Monday, January 18, 2016

Commercially available things !

There are many standards and proprietary solutions used for connecting things to each other or to the cloud: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Active RFID, loWPAN, EtherCAT, NFC, RFID to name a few. Among these technologies, Wi-Fi has been the most successful. It has become a ubiquitous standard of connectivity and is used in the home, enterprise, schools, hospitals, airports etc. 

In this post, we will see some existing commercial things that we can use right now. These include 
  • Smart home devices,  
  • Medical devices, 
  • Wearables, and 
  • All kinds of gadgets.  
All of these devices connect to your Android phone using either WiFi or Bluetooth, pacifically Bluetooth low energy (BLE), sometimes know as Bluetooth smart.
 
One of the most well-known internet of things (IoT) is the Phillips Hue Lighting System. talk to both Android Phone and Android wear watch.
 
Let's go take a look at some existing devices. Kaptur band this is a simple wrist band, that essentially consist of a microphone sensor, some memory, and a Bluetooth radio. It sits and records in a loop, 60 seconds, and whenever you tap it, it captures that 60 seconds, and sends it to your device.  
Another well-known device is the Nest thermostat, which as I believe everybody know, is also owned by Google. They also make a smoke detector, both of which connect up via WiFi, and talk to your Android phone.  

One of the most well-known companies in the home automation market is a company called SmartThings. They make a number of devices that allow you to connect up to your phone. They build locks, sensors, so you can tell when doors are opened or closed, cameras, speakers, and so forth.
 
Talking about the internet of things would be completely empty if we didn't talk about Android wear. The two most prominent devices right now for Android wear are the Moto 360 and the LG G watch.  There's also the Pebble watch. It's not a specific product that's just for Android, but it does have a very nice SDK, and it actually has some physical buttons on it, so you can build apps that do a variety of things with the user punching the buttons on the device. Then, using your Android phone to either control your phone or to use your phone then via WiFi to control other devices.
 
Lumo Lift is a small device to track your activity and calories burned, as well as improve your posture. It is essentially an accelerometer, and you can see here it goes on the shirt/bra by holding it with a magnet. Essentially, you just sit up straight, double-tap it, and then if you ever start to slump, it'll buzz, vibrate and remind you to sit up straight again.  

In terms of wearables and fineness, one of the most popular's called Fitbit. Fitbit, essentially, will tell you how many steps you've taken, route your map, and do all of that while you just wear it around everyday, and it'll help you manage your weight, eat better, sleep better, and so forth.
 
One of the early entries in the internet of things was a company called Withings. They make everything from activity tracker to a bathroom scales, to this fashionable Activite steel white watch and activity tracker. They also make a pulse oximeter, so that you can tell how much oxygen is in your blood while you're exercising, and even a home camera.  

The internet of things goes everywhere, including into your peaceful moments. The muse, the brain sensing headband monitors your brain waves, and allows you to determine when you brain is actually calm. There's also an SDK that you can use to experiment with using your brain waves to control other things.  

TI Sensor Tag. The reason it's great is because it's $25, and it contains all of these things, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, pressure sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer. That works on one CR2032 battery, and it's very, very easy to talk to it with Bluetooth. And also you can do your Android phone or Android tablet to talk to a Bluetooth device. This is a easy way to get started, so that you can understand how to build a Bluetooth app. 

Then, there's this great product that's a internet of things developer kit called WunderBar. It's from Germany from a company called Relayer.  We'll talk to the Relayer master module via WiFi, and it will talk to the different individual modules via Bluetooth.

Then, we're going to go even further, and build a simple intelligent device that you can mount at your door, so that when somebody rings the doorbell, you can pick up your phone and snap a picture of who's there, so you can see who's at the door. For that, we're going to use the Tessel platform. Tessel's very interesting. It's a microcontroller that runs JavaScript. It uses no JS, has WiFi, it's got four connectors. Tessel's very unique in it, all of the components are only on one side. You can always tell when you've got things plugged in correctly with the Tessel, because it can only go in one direction. With components on one side, if you flip it over, all you see are the backs of all the boards. You can plug pretty much any component into any one of those things, and you can power the Tessel with via USB or with a battery. It's very, very easy to program using JavaScript.

Lot more are available or existing which can be used as a solution in demanding market.



Where to find new Internet of Things (IoT) Devices ?

Hey folks,

If you are a crazy and passionate gigs for exploring Internet of Things (IoT) technology invention and gadget availability around. Also very fond to know about latest news, articles, pricing and purpose for various available sensors and IoT based gadgets details.

 I recommend to checkout below links, will help on making decision and pursuing further:
  1. http://iotlist.co/
  2. http://www.iotnewsnetwork.com/
  3. https://www.kickstarter.com/
  4. https://www.indiegogo.com/
Thank You!

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Custom ROM: CM and MIUI - High Level Overview.

Hello Readers,

Cheers and best wishes for 2016 :-)

With this post you'll grasp better knowledge and understanding about CyanogenMod (CM) and MIUI
(which stands for Mi User Interface and pronounced "Me You I", a play on the common abbreviation of the words user interface as UI). 

Lets discuss first, what exactly the purpose to know about them?

There are list of custom ROM available in market as an open source. CM and MIUI are most popular which can be used on almost any phone brand and has support for custom ROMs. Both are an open source operating system for smartphones and tablet computers, based on the Android mobile platform. Developed as free and open source software based on the official releases of Android by Google, with added original and third-party code. Both can be used as firmware for smartphones and tablet computers based on the free software Android OS. It is similar to installing any OS on a PC.

If you love to play with technology and interested to buy a new Android based phone or flashing an existing phone with one of these ROMs or UIs theme, this article will help you to make decision and also to pick one among these two MIUI and CM.

Here is a short background comparison of the two:
  • MIUI, developed by Xiaomi Tech whereas CM is developed by CyanogenMod Open-Source Community as free and open source software based on the official releases of Android by Google, with added original and third-party code. It is based on a rolling release development model and quite similar to stock Android.
  • The source model of MIUI is an open source with closed source component  whereas CM is an open source. 
  • Both ROMs have version history with the date of their launching and criticism/controversies involved time-to-time , the recent version of MIUI is MIUI v7 and CM is CM v13.  
  • Interesting to know that the original MIUI ROMs were based on Android 2.2.x Froyo and CM v6 sources. Xiaomi added a number of apps to enhance the basic framework; those include Notes, Backup, Music, and Gallery. Other than supporting own brand Xiaomi also offers MIUI to be flashed on other smartphone brands such as Samsung, Sony, HTC, LG, One Plus and Nexus. On the other side, Cyanogen OS 12, a variant of CM v12 for the OnePlus One and Yu Yureka was released in April 2015. Yu Yuphoria got Cyanogen OS 12 out-of-the-box when it was launched in May 2015. Cyanogen commercially develops operating systems pre-installed on some devices (OnePlus One, YU Yureka, YU Yuphoria, Andromax Q, Lenovo ZUK Z1, Wileyfox Swift, Wileyfox Storm) based upon the CM source code.
  • MIUI do have regional restriction on package manager side. It doesn't ship Google Play Services in Mainland China. Global versions of MIUI are been certified by Google. Also during the development of MIUI v4, Xiaomi started to remove Google services from their ROMs in order to build and monopolize its own environment of Xiaomi, including cloud services, paid themes and games (featuring MiCredit currency). Later, during development of MIUI v5, nearly all Google services had been removed from the Chinese versions.
On performance perspective,  
  • Features supported by CM include native theming support, FLAC audio codec support, a large Access Point Name list, an OpenVPN client, an enhanced reboot menu, support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB tethering, CPU overclocking and other performance enhancements, soft buttons and other "tablet tweaks", toggles in the notification pull-down (such as wi-fi, Bluetooth and GPS), app permissions management, as well as other interface enhancements. CM does not contain spyware or bloatware. In many cases, CM may increase performance and reliability compared with official firmware releases.
  • MIUI, the interface is similar to and competes with iOS's UI and Samsung's TouchWiz UI. MIUI has really taken the android community apart by the really amazing features that the ROM is providing to its end users. It features a heavily-modified user interface that does away with the Android app drawer and has drawn comparisons with Apple’s iOS.  IT features additional functionality that is not found in the stock Android applications which include toggles on the notification pull down, new music, gallery, and camera apps, and an altered phone dialer that displays matching contacts as a user enters a number. The modified operating system has been criticized to be similar to the Apple’s iOS but that does not really matter for the end users as long as they are enjoying using it. 
 
 
Source: http://en.miui.com/data/attachment/forum/201410/05/202651rxdbgqd8b8dlqza2.jpg.thumb.jpg

Experts take on as conclusion: pick MIUI for user-friendly features and intuitiveness; go for CM if you want to control every aspect or built-in features of your phone and want more controls with high stability; and go for stock Android for performance, stability and simplicity. Also you can find experienced user view over here