The Embedded Angle

For some time I'm following the Circuit Dojo channel . I'm sure the guy (Jared Wolff) knows what he's talking about since he has a web store with embedded electronics products of his own making (including a tiny nRF9160 based circuit board).  In recent times he seemingly specialized the channel to represent the theme of the Zephyr RTOS by organizing live streams under the umbrella ZEPHYR: 101 . These might be very helpful for those new to Zephyr as whole because he provides essential (sometimes basic, sometimes more advanced) information on a specific subject.  For instance, the latest video is dedicated to the particular way one can configure their Zephyr based application to work with their custom tinkered board. In the general case a vanilla Zephyr should work but as a specific example it is said that the nRF916x type of boards would require the nRF Connect SDK . With that example he says that any of the dependencies of the custom board must be satisfied prior to wor

 This is something like an announcement ...  Today I renamed the blog (from wildraspy to embeddedanble ) because the world of IoT grew up. A lot. And my interests with it. So in terms of devices what else can be covered here? Here is a list of possibilities: Raspberry Pi (of course!)  ESP32 based devices like: M5Stack family (like the Cores and the Sticks, ...) Arduino family Nordic Semiconductor family (like the Thingies and Development Kits) In terms of programming languages involved in the embedded development the list usually includes (without being limited to): C/C++ (duh!) MicroPython Java Rust Both list can easily be extended but only time will show how.

To be honest and straightforward I expected more from a book with title like Raspberry Pi Super Cluster . The author Andrew K. Denis has a very clear vision on the subject (like in his previous book Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino , which I liked a lot) . He's done his best to deliver an exhaustive set-up while being concise at the same time, but it seems to me, this clearly is the wrong format for a book on the given topic. Stack Pis for parallel power Now having this book at hand, I finally got the chance to answer many of the questions I had about clustering, and how it can be applied to a set of Raspberry Pis. The first impression is that it is very well structured and gradual. Lets see, the first two chapters are short introductions to parallel computing (background history and the contemporary systems) and the initial set-up respectively. They're short and to the point. And that's the way it should be - it is presumed that if you're going paralle

This topic being approached exhaustively may become vast and is fit for at least a book. I'll have to keep it short and concise here, so I'll stick to a few key points: Java Runtime vs JDK - actually there is no discussion here - if you you intend to run programming projects you need the development kit, period. (It contains the runtime anyway.) Java 7  vs Java 8 (JDKs) - this could require some debate. Java 7 is the mature and default option to go with. Having around two years in production, it is the safer choice. Java 8 has been just released, and its shortcomings are still unknown. On the other hand Java 8 has numerous improvements to the language, and Oracle wouldn't approve it for release if it wasn't quite well tested. Another facet to be considered is that Java 7 is well presented in the repositories, while currently Java 8 have to be downloaded, installed and maintained (the regular updates - mostly for security reasons) all manually. Source examples - ne

Raspbian with PostgreSQL it is quite easy actually. Just like on Ubuntu/Linux Mint/... (Replace the ellipsis with any derivative of Debian or Ubuntu.) The hardest part is to decide which version of the database server to employ. On this page the full set of options for retrieving the server is given with the necessary amount of detail.     "Should I get it?" Actually, since PostgreSQL (together with MySQL) is one of the most popular open source databases within the Linux realm, some distributions choose to deliver it pre-installed on their releases. If you are not sure, if you need to get the server at all, this simple command can answer that question: $ ps aux | grep postgers It will search through the processes running on your system and filter them to leave only those bound to PostgreSQL. It is possible that the server is present on the system, but it is not running at the moment. In that case it is enough to see if its configurations are in place. The plac

The wait is over. The thoughtful and slim costume for the Raspberry Pi called SweetBox finally arrived in my mail box and what can I say ... The guys managed to pull it through. This is one of the successful projects in the large basket of Kickstarter . The pack included the carefully designed case, three heat sinks and a camera holder.  Well enough with the words and enter the pictures ... So with this versatile set-up it seems the only feature left out is ... say water resistance for instance.