New IoT kit from Intel

I have discovered today (yes, with some delay, I've been busy recently) that Intel has released a new IoT kit at the end of March.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2016/03/30/intel-iot-developer-kit-30-release-notes

Lot of interesting things. For example, now MRAA support explicitely (as they say) Node 4.1.1.

I have to try again to upgrade the OS on my Edison and test upgrading Node to 4.1.1
Hope this time it will be less painful.

Internet and the past: looking back

One of the nice things about Internet is that the Net make it easier to find everything, also coming from the past

here is a list of the paper born (partially, ehi, my contribution is a small part) from my Thesis

https://www.researchgate.net/researcher/2002285507_Luigi_Saetta

Nice comparison between Amazon and Microsoft Azure IoT Cloud Platform

Nice article:

https://paolopatierno.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/an-iot-platforms-match-microsoft-azure-iot-vs-amazon-aws-iot/

Amazon AWS IoT

Yes, you need to be well aware of the features and the way to work with the most used Cloud IoT platforms.

Yesterday evening I had some spare time (well, sort of) and I decided to give a try to Amazon AWS IoT.

I have developed a quick example, written in NodeJS, that sends MQTT msgs from my IoT gateway (based on RPI2) to Amazon IoT.

Documentation is not perfectly clear, but the example has worked. Maybe I'll write a longer post trying to clarify all the steps needed.

Back to Intel 386

This morning I was giving a closer look at how it works the ISS for Edison, the development environment based on Eclipse, to assist in development of C/C++ programs for Edison

This is the result of the "file" command execution launched on one of the exe produced,

BlinkTest1: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.32,

Well, I know that Edison is an Intel 32 bit board... but it is strange, years after, to read 80386

Visual Integration Tools

On my IoT Gateway two components have a great importance:

• NodeJS
• Node-Red

Normally, an IoT Gateway has several task to do. Amongst the others:

• Register locally values received from Sensor Nodes;
• Transform message format

Node-Red is a great integration tool, based on NodeJS, but with a Visual Designer.

For example, with this simple flow, I take a msg from a MQTT Topic, I do some simple transformations and then I store the readings from sensors in a MySQL table.

Cool

Containers, DevOps...

This is another area that I find really interesting nowadays.

Flexibility, agility, efficient use of resources in the IT world today can be satisfied only by adopting efficient and effective virtualization technologies.

Docker is today "on the radar" of many people and organization. A really nice way to "containerize application", both for isolation in consolidation, both for distribution.
Docker is for Linux.
Solaris has for long time had a similar virtualization technology: Solaris Containers (also known as zones).

I have found, by chance, this really interesting article:

https://redstack.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/gettingn-to-know-docker-a-better-way-to-do-virtualization/

Maybe worth the time to read.