Container on ARM SBSc
Most single-board computers (SBCs) today are powered by ARM. Containerization on SBCs like Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi brings so much flexibility in a Smart Home project, i.e., modular, scalable, decoupled, and interconnectivity.
iot
Saving electricity by suspending idle servers
Electricity is a (very) expensive resource in Europe. By putting the servers into sleep/suspend mode (while idle), I can save 80% of the power consumption. A very-low-energy microcomputer (e.g. raspberry pi or even the smartphone) is enough to get them to wake up when being used.
Microsoft Azure IoT edge
Just launched before IoT expo Amsterdam 2018 (19-20 June 2018), a brilliant approach by Microsoft Azure: embedding intelligence to the IoT devices (namely IoT edges), proposing containerized-driven devs-ops using all their SaaS, providing a public registry for massive involvement, and building a partnership with IoT hardware vendors. It’s a big ecosystem. Just get the deployment … Read moreMicrosoft Azure IoT edge
Edge embedded system: UP core
Hardware makers are competing to make a credit card-sized single board computer (SBC) that has ‘enough’ computing power on which ‘intelligence’ can be put. As an example, a drone that could take actions immediately when perceiving a certain pattern without beforehand coordinating with the ground station. Interestingly one of them is based on Eindhoven, UP … Read moreEdge embedded system: UP core
Sonoff RF Bridge (before the firmware flashed)
Turning a remote controller into a (WiFi) lamp switcher using a Sonoff RF bridge that converts a learned RF incoming signal to an MQTT publishing action. Sonoff original application is used (it needs to send the message to the Sonoff cloud). IFTTT (If-This-Then-That) is created to respond to an RF request to turn on a … Read moreSonoff RF Bridge (before the firmware flashed)
IoT market landscape
Many IoT vendors at the last IoT conference in Amsterdam (27-28 June 2018) prefer ZigBee as the connectivity protocol to RF or WiFi due to very low power and advanced functionalities. However, there are 2 main concerns: 1) it brings proprietaries to the market (must be connected to gateway from the same vendor); 2) the … Read moreIoT market landscape
Battle of Time-series Database (TSDB)
The rise of time-series database is accelerated by massive IoTs. It can provide users low latency queries & distributed storage. Competition of TSDB vendors is dynamic and progressive on which newcomers introduce better & better performance and functionalities. The full comparison is as follows. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sMQe9oOKhMhIVw9WmuCEWdPtAoccJ4a-IuZv4fXDHxM/edit#gid=0
Integrating RF smoke sensors into Smart Home
Reflecting from the fire in the Office of Ministry of Transportation This is an industrial-grade smoke detector that sounds very noisy and transmits an “RF-433 MHz alarm” when exposing heavy smoke (e.g., in case of fire). I converted it to a network device using an MQTT-RF bridge, so:1) it can be monitored anywhere, anytime, and … Read moreIntegrating RF smoke sensors into Smart Home
Android sensors to Smart Home
Our Android phone is by default equipped with multiple sensors, e.g., accelerator sensors, magnetic field, photo light detector, noise level sensor, etc. I have an unused LG G4 which I turned into a sensor device. To convert the sensor readings into MQTT message, Sensor Node Pro is used. Telegraf is embedded to the MQTT server … Read moreAndroid sensors to Smart Home
OpenWRT: Network Democratization
Democratization is a trending word in today’s era, i.e., private-owned have to be community-driven, vendor to be open source, elite to be everybody, locked to be freedom. In the hardware domain especially in switch/routing technology that is dominated by just a bunch of vendors, democratization can be seen in the advent of new technologies such … Read moreOpenWRT: Network Democratization