Wireless mobility - Innovation - Digital convergence - mobile web 2.0
This is awesome news!
I spent my holiday learning about Arduino and I am a huge fan/ believer in Arduino and today I see that the Trailer for Arduino Documentary Gets 75,000 Views in 1 Day
Its great to see Arduino get so much traction and there was a clear need for an open source hardware and software product for the Internet of Things! Expect more posts on this topic and subject in general. The link for trailer below
TRAILER Arduino: The Documentary (available on HD) from gnd on Vimeo.
For the past four years, I have co-chaired this conference at Oxford University alongwith Tomi Ahonen. This year, this year’s ForumOxford: Future Technologies Conference 2010 will be held at the University of Oxford on Friday 15 October 2010.
The conference is industry led i.e. not academia/students
See more details at foumoxford future technologies conference 2010 at Oxford University
Click here for more information about last year’s events and for registration
Contact me at ajit.jaokar at futuretext.com if you want to speak/sponsor at this exclusive conferece or contact peter.holland at conted.ox.ac.uk at Oxford University
This is a cool/fun topic which I have been looking into recently
In a nutshell, this blog describes a way to interface twitter and wordpress using sensor networks using two products called Waspmote and meshlium from libelium htechnologies
The actual mechansim is a bit cryptic so I have tried to make this blog more complete by adding a bit more about the two products and how they interact in case of forest fire detection and that helps understand the twitter/facebook sensor application better.
Waspmote is a modular platform for wireless sensor network which connects to a number of sensor boards. Meshlium is a multiprotocol mesh router which combines Wifi, ZigBee, GPRS, Bluetooth and GPS technologies.
Together, the architecture can be used to form an ad hoc sensor network. For example: In the case of detecting forest fires using wireless sensor networks using waspmote . In this configuration, the sensors connected to Waspmote gather information in a ZigBee wireless network which connects by WiFi to the control panel. 90 Waspmotes were deployed in strategic locations; 4 parameters (Temperature, Relative humidity, Carbon monoxide (CO) and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) were measured each at 5 minute intervals
A similar architecture works in the case of detecting a threshold value and sending a tweet/creating a wordpress blog Interfacing Sensor Networks with Twitter and WordPress . On real applications, each sensor usage has its own alert parameters, and several alerts can be launched over different sensors.
The ‘sniffer’ program reads frames received through a Bluetooth Serial Port or a XBee module and store it on a MySQL database. If a detected value if greater that alert_value, an alarm is processed and a post on twitter is made. Same logic works for a post on wordpress. The relevant section of code is as below and the entire tutorial is at Interfacing Sensor Networks with Twitter and WordPress
The relevant section of code is as below
Comments welcome
I mentioned in a previous post that as part of my holiday, I did a course on the usage of Arduino – Internet of things – Smart Objects – which can be described as a toolkit for smart objects/ internet of things. While I have a research interest in this topic, I did this course for fun 
An Arduino is a single-board microcontroller and a software suite for programming it. The hardware consists of a simple open hardware design for the controller with an Atmel AVR processor and on-board I/O support. The software consists of a standard programming language and the boot loader that runs on the board. Arduino hardware is programmed using a Wiring based language (syntax + libraries), similar to C++ with some simplifications and modifications, and a Processing based IDE. Currently shipping versions can be purchased pre-assembled; hardware design information is available for those who would like to assemble an Arduino by hand. Additionally, Arduino-inspired clones with varying levels of compatibility have been released by third parties.
The course I did was the Arduino beginners course It was largely customised to me and it was great fun! The course was conducted by Dr Andrew Eliasz who is one of the smartest people I have had the pleasure of meeting(and in my work, I do meet some very clued on people). You can see a brief bio and ethos of Andrew at his talk at Europython
Andrew is passionate about UK manufacturing, smart objects and the Internet of things .. and a part of his personal ethos was reflected in the course making it fun
For example besides his personal company FTT , he is also involved in the United Kingdom Robotics Education Foundation and a robotics store called robotiq
It’s a while since I discussed 8051 core instruction sets / pointers / C programs etc etc and I very much recommend that you spend your holiday doing this course if you are interested in science and tech and in making things. I would also recommend it for younger people (maybe 12 +) who have some interest in Smart objects
The potential of Arduino can be seen with this Amarino (i.e. Arduino + Android). As phones get sensors, this could evolve beyond hobbyists.
At some point, Andrew asked me if this could be the next cuckoo clock i.e. the next platform on which a whole industry could evolve and I think so ..
Anyway, I had a great time and highly recommend the course(maybe as a customized version) if you are interested in this space
Dr Thomas Magedanz of Fraunhofer FOKUS is a long term friend and collaborator and I follow Thomas’s work with a lot of interest.
Recently, Thomas made a presentation which asked : IMS is dead, long live EPC?
If you are unfamiliar with the background of this discussion, then some background links HERE and at 3G Amercias
I can summarise Thomas’s thinking as follows
• LTE roll out will require interworking with other existing and emerging wireless access network technologies
• The 3GPP EPC is the new mobile core network suporting seamless mobility, QoS and charging across multiple IP access networks, incl. 3GPP and non-3GPP access
• EPC shares a lot of concepts with IMS, e.g. overlay architecture concept, HSS, PCC, etc.
• EPC maintains seamless IP connectivity and thus supports QoS and FMC/ABC for multiple application domains, including IMS and internet platforms
• IMS provides a lot of needed capabilities in the voice domain and value added multimedia services domain (e.g. RCS, IPTV, etc)
• However, most of the future Multimedia Web Service don´t need IMS anymore!
And some of these ideas were explored further through a test bed and event organised by Fraunhofer FOKUS
The OpenEPC toolkit helps for early prototyping and the
1st FOKUS FUSECO Forum 2010 will discuss the business and Technical Challenges of Seamless Service Provision in Converging Next Generation Fixed and Mobile Networks
I may blog more here depending on interest. Next Generation networks an an converged networks have always been of interest to me and much is happening in this space
Open Gardens is published by futuretext
Recently, the OpenGardens blog was rated amongst the top 10 mobile blogs as per technorati stats.
Rated 8/10 on Blogged.com
