Arduino and SigFox

This is really interesting.

One of the problem that you have, if you want to deploy IoT solution in the field, is connectivity. WIFI is OK only for Home.
Imagine if you want to monitor condition of your fields in Agricolture, or things like that.

SigFox, a French company, has launched and is developing a global Net for IoT, based on Ultra Narrow Band technology. And today, SigFox network covers more than 22 countries, including Italy.

Arduino has developed and started selling a new board, member of MKR family, that allows connectivity to SigFox network, including a two years' subscription.

Here you find the announcement:

Arduino launches SigFox connectivity

The board is called MKRFox1200 and costs only 35 euro.

And here, in Arduino blog:

Arduino Blog: SigFox 

IoT is progressing really fast: a world of new opportunities.

My AndroidThings 2

One quick update, things are rapidly happening in AndroidThings Space: Intel has announced a porting of its MRAA and UPM libraries to AndroidThings. Have a look here

MRAA and UPM on AndroidThings

Obviously it is only a starting point: you'll only drivers for few sensors.

As soon as I have time, I'll try with my LCD display, coming from my Grove kit.

TensorFlow and Image Recognition

How much easy is to do Image Recognition with TensorFlow:

https://www.tensorflow.org/tutorials/image_recognition

The model is Inception-V3 and it is already pre-trained. Only 200 MB of space on disk and.. it is done.
The language used is Python.

My Android Things

AndroidThings

Android Things is the new name that Google has adopted for its OS for Internet of Things. Before, the code name was “Brillo”.

Google has made available Android Things to developers, as a developer preview, at the end of 2016.
At the beginning of April 2017 (06/04), Google has released the DP3, adding for example BLE support, and it has been generally made available.
See the announcement here:

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/04/android-things-developer-preview-3.html

What is interesting is that it can be installed on a set of prototyping boards, such as Raspberry PI 3 (RPI3) and Intel Edison and therefore you can easily test it (obviously if you have one of these boards available).

Home Automation for Makers: still a long voyage?

My dear 10 readers,

I have been away for some time, travelling through disturbed waters of work and life, but I'm back.

I have some small troubles with my HomeAuto system. Nothing really terrible, but annoying.

1. My Ardino Yun positioned in my bathroom has stopped working. It is up and running, but it has left my WIFI network and I need to have a close look at its configuration. Yun is a rather expensive board, as compared for example to Particle Photon and I'm thinking that probably it is not the right board for my experiments. Fortunately I have bought only one.
2. I have tried to test the new Fishino IDE, that should enable me to do OTA update on that card. But I think I need also to upgrade Fishino firmware to have OTA enabled. Some wiring and low-level upgrade, hoping that in half a day it will return back in my fleet of rooms' devices.
3. I have left for a while in my 'bag of ideas' the project of moving the entire HomeAuto to a K8S based infrastructure... it will take more time than I expected (or I have less free time than expected). But it is an interesting idea and I'll continue on that.

Anyway: the point is that if you want to have a 24x7, well made, HomeAuto system, only few days of work are not enough.

Better said: one thing is to build a working prototype and a completely different thing is to set-up an industrialized solution, reliable and easily to maintain.

Well, most of you will think: where is the news?
Ok, but millions of happy maker(nerd)s are aware of this? Hope so.

Stay tuned.