thebaldgeek

One thing you need for just about every project is power.
Different voltages, different currents.
It can all get a bit messy. I have known about using computer power supplies as said source of said power, but these new(ish) boards make it a lot simpler.

I really really like this new version and will probably pick up two of them once they become available.

http://dangerousprototypes.com/2014/11/10/building-a-better-breakout-board-for-atx-psus/

Its important to note that the link at the bottom is for the old version, not this new USB version, so the price and features are very different.
(Like I said, I have held off getting one because I really wanted USB which the new one has two of).

SBC.
Single Board Computer.
I love them…They are the perfect example of a solution looking for a problem for me…. I love solutions almost as much as I love problems.
Anyway, I have a few single board computers, they are in my garage. Doing nothing….Well, actually, they are waiting for me to have a problem that they can solve.

What in the world am I talking about?

Small cheap computers. They usually run Linux. Are not super friendly and really dont do anything.
They are too small and two under powered to do much of anything. But they are so cute and so cheap that most geeks own at least one.

The crazy thing is that the most popular (called, of all things, a Rasberry Pi) has sold millions.
Thats a lot of problems. Or solutions. Im not really sure which.

Anyway, they have a network port (or not in some versions), a video port (or not in some versions), an SD card for storage (in most cases) and (sometimes) some input and output ports that can be hooked to other things.

I have one Pi at work and one at home. Neither are powered up, but I got an idea last week for the Pi at home.
(Will blog about that if I get around to doing it).
I had another one called a BeagleBoneBlack. It was like a Pi on steroids. Bigger, faster, more powerful. Only it was smaller. I sold it to a guy at work that wants to make it his home brew beer controller.

Anyway the point of this blog is to say this; there is a new version of the Beagle coming.
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2014/11/07/breaking-news-beagleboard-x15/

Im pretty excited for it as it will mean harder problems can be solved with it.
No news yet on its price, but I suspect it will be 50 bucks or less. (To keep it inline with with its brothers).

So. If you are in the hunt for an SBC, perhaps this new version will fit the bill?

EDIT. Not a day or more latter and yet another update to the Pi itself.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2380390/freshly-harvested-raspberry-pi-model-a-hits-stores

Note, the model A Pi does not have an Ethernet port. To me this totally kills it. Its a computer with no (as in zero) out of the box connectivity.
Might be Ok to run a microwave oven or something, but as for it actually being useful, not so much.
Sure, the price is hard to beat. Sure there might be the odd problem it could be a solution for…. but for me, not so much.

What I am looking for is a computer that is under 50 bucks and has wifi, ethernet and bluetooth. Now that would a very cool solution that I have many problems it could solve.

One of the things that an Internet of ‘things’ is going to generate is a huge amount of data.
If every home in our suburb’s thermostat was somehow linked to the Internet and a single value, once every 15 minutes was stored in a database, you would have a few things. You would have a lot of data. 1440 data points a day per house for starters….
Data storage is cheap, so lets forget that aspect.

Ok, so you have the data. Now what?

This is the challenge facing IoT. Making sense of large data sets.
Not just making ‘sense’ (what exactly does that mean to a computer?), but trolling through the data and coming up with something that will improve the quality of life of someone or something as a result.

In English?

Ok. That sort of data (and I just made the example up on the fly) can provide all sorts of helpful insight to weather (people feel cold, so they turn the heat up – oh, wait, we are in SoCal, they are ‘never’ cold) for example. So you would be able to tell the mood of the place.
Power. By looking at all the data over time, you could start to easily tell when the bulk of the suburb comes home and turns on the AC, thus putting a load on the electrical grid supplying that area.
Both those are reactive…..

What if you looked at the data, for say, a year. Or two.
Just had a computer sit there with some clever math and looked at trends and stored those trends and matched the daily and weekly trends. That same computer ran checks on itself, and made sure that the trends it saw were repeatable.
Now, with some certainty, the computer can now predict.

AI. Artificial Intelligence.

Pie in the sky?
Not so much – you probably use it every single day. Many times a day.
Huh?
Google search.

Every time you click on a link that you think matches best the search term you enter into Google (or Bing, or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo), you reward the AI that Google has built.
Billions of times a day, the math formula is rewarded or punished.
It learns.
If offers better search results.
The humans are happy.

Now read this;
http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/11/artificial-intelligence-summoning-the-demon.html

I have more to say on this topic at another time.

I have two Kickstarter projects due in the next two months, and I am honestly excited about both……
Well, let me re-phrase that, I am trying NOT to get too excited about both.

The first one that should arrive is a sleep tracker.
I will of course talk more about it when it comes, but most of you that know me know that I have really odd and variable sleep cycles. For years its been this way. Moving to the States has just made it more noticeable as I am not in a basement by myself, but how I sleep now impacts more people.
Anyway, its a small device that clips to my pillow and sends moment data to a monitor on the bedside table.
Could be interesting.

The other is the one I have been looking forward to for way too long.
Backed it like, April or May this year… Its a band that you wear around your wrist and it tracks not just heart rate, but also activity.
Big deal you say (if you have been keeping up with wearable tech), there have been a squillion of these things out for a long time.
Yes and no.
Yes, there have been many released, no, none of them do what Atlas promise….. They claim that they can look at the way the band is moving on your wrist and work out what the exercise you’re currently doing.
This is a pretty big deal.

Here is a video of a demo they gave last month;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_889yeuLNc

When I was working out in the gym before Australia, it would have been really useful keeping track automatically of what I was doing and how many reps.
I’m still trying to do the push ups and pull ups every hour and am pretty tired of logging each hours reps, so this should totally remove that extra step.
As the guy states in the video, its all about automation. Just wear the band and forget it.
That’s the best tech right there.