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Archive for category Coding Outside The Box

The revolution will be printed

Jan 25

Posted by PhilWheat in Coding Outside The Box, Software/Tech | No Comments

This past week, for me the big news in consumer electronics wasn’t what you probably thought.  The big names all were all talking mobility of one fashion or another, but one of the companies that can make a claim to bringing printers into the home is now applying that same talent to 3d Printers.  Yep, that’s right HP is now working with Stratasys to bring 3d printing to a much wider array of people.  This has huge potential for localsourcing manufacturing and changing how economics work in quite a number of markets.

http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/357-Stratasys-and-HP-join-forces-to-make-3D-printers.html

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Thinking

Jan 20

Posted by PhilWheat in Coding Outside The Box, Quote | No Comments

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.

— J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999)

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Smart for Who? Connected Devices and You SxSW Interactive Session

Sep 2

Posted by PhilWheat in Architecture, Coding Outside The Box, Events | No Comments

In the spirit of completeness, I wanted to make a few comments about my other session I submitted for SxSWi- “Smart for Who?”  This session really came out of looking around my office and working spaces and really noting not only how connected all those “impulse electronics” and “entertainment devices” have become, but how little most people consider what their full capabilities and purposes are.  As we’ve seen in the history of PC’s the best capabilities have come with networking and larger connectivity between systems, but that increase has also been paced by an increase in vulnerability and exposure to those connections being done with malice.

So as we connect more and more devices that we use every day not only to each other, but to the internet at large, we need to be aware of what’s going on between those.  PVR’s often report back not just what shows you watched, but how many times you rewound that halftime commercial or act.  The old days of “tracing a call” have become a Hollywood gimmick – the number is available even before the connection is made, and the call itself can be real time transcribed to text.  Your printer is network connected, and most embed unique numbers in ever item printed, your security system knows when you’re home and when you’re gone.  And they’re all able to talk with each other.

This session will be about how much control we have over this – how much is black helicopters and how much is actual productivity enhancement and personal customization that I WANT to be done.  Do I want my bedside alarm clock to check my schedule and know that it doesn’t have to wake me quite so early tomorrow morning because my first meeting got cancelled overnight?  Do I want the world to know I’ve put my house on power save mode because I’m going to be in Chicago for a couple of days?  The Yin and Yang of connectivity is that Identity, Privacy, and Security are key – and we’re having to find new ways of making those concepts easy enough that you don’t have to read another 300 page manual just to use your new remote control or VOIP phone!

If this sounds like something you would be interesting in hearing about, either at SxSWi or in the community after SxSW – please “Thumbs Up” my session either above on the link or below!

Vote for my PanelPicker idea!

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Your Brain in the Cloud SxSW Interactive Session.

Aug 31

Posted by PhilWheat in Architecture, Coding Outside The Box, Events | No Comments

I’ve had a couple of people ask me (and a couple of people not ask, but given their own spin on the title) and so I thought I’d do a bit more commentary on my “Brain” session submission.

From the site (“Your Brain in the Cloud”), you’ll see the description as:

Workflows, Agents, Bots… Not only is our data going into the Net but our decision making processes as well. What constitutes “Me” and how carefully should we consider how much of that resides outside of my own skull? Who owns or has access to that part of us outside ourselves?

So what does this mean?  Well when I first started thinking and talking about this, “Bookworm, Run”, “True Names”, and “A World out of Time” (Peerssa for the state) were some of the works that had already been thinking about what happens when we begin not just using computers, but embedding our own decision making processes into them and then turning over those “mundane” activities to be freed up for more lofty (or just more fun) activities.

Well, as the years went on and many people continued thinking about it, most of the “Serious” work was focused on either higher FPS’s, achieving the holy grail of the Memex, or embedding the decision making processes of Corporations and legal entities into the programs and systems of the machines.  But Moore’s Law marches on and what used to be in the reach of only governments and multi-nationals are now the playground of everyday users, and embedding yourself in various systems comes along with that. 

What I hope to talk about is how this initiative/push/desire – whatever you want to call it – will affect us.  Don’t think you’re part of it?  Have you ever run a tweetbot?  Set up an email rule?  Configured your phone to allow some people and not others at different times of the day?  Used a Bot in an online game?  These are all ways that people today are putting parts of themselves into the cloud without even realizing it! 

So what I hope to do is get us all thinking about what we do outsource of our internal selves, what makes sense to push up and to think about what happens if that repository should be compromised.  While we all want the happy part of “True Names” (“My kernel is out there in the System. Every time I’m there, I transfer a little more of myself.") we also need to be aware of Stross and his vision of multiple copies of self aware selves and how the very idea of identity can be challenged by this. 

And my final plea – if all this sounds interesting, please “Thumbs up” my session either directly or by the link below. 

Vote for my PanelPicker idea!

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Private Cloud Architecture to be discussed at Worldwide Partner Conference in July

Jun 25

Posted by PhilWheat in Architecture, Coding Outside The Box, Events | No Comments

It’s been up a couple of days, but I just saw a tweet fly past about it.  If you check out session CI011 on the session track (https://www.mspartnerconference.com/public/sessionlist.aspx?keyword=CI011) you’ll see that there’s some great information about the Infrastructure strategy behind Microsoft’s cloud computing.  We expected to see a good bit about that, but there’s also a nice little spot in the end of the session description – “and the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit for Enterprises (available Q4 CY 2009) that enables building the foundation for a Private cloud.”

Hmmm, I need to try a lot harder to get to the conference – it isn’t that far away!

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Michael’s Networking Toolkit for Micro Framework

Jun 25

Posted by PhilWheat in Coding Outside The Box, Software/Tech | No Comments

While I’m looking at my Micro Framework notes, I wanted to push this one out as well.  over at CodePlex (http://mftoolkit.codeplex.com) you can find Michael’s toolkit for networking Micro Framework boards.  To get your interest, let me just quote directly from the latest release notes:

  • Web server improvments, fixed several bugs and added Cookie and Mime (POST) support
  • NtpClient initial version
  • uALFAT initial version
  • fixed several bugs in Dns library

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    Oh, did I mention there’s XBee support in there too?  OK, I’ll stop typing because you’ve already clicked over and are downloading the toolkit!

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    Why pay $300 for a programmable Remote Control when you can make one yourself?

    Jun 25

    Posted by PhilWheat in Coding Outside The Box | No Comments

    Pavel sent this to me a while ago, but I haven’t been keeping up.  You know those super expensive universal all in one programmable remotes?   Well he put together one all on his own, the great part is that he can can keep adding to it or tie it into other systems to work.  On his post below he shows how to take a simple IR LED and a Micro Framework board and create his own multisystem IR remote.  But once you do that, you’ve got the basis for LOTS of other stuff – add an RF transceiver and you’ve got a bridge/extender.  Add an IR photocell and you’ve got a learning remote.  Take advantage of the networking capability, and you’ve got a house controller that doesn’t have to be hard wired in any particular location…

    Oh, and did I mention that Servos work off the same concept of pulse modulation?  No, I don’t have to, you’ve already figured that out!

    http://bansky.net/blog/2009/04/microframework-device-controlled-via-tv-remote/

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    Smart Environments/Green IT

    Jun 16

    Posted by PhilWheat in Coding Outside The Box | No Comments

    Just uploaded the deck I used today at the Green IT sessions here in Austin – it’s a slightly modified version of my Nerd Night presentation that I had neglected to push up.  I’ll use this post as a placeholder for any comments or discussions as well.

    Deck at Smart Environments

    More links and posts on the Coding Outside the Box series coming up, but for right now you can follow the sensor tweets at www.twitter.com/philtweetlab.

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    The Embedded Processor Components (How, Pt 2)

    Jun 8

    Posted by PhilWheat in Coding Outside The Box | No Comments

    This has been a long post in arriving.  Why?  I keep finding new stuff to throw into the project.  I’ll do some of the major items right now, but there will be more as we go along – there’s a LOT going on in the embedded and low power processor and sensor spaces.

    Let’s start with the processors:

    This is my SJJ Micro Framework board (I’ve stuck the breadboard on top.)  I’ll be using this for where I need a small, low powered remote processing unit that has access to an Ethernet cable (very handy feature that last one.) 

    BlogHardware 056

    Next is my GHI USBizi board – again, Micro Framework, but smaller and with more serial ports.  This is useful for even lower power situations, and those with the need for local storage and USB Host capabilities.  Note no Ethernet onboard, but I’ve got some ways around that a bit further down.

    BlogHardware 084

    And a base Arduino (with prototype shield.)  Useful for quick and cheap, but fewer control lines and memory/storage size.  It is worth a note that the Arduino Mega is out and answers a number of these concerns. 

    BlogHardware 081

    And (not quite stand alone but even easier to prototype with) my old V1 Phidgets 8/8/8 controller.  Requires at least a USB connection to a PC so it’s not for remote usage, but it’s really easy to put together various configurations, has a LOAD of great sample code, exposes functionality as a web service, and has Robotics Studio support for features.  Oh, and the wiring is keyed for the analog I/O so I don’t fry all my sensors when I get distracted and forget to make SURE that everything’s hooked up right.  (Yes, I tend to multitask far too often.)

     BlogHardware 088

    A number of XBee radios – not the processors themselves, but allowing me to do wireless serial over some nice distances.  Handling point to point communications right out of the box, this nice little radio is fairly inexpensive, pretty good with power, and it has a good many tricks up it’s sleeve (including star network and mesh networking configurations.)  Below I show the radio itself and one of the several breakout boards that are used to talk with the radio both from the embedded controllers above and my main controller computer.

    BlogHardware 044

    The Sparkfun weather board.  This is a prototype from Sparkfun that gathers up environmental data and reports on it in a text format through a serial interface at a rate of 1Hz.  I’m throwing this in on the controller section because it really is stand alone – the processing happens locally and then opens up that data for remote usage.  I could even rewrite the firmware for different local functionality (but I probably won’t.)

    BlogHardware 079

     

    Next time – OK, so you’ve got a bunch of procs floating around – what are you going to use them for?

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    The Online Component (How, Pt 1)

    May 14

    Posted by PhilWheat in Coding Outside The Box | No Comments

    This is the part most people that read blogs see.  Why?  Well, it’s “The air that we breathe” – if you didn’t already have an interest in this space then you probably wouldn’t be reading this.  (Isn’t circular justification fun?) 

    Anyway, the online components that I’m starting with are going to be:

    Twitter:

    If you don’t know what this is – you’ve probably not been paying attention to the Social Computing Scene (or online at all for that matter.)  Twitter is the current darling of the Hyper Connected crowd and as I write this has just really hit mainstream.

    Twitter is a basic messaging system, the behavior of which tracks all the way back to mainframe chat systems written in COBOL and Assembly in the 60’s.  (Status) Messages are limited to 140 characters and can be entered from the twitter web site, SMS messaging, or through the Twitter web API that has been published.  Messages are highly unstructured, though unofficial structures are formed, refined and abandoned in almost real time.  One of the major features of Twitter is that all messages have a permalink and can be referenced by anyone.  It has been noted that a quick twitter app is in danger of supplanting “Hello World” as a demo/quick intro program.

    Windows Azure:

    This is the foundation of the Azure cloud platform, basically the compute and storage layer, plus the group of development tools to make it simple to work with the capabilities (and develop offline until you’re ready to deploy.)  Azure is basically a way to have control over code that can be executed remotely without worrying about setting up hardware or provisioning systems.  It has been designed to be a platform where code of a wide variety can be executed securely and without the need for system level maintenance and monitoring.  I’ll be using this to provide both web interfaces, always on services, and the ability to store data remotely to handle situations where connectivity with my offline components may be intermittent or bandwidth constrained. 

    Microsoft .Net Services:

    This is another set of online services that builds upon the Azure capabilities, providing pre-built features that are commonly needed.  .Net Services currently provides capabilities around Access Control, Internet Service Bus, and Workflow Services.  These are resources that can be used either by themselves, with Azure hosted code, or with local code to make development quicker and simplify those nasty code maintenance costs.  I’ll be using all of these component, starting with the Internet Services Bus and then expanding out through the Workflow Services for state management and ending up with a foray into security.

    Live Services:

    Live Services are a set of services that many people are already using and familiar with through such offerings as Live Messenger, Live Mesh, LiveID and the like.  I’ll be focusing here on some of the Live Mesh features, but spreading out through the rest for capabilities such as geospatial, search, presence and other functionality to take advantage of.

    Note this isn’t a comprehensive list.  As this project is a work in progress, I’m sure I’ll tie some other components in, and may change my mind on some of the ones listed above.  There’s a lot going on in the Online space and things change faster than I can keep up, so I’m assuming I’ll get notified somewhere along the way about something really cool that I’ll need to add which will expand or take the place of something I’ve listed above.

    Next – The offline component.

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