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 ...

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The Beaglebone platform is a great platform for learning Windows Embedded Compact. The platform is based on the Texas Instruments AM335X A8 ARM processor and has fantastic expansion capabilities. In addition to the standard I2C, SPI and serial ports it also has the ability to host “cape’s” expansion boards. Capes are custom peripheral boards that “piggy back” on the Beaglebone or Beaglebone Black base board. Capes come in all sorts’ flavors containing peripherals such as cell modems, LCD displays, accelerometers, FPGA’s, WIFI, RF ID readers and cameras. Here is a listing of more capes. The latest release of the community BSP now contains support for the LCD4 480x272 LCD display. This cape also has a resistive touch screen and 5 UI control buttons also supported in the BSP. One unique feature of a properly designed cape is that it must contain a “personality” EEPROM. This EEPROM is programmed at the factory and contains information such as, a serial number, a model number, how many and what GPIO expan ...

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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 ...

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            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 ! ...

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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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Many of the Board Support Packages (BSPs) for Windows Embedded that I have seen over the years tend to have several drawbacks. Some lack the full complement of drivers, others only come with binary code. Some show little, if any signs, of ever being tested. I can understand the underlying reason for some of these issues but one that is rather irritating is the lack of a consistent coding style. You would think that at least within an individual BSP a single, consistent coding style could be followed. Most times this is not the case. Over the years different developers work on different pieces, each imposing their own coding style (instead of taking the time and effort to learn the existing style and following the existing norm). Also, as more platforms based on the same SOC come on line, we tend to just “add on” adding deeper levels of abstraction, adding more compile time and macro directives. While it can be argued this is what makes modern day programming so powerful, it also adds “code bloat”, slows down ...

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The BeagleBone platform now has a community supported board support package (BSP) on Codeplex.

The BSP currently supports Windows Embedded Compact 7 with a Windows Embedded Compact2013 version in the works.

I2C, SPI, Serial and many other drivers supported. Source code available for download so you can build and customize your own image.