The most frequent question in the past week was “How was CES?”, “What did you learned ?”, “What did you preferred?”, “Is there an interest to go at CES for us?” … I tried in this post to get, not a direct answer to these questions but direction where anyone can find the reason to visit or to exhibit to CES. You may add some more but they are the one that flashed my mind when visiting. Do not hesitate to complete in comment.
Connected cars
A second post once back from CES about connected cars ; connected cars are not autonomous cars even if autonomous cars are connected cars. For sure what is important is connected cars are already a reality and also a growing trend. Cars are connected different ways, for safety in a first step. Once the car is connected to Internet you have many ways to use this connectivity for the driver use as for the constructor use. Connected car is a great opportunity to propose new services for the consumer and most of this post will be about theses new services.
Connected cars and autonomous vehicles are two of the main topics discussed during the CES2016. Probably not the most review during CES as it still an industrial topic more than a consumer one at this time. In fact if we are on the way and we start to see some of the benefits for our safety, the roadmap is not for this year but for 2020 and 2030 depending on the steps. What is really interesting this year in CES is we have the first roadmaps I ever saw. We also had many actors running the same direction to make it a reality. This first post is presenting what I’ve learned around autonomous and driverless vehicles during the different CES sessions in 2016.
Today was CES2016 first press day with 2 major events : conference on digital consumer market trends and CES unveiled with 125+ startup and larger companies presenting innovations & products.
For this second event, a large part of the startup were coming from France and they had most of the more interesting innovation ! that is a great news in my opinion.
CES is waiting for 150.000 attendes this year and shows about 20.000 different products. 500 startups from 29 countries. As Olivier Ezratty told me many time today, on the 500 startup 1/4 are coming from France, and represents half of the non-USA startup.
nrf51 ble stack
After building my first project using an nRF51 device from the template given in the SDK I was really disappointed by the result, I mean, it works but the code is really bad and hard to maintain.
The given examples are not really generic and if you have to create your custom ble service and characteristics you have to make many modification in a code that is not clean for all.
So my second project was to create a ble library to make creation of custom services & characteristics as easy as possible and to create a main file with less code.
Bluetooth remote shutter
Remote Selfie shutter are really low cost Bluetooth 3 buttons that are really easy to hack for making different applications.
These button can be found on ebay, amazon or aliexpress like following this link for less that 6$. The button is paired to the smartphone and then allow to execute photo shoot without the need of any third party application.
You may have read some of my post about RF433 and Raspberry PI. Basically with RPI 1, I was using wiringPi interrupt handler to manage the RF433 decoding. The problem is that with RPI2 and RPI B+ the delay to take an interrupt that was becomes unpredictable. And the timing constraints are not respected. As a consequence part of the messages are loss because for these delay.
One of the solution (the software one) is to be more efficient to proceed the interrupts and the way to do this is to compile a kernel driver for directly handling the interrupts. This is what this post is about. This comes to complete the RFRPI code and associated hardware. A complete source code and software for using it is on the rfrpi bitbucket repository.
Challenge of the coming days : write a kernel driver to manage interruption quicker on a raspberry pi 2. I’m happy to find a lot of example on Internet and in particular this one, that is really looking like what I’m trying to do. This post is describing all the step needed to do this.
IoT is generating data and to quicky look at it during the prototype phase is sounds good to plot these data in a dashboard. There are many solution you can install on your server and configure to get pretty nice dashboard. But if you want to go faster it would be really nice to have a SaaS solution for doing this. I have tested some of the solution I have found and friends helped me to found (not easy to search on google …). This post details these experiments