Arduino 6LoWPAN Internet Gateway for the Common Hacker
I’ve been kind of obsessed with the Internet of Things (IoT) lately. For me, it inspires geeky, gleeful visions of an environment of integrated “things”, harmoniously working together to help us live, work, and play. If you can address it, you can control it, and that’s why I think everything needs an IP. 6LoWPAN is essential to IoT because 6LoWPAN makes IP ubiquitous. IPv6 has enough capacity to address every atom in the universe so even your mom can have an IP. Second, its emphasis on low power implementation makes it suitable for ultra-low power microcontrollers, which happen to be an obsession of mine. In this post, I lay out an idea for a project to bring 6LoWPAN internet connectivity to the common hacker, using the control of a window AC unit as a vehicle. Continue reading →
Three Spheres of Embedded Sensing Design
Deploying an embedded sensing product often requires development of three major components in order for it to be useful. Hardware in concert with firmware collects data, and perhaps performs early analysis or filtering on the node itself. Ultimately, a desktop software component is needed to make sense of the data, and to present it in an approachable way. Here’s a more in-depth look at the three spheres of embedded sensing design:
