M2M
The July 4th and 5th I was in Florence for the event Better Embedded 2014, the first Italian conference dedicated to the embedded world.
I was lucky and honored to be a speaker with a session on the Internet of Things entitled "Internet of Things: protocols war !" The event was attended by many people every year and has kept his expectations and I hope to be able to relive this experience again next year.
Regarding my slides you can find them on SlideShare.
Yesterday, I got my kit with the Intel Galileo board with "Windows for IoT" and of course, as a child who has a new toy in his hands, I started to play ! The easiest thing is to follow the online documentation, accessible from the official Windows On Devices website, which describes step by step how to be "up and running" in a few minutes. My desire to do drove me to make a "mistake" that didn’t allow me to finish the procedure correctly. What happened ? After turning on the Galileo, connecting it to the PC and browsing through the folders (both with a telnet session as "network shared"), I decided to develop the first example for the blinking LED. I opened Visual Studio 2013, selected the C++ project template for Windows for IoT, and finallty started the build without any changes but .... here was the error ! Arduino.h file not found ? How it is possible ? Isn’t it installed with the SDK that we have to download from the Microsoft Connect site ? No, it isn&rsqu ...
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This time the M2Mqtt library has undergone some "important" changes in terms of new features and bug fixing. I have to admit that the improvements are mainly due to the people who use it and report me to add new features or bugs to fix. In addition to several issues reported on CodePlex, this time also Clemens Vasters, PM on Microsoft Azure, submitted some improvements to be applied in the context of SSL / TLS authentication. In fact, as already tweeted several weeks ago, Clemens used my library to run tests on the Reykjavik project (Device Gateway) presented at Build in 2014 and I can only be honored. SSL/TLS authentication In this case, the improvement is closely related to the .Net Framework version, since it is the only version to support what has been added. In particular, the MqttClient class makes available other constructors which can provide the following callbacks : RemoteCertificateValidationCallback : allows the user to execute further checks on the validation of the ...
Although it was announced immediately after the Build 2014 and O'Reilly Solid , the "Windows Developer Program for IoT" was officially started yesterday !
The announcement was made by the program manager, Steve Teixeira, on the Windows blog highlighting the launch of the new Windows Developer for IoT portal and the beginning of the shipping of the evaluation kit consisting of the Intel Galileo board with a specific version of Windows that supports the Arduino APIs and a subset of the Win32 API.
Also, on the Microsoft Open Technologies website it is specified that the SDK will soon be released in part as open source.
For those who were already enrolled in the program, they have to wait for the kit that will arrive at home very soon but can start to take a tour on the new portal that already provides all the information related to SDK with the sample applications !
After I wrote the article about the Node-RED installation with a Web Site in Microsoft Azure, I decided to start another "small" open source project closely related to the "flow-based programming" with Node-RED using the Microsoft Azure services. Starting from Azure SDK for Node.js I am asked myself the following question: why not make available to the Node-RED users all the Microsoft Azure services in their "flows" ? From there I had a new project idea : Azure Nodes ! This project, available on GitHub, adds a bunch of nodes ("azure" colored) to the Node-RED toolbox through which you can interact with the Microsoft Azure services. The current version is still in Beta and it supports only the Service Bus features (queue and topic / subscription) very useful in the Internet of Things, I love. The documentation is available in the Wiki pages related to the project even if the use of the nodes is remarkably simple and intuitive. There are still many (too much ?) debug messages displayed ...
One of the greatest well known tool for the “flow-based programming” that provides a great way for wiring the Internet of Things is Node-RED. It is an open source project hosted on GitHub and developed by Nick O’Leary and Dave Conway-Jones from IBM but it isn’t related to any IBM technology. The main important feature is that Node-RED is completely written in JavaScript and HTML and it is based on server-side framework NodeJS. This means that it can run on any PC where we can install NodeJS and with all available operating systems from Windows to Linux through Mac OS X. This article is not intended to be an introduction or full guide on Node-RED but it will describe how we can run it in the cloud ! Thanks to its NodeJS base and the power of all services provided by Microsoft Azure, you can create an Azure Web Site for a NodeJS application that can host Node-RED so that you can access, control and develop on it from everywhere ! In this way, we don’t need to s ...
The M2Mqtt library is now at 3.4.0.0 release with the new tracing feature in debugging mode. The project has the new Trace class that exposes the static member TraceListener declared as the following delegate : 1: // delegate for writing trace 2: public delegate void WriteTrace(string format, params object args); In this way, it is possibile to chose our preferred tracing mode setting a method to this delegate. Furthermore, it is possibile to set the tracing level using thet static member TraceLevel with the following possible values : 1: /// <summary> 2: /// Tracing levels 3: /// </summary> 4: public enum TraceLevel 5: { 6: Error = 0x01, 7: Warning = 0x02, 8: Information = 0x04, 9: Verbose = 0x0F, 10: Frame = 0x10 11: } A simple example of tracing usage could be the following : 1: Trace.TraceLevel = MqttUtility.TraceLevel.Verbose | MqttUtility.TraceLevel.Frame; 2: Trace.T ...
In the last days, I saw some interesting things around the future of .Net Micro Framework … First, a post in the GHI Electronics community forum that speaks about the 2014 plan for .Net Gadgeteer. Gary, GHI employee, says : We have some very exciting news to share with you today. First of all, we have been communicating your feedback to Microsoft and they have been very responsive. We can't share all the details yet but we can tell you that you will be very happy with what Microsoft will announce very soon. There are two main points about it : GHI reported to Microsoft all feedbacks by .Net Micro Framework and Gadgeteer users and I think with the objective to improve the framework; There are more details and news that Microsoft will announce very soon, so in the next days (week ? months ?) we will have new official information about .Net Micro Framework future; Of course … the above are great points ! ...
This year, I will have the great pleasure and honor of being speaker at the only one educational Italian conference on embedded world, Better Embedded 2014, which will take place on 4 and 5 July in Florence at the Hotel Londra.
My session will be focused on the Internet of Things with a look at "war" between the main protocols used for it, such as HTTP (REST), AMQP, MQTT and CoAP (I'll add XMPP and DDS as soon as possibile after deep into them). The comparison between them will be literally on the field, so no more an introduction to the protocols themselves but more battles on different fields in which each protocol will try to get the better on the others.
There will be a winner ? To find out, you just need to subscribe to the event and come to follow my session !
Friday, June 6th IoT@Work event was held in Rome at the Microsoft headquarters and it was organized by the DomusDotNet community and the online TinyCLR.it community (of which I am member). Thanks to the hospitality of Massimo Bonanni and all the guys in the community, we spent an entire day dedicated to the Internet of Things. In the morning, Mirco Vanini started showing us what Internet of Things is and what it is not with a series of real use cases and future projections of this new business. The next session saw myself as the lead in tackling a technical point of view of main protocols that are used in the IoT, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The morning sessions were completed by Lorenzo Maiorfi who spoke of "flow-programming", its application in the IoT and two main tools that can be used for this purpose: NodeRed and Orleans. ...
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