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Des del 2000 compartiendo sobre…

Tag: internet of things

MIT IoT course: Roadmap to a Connected World

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

Some weeks ago I finished this course from MIT. My ideas was have an overview of the IoT market from an external point of view. In the end I’m a little bit disappointment because the course was more focused on talking about general ideas with a lot of references of internal projects about IoT on universities, mainly MIT as you can imagine. I don’t know how those it work in The States where the companies are by far bigger than in Europe, but in my humble experience it’s very difficult to approach to a company talking about experimental technologies, or whatever which is not properly supported by another company. This is the language of business that I experimented in my professional career.

A part from that I want to remark that technical contents are presented by very important people in different areas of technology. But when it was time to talk about technical details the things changed a lot depending on the teacher, some teachers where lost on completely usefulness details of a completely unknown technology and others don’t go deep enough on basic specs of basic technologies.

Sadly the block where I want to contrast my point of view with others, the Architecture, was focused on completely different approach that I expected. I didn’t find any reference from architecture reference models (ARMs) of the IoT platforms, for example. Minor references to important transport protocols like CoAP, or MQTT. Both of them important standards from IETF and OASIS/ISO, respectively.

Another disappointing part is the security chapter, most of the content is focused on securing hardware to the most deep and complex parts. And practically no information referring to Internet security, or data transportation. Nothing about certificates, blockchains, or whatever other solution to improve most of the security problems in real IoT today. May be hardware security is important for some companies but usually this is not the most concerning part from most of companies today.

Sorry but from my humble opinion, the course is not well-focused and if I have to be honest with you I felt sleepy more than once when I watched some videos. A part from that, the assessments at the end of chapters are a waste of time because they try to check if you followed the explanations with simple question that you can answer looking video transcriptions. Only forums and course mates are good points, but old fashion user interface of the learning platform don’t allow you to enjoy the conversation threads.

After more than 16 years writing blog entries in my site I’ve never did so bad review of anything but I have to be honest with my feelings with the course, and I want to call for apologies to all the people who spent a lot of energy preparing materials for the course.

Luckly the cost of the course is only $495, but nobody likes to spent that amount of money for not being satisfied. Before closing the post, just a link to the course: Internet of Things: Roadmap to a Connected World.

Homie as a convention for MQTT based IoT solutions

Reading time: < 1 minute In this video I describe deeply a convention called "Homie“; thanks to that we have a set of rules and assumptions very useful when a firmware device is created and/or an IoT platform have to be configured to support those devices. I love that convention and I used it during my demonstration scenario in Lviv IT Arena.

After this video I’ll follow a series of some other videos, describing how to develop devices following Homie conventions.

Official documentation of the convention can be found in the Github Homie project.

Conferència Summer Camp Garrotxa 2015: SmartHome usant Arduino, Raspberry PI i més

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

Aquest cap de setmana vaig tornar a donar la meva conferència sobre “SmartHome” en aquesta ocasió vaig introduïr la novetat del sistema de feedback basat en “Tasker + Auto-notification”, a més de l’execusió de tasques basades en “crontab”. També he inclòs un petit avanç sobre el nou projecte en el que estic treballant per tal d’integrar les dades del descalcificador dins del OpenHAB usant una webcam i OpenCV per processar les imatges optingudes.

Agraïr al Xavi, Gerardo i la Laura per haver-me donat aquesta oportunitat. Tant el SCG15 com el SAX2015 són events molt familiars a més l’entorn és espectacular. Tot un descobriment del que malgrat tenir referències no havia pogut disfrutar en primera persona.

scg2015

Conference: SmartHome using Arduino, Raspberry PI and more

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

I did this conference twice but this time it’s in English as I said before in Catalan, this is how I’m getting real a childhood dream. Thanks to open hardware like Arduino and Raspberry PI and open source software like OpenHab I have a smarthome with several automations. Last Thursday I spoke in “IoT Barcelona meetup” sharing my personal experience automating my house.

If you lost it and you want to watch the presentation video is here:

and the presentations slides are here:

Conferència: SmartHome usant Arduino, Raspberry PI i més

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

El dia 12 de febrer al vespre vaig fer una conferència a la FIB (Facultat d’Informàtica de Barcelona) dins de la UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya). En aquesta xerra vaig estar explicant com vaig convertint en realitat un somni que vaig tenir quan era petit, estic parlant de domotitzar la casa. Gràcies a enginys com l’Arduino i la Raspberry PI a més d’aplicacions com l’OpenHab podem fer assequible allò que si anem a grans marques comercials es fa caríssim pel meu pressupost.

En aquest enllaç podeu trobar les transparències de:  SmartHome usant Arduino Raspberry i més i el video el teniu disponible al servidor de la FIB.

Ara també teniu disponible el video a youtube:

i podeu veure les transparències des d’aquest mateix post:

Espero els vostres feedbacks als comentaris, desitjo que ús sigui útil.

Short MIIMETIQ definition

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

M2MCF and MIIMETIQ

Last months in M2M Cloud Factory we have been working on MIIMETIQ. Last weeks I’ve been thinking about how to define MIIMETIQ shortly and this is my definition, please tell if you can understand something. Of course, you have to know we’re focused in Internet of Things and M2M market.

  • MIIMETIQ is an IoT/M2M framework, so this is the first step to setup to develop your vertical solution.
  • Framework: With a well defined architecture a framework is a set of functions ready to create any application. Everything else is open and adaptable.
  • MIIMETIQ architecture is service oriented and it uses AMQP as a message broker to connect the services.
  • MIIMETIQ has several modules, we define a module as a set of services. Basicly MIIMETIQ have 5 modules:
    • Identity Manager: manage users, groups, roles and all kind of entities the project needs and its security.
    • Assets Manager: a data model manager, the integrator creates the business logics and data models here.
    • Distribution System: this is a set of agnostitc connectivity layers to different types of devices.
    • A E N M: several time series and other signals flow through the AMQP, this data are events and using rules those events could be converted in alarms and some alarms have to be notified to proper services, systems or people.
    • Control Panel UI: this is an administration dashboard, in form of a UI to setup and monitor the most common uses of MIIMETIQ.
  • Using those modules usually the integrators create their own user interface to satisfy customer requiremests. In M2MCF we create those UI using ADUX (Advanced Development User Experience).
  • After configuring MIIMETIQ the integrator has 2 customized APIs to connect their code with MIIMETIQ. One of them is an API REST and another one is AMQP.
  • Finally everything inside MIIMETIQ could be customized, because the flexibility is very important when you have an horizontal solution.

Conferència al Tecnocampus: Internet of Things (IoT) low cost

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

Després d’arribar corrent de Cardiff on era aquest dilluns el dimarts vaig arribar a temps per fer la presentació “Internet of Things low cost” als companys del Tecnocampus de Mataró; per cert, unes intal·lacions brutals res a veure amb la EUPMT on vaig estudiar jo fa una colla d’anys. Jo encara diria més, molt millor que no pas la gran Universitat de Cardiff on vaig ser el dilluns.

Pel que fa a la xerrada agraïr a tothom que hi va assistir, a continuació adjunto les transparències pels que vareu ser-hi i pels que no.

Properament pujaré el video, o la part, del video que es va poder gravar. El problema és que són diversos gigues i he de deixar l’ordinador renderitzant cosa que encara no he pogut fer.

El video no conté tota la presentació però té una part important del contingut, així que desitjo que ús sigui útil:

Per cert, una gran part de la presentació esta reciclada de la conferència: Conferència: La revolució dels mini-PC: Raspberry PI, Arduino i més

Firmware of my home heaters (Panstamp = Arduino + TI C1101)

Reading time: < 1 minute Clicking the next link you can get my github repository with the firmware of my home heaters. The code is very simple but useful as we tested last winter at home.

I know all the public documentation is not enough to duplicate my heating project. I’m so sorry but I have a lot of pending home projects to do because I have a lot of under construction things. If you need some help to understand what I have or how to do something feel free to ask.

 

Conferència: La revolució dels mini-PC: Raspberry PI, Arduino i més

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

Ahir al vespre vaig fer una conferència a la FIB (Facultat d’Informàtica de Barcelona) dins de la UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya). En aquesta xerra vaig estar explicant què és i en que es diferència Arduino i Raspberry PI. A més de presentar tot un conjunt de solucions alternatives i experiències en el tema.

En aquest enllaç podeu trobar les transparències de:  La revolució dels mini-PC: Raspberry PI, Arduino i més. i el video el teniu disponible al servidor de la FIB.

Ara també teniu disponible el video a youtube:

i podeu veure les transparències des d’aquest mateix post:

Espero els vostres feedbacks als comentaris, desitjo que ús sigui útil.

Home heating using Panstamp (Arduino + TI C1101) and SSR

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

Last weekend I worked on setting up home heaters using Panstamp. Panstamp is an Arduino board with Texas Instruments radio. Next winter we’re going to control our home heater using connected internet devices like the laptop, tablet o mobile phones. In this post I only want to share some pictures about the process to install the electronics inside the heaters changing the old electronic boards with new custom ones.

The parts:

  • AC/DC transformer, outputs 5V. It’s really cheap, in this case free because I have more than 20 of them from old projects.

acdc5v_

  • A small custom PCB designed and made by Daniel Berenguer, the owner of Panstamp. Thanks again Daniel. I bought the PCBs and parts for around 10€ each one.

IMG_20130923_114830

  • TMP36 temperature sensor. It costs about 1,5€ each one.

IMG_20130923_114814

  • Solid state relay (SSR) bought in Alied Express web site for less than 5€.

ssr

The process:

I used a lot of tools, because DIY aren’t my strong hability.

IMG_20130921_141640

Double-head tape and hot-blue gun are need…

IMG_20130921_133746

because I want to use a cork base under the PSU and PCB

IMG_20130921_133723Parallelization of the last process
IMG_20130921_143116Using a cutter I got the units
IMG_20130921_143434SSR setup
IMG_20130921_164651connecting SSR, PCB and PSU
IMG_20130921_170711assembling everything on heater side panel
IMG_20130921_173937finally, mounting side panel on the heater
IMG_20130921_133547

Next weeks, I’ll come back with this subject to talk about the software part.