive on conferences with the really good quality and interest.

Most of the discussions / demonstrations were based on Home Automation, Smart house and globally telemetry. Not many industrial applications has been shown but some of the companies are working on industrial domain. Most of what has been shown is applicable on industry.

All the project are separating sensors, based on low cost / low energy devices associated to a local management/administration platform connected to Internet. The technology in use are mostly :

– RF and ZigBee for sensor to management platform

– Java for the management platform running the OSGi platform (Java) (this is also due to the fact Eclipse were organizing the conference and OSGi is Eclipse framework) This OSGi framework integrates management tools to connect / upgrade the platform remotely.

– Mqtt to communicate on Internet

– A custom MDM solution is deployed to manage the platforms (generally based on server management solution instead of MDM solutions) like roboconf.

Regarding the different architectures, some maintain the data on site with a in-house user interface, some export data outside on “cloud”  with an on-Internet user interface. As much as I’ve seen the in-house strategy is largely loosing on performance and interface quality due to the limited power of the management platform to perform advanced HTML experience. I assume this is also related to the Java choice to run these applications.

The other interesting learning is that most of the companies are using Raspberry Pi and Arduino to prototype solutions before, I assume, building a more robust platforms. Opensource is also mainly used and presented as the only solution to make the IoT market based on standard to be integrated all-together.

Introduction to Internet of Things

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Recently I made a presentation on Internet of Things for ClermontTech ApiHour show ; normally video should be published soon. For those who are interesting in this topic, here are the slides with the associated comments.

http://slid.es/disk91/internetofthings

Have fun !

Make you own PCB

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I recently created a printed circuit board for a raspberry PI design i’m working on. By the past, when I did such things, the cost to make it was not accessible for a home made design. In 10 years things have change a lot and now, you can do it for less than 100€ for a 10×10 two layer board. 4 layer is also something accessible.

I want to share with you this experience, because, I had a good and an bad experience to share.

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Draw your circuit with a pen – electronic for fun & childs

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You can imagine a lot of use cases for a such thing : a pen able to create electrical conductivity over ink. The one I found really interesting this morning is to make electronic a fun activity for my daughter. That’s the reason why I backed on this product.

This is a kickstarter project accessible for a couple of euros. I let you have a look to the project itself here .

 

 

New arduino Galileo ready for orders

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Galileo is an Intel platform compatible with arduino ; more of that it is an embedded Pentium class platform. With 400MHz and 800mA and 55€ with Ethernet but no video out, I’m not totally sure this platform provides a real new thing in the embedded world.

By the way, it have some interesting advantages :

  • Compared to usual arduino platform, you have a really more powerfull system for the price of a small arduino + ethernet shield. Making this board interesting.
  • Compared to ARM based board, for a couple of Euro more, you have a full x86 compatible platform (32b) where you can run most of the existing x86 code.

I let you have your own advice, to take a look to the detailed description here and buy it here (actually 9w delay)

 

 

Feed back from Oracle OpenWorld 2013

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I some may mentioned, I was at Oracle OpenWorld conference last week. The main points I retained regarding my point of interest are listed in the following prezi :

http://prezi.com/c1vlmudi2dh2/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Lots of activity around radio embedded systems (Internet of things)

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We all know that Internet of things is going to be the next revolution and it’s on the way, we also know that this revolution will not come from some main existing IT leaders as IBM, Microsoft, Amazon … ( I won’t say Google, because they are good player here) but from a lot of non existent companies/startups. It’s really interesting to see what is happening on crowd founding place like kickstarter (Ok, Amazon is part of it) these days : for sure we can see Internet of things in creation with a lots of connected gadget founded. But you can also found all the raw material used by the future companies to make this revolution real.

A year ago we had a lot of buzz around Raspberry PI ( and it continue to grow even if I think the reality of this environment is under its promise ) which is an interesting platform like BeagleBoard Black coming this month is. In my opinion these platforms are good to do geeky stuff but suffer of two issues : not natively wireless and consuming too much power. I assume Internet of thinks is mostly mobile and wireless : because I won’t put many cables in my house to connect these objects : I want wifi/battery stuff!

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Idea of the day – Camera companion

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After a long period without any idea commit, I propose to imagine a Digital Camera companion, compatible with the main reflex system canon and nikon. This system would be connected to the camera using the USB channel or eventually a dongle type on usb connector, or eventually a wifi memory card system. This is for the camera side. On a tablet side, all the taken photo would be received and transform. The idea is to add GPS location and easily apply filter like in instagram. This can also be use to make panorama automatically or create HDR.

The choice of an USB direct connection could help to automatically configure the camera like for HDR.

As all the idea in this category, feel free to comment, and develop, if you become rich with it … don’t forget to help me paying my house !