iot - Kevin Hoyt

Teaching Watson to See My Garage

After a long day of work, I like to head out to my garage and tinker, binge the latest series, listen to a podcast, or settle in with a book. If the weather is right, I will open the garage door. Eventually I will head to bed. Then it hits

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LightBlue Bean to IBM Cloud

The LightBlue Bean, by Punch Through, is one of my favorite IoT development platforms. The Bean has many parts, including an iOS application called the LightBlue Explorer, that lets you view and control nearby Beans. The gang over at Punch Through recently added the ability for the Explorer application to

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Slap Robin with the ZX Gesture Sensor

Every now and again, I run across a sensor that just sounds like fun. Such is the case when I read about the ZX Gesture Sensor from Sparkfun and XYZ Interactive. Put it together with the Internet, and I just may have gotten a little slap-happy. The Sensor The ZX

particle

Particle and Google Maps Integration

At Google IO 2017 just a few weeks ago, Particle announced an integration with Google Maps. This integration allowed you to get the location of a Photon without the need for a GPS. Instead location is achieved by referencing the wireless access points in the vicinity (a less scary way

web

Web Bluetooth Bean

Bluetooth has been around for a while now, but it has always been a feature for native applications. The Web Bluetooth specification has been brewing for a while, lived under a flag for some time, and is now starting to land in desktop browsers. I figured it was time to

tessel

Tessel Barcode Scanner: Software

In my previous post, I show how you can connect a barcode scanner to a USB port on the Tessel, and read the scanned values. While that is interesting, what is more interesting is in doing something with that value. In this post we will take a look at finding

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Tessel Barcode Scanner: Hardware

In addition to the two module ports on the Tessel, there are also two USB ports. USB, while big and bulky in many IoT projects, can provide a useful access point to hardware. One example used by Tessel is a web camera. Many POS (point of sale) devices are also

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Custom Tessel Module

Not too long ago now, I presented at Windy City Things 2016 in Chicago. Among the IoT boards I showed there was the Tessel. I have written about the Tessel before, and how approachable it is for a JavaScript developer. Do not let the approachability fool you though, there are

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Tessel on Watson IoT

Do you know JavaScript? Do you like IoT? Lean towards open standards? Then the Tessel should be right up your alley! Tessel is a hardware development platform. It has both Ethernet and 802.11 b/g/n support (and more), and you develop for it using Node.js (or Rust,

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Electric Imp on Watson IoT

I recently posted about connecting a Particle Photon and your browser to the Watson IoT Platform. Both of these systems easily supports publish/subscribe using MQTT. What happens when you have a device that does not support MQTT, yet still needs to communicate with Watson IoT? In this post we

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Your Browser on Watson IoT

In my previous blog post, I connected a Particle Photon to Watson IoT. At several points during that post I mentioned the subtleties of device connectivity versus application connectivity, but I did not really show the application side. In this post, I will pick up the messages from the Photon

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Particle Photon on Watson IoT

IBM has had an IoT platform offering for a while now in various forms. The most recent evolution falls under the Watson brand, and includes device management, and authentication. Marketed as the Watson IoT Platform, the messaging layer is MQTT supported by IBM MessageSight. MQTT is an ISO standard largely

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Decoupling IoT Rendering

I recently received a comment from a visitor using one of my Arduino-to-WebSocket examples. They had a requirement for a specific charting library. The problem is that the library could not handle the data rates coming from the Arduino. In this post I break down why that is, and give

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IoT Weather on Android

In a previous post I talked about moving from request-response to using the publish-subscribe pattern. This pattern allows our application parts to listen for changes in a decoupled fashion. This works great with the continuous feed feature of IBM Cloudant. In this iteration I will bring the data to Android,

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Cloudant Continuous Feed

Over the past several examples, new documents in IBM Cloudant have been discovered by continuously polling the database. This is not only inefficient at scale, but creates a tight coupling between our clients and the server. With a little tweaking to our existing code, Cloudant can tell us when changes

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IoT Weather on Cloudant

Getting weather data from a service is all fine and dandy, but in this day and age of IoT (Internet of Things), it almost seems more likely that you will be getting data from sensor in and around your home. In this post I will take you through connecting a

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Particle Photon

The company Spark, which became popular with their Core product, has recently changed the name of their company to Particle. The successor to the Spark Core then is the Particle Photon. I have received two Photon units and have been putting them through their paces over the past week. The

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Real-Time Smart Buildings

What is your favorite building? The office? The coffee shop down the street? Your home? Maybe a shed out back? Whatever the case, there is no shortage of ways to augment your home with IoT (Internet of Things). Google Nest, Philips Hue, or WeMo give you classic request/response control

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First Steps with Intel Edison

There are a lot of SoC (System on a Chip) devices out there these days. I have written about the Arduino Yun in the past. Today I would like to introduce you to the Intel Edison. At about the quarter of the size of a credit card (35.5mm x

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Messaging and the New Web

The Widget Company now has two successful devices on the market. WidgetX (LED) has a web server built into it, and is expecting REST operations for control. WidgetY (photocell) has a WebSocket server built into it, and can push sensor data to the web in real-time. But does this represent

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IoT and the New Web

All too often, we as developers, focus on technology for what it can do for us - and usually in a particularly one-sided conversation. Every now and again however, there comes a time when we need not to look at technology for what it can do for us, but rather

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Real-Time Quadcopter Telemetry

Modern commercial aircraft have what is commonly referred to as a "black box". The black box is a flight data recorder. It captures numerous sensor data points across the aircraft, and records them for playback in the case of a catastrophe. As we have seen lately however, the