Embedded Development

We're going to do something that is a little whimsical and timely given that it was recently Valentine's day.  First let's discuss the motivation.  Snow White had this evil relative that could call out to her magic mirror by saying "Magic Mirror on the wall" and then ask it any question.  Well ya know what, we can build our own magic mirror that will respond to questions with answers, display a face, or just display some relevant information sans the evil relative bent on feeding poison apples.  Ours will display everything from motivational statements to agenda for the day and news about commute; thus works quite well for a practical Internet Of Things (IOT) project. There's some really cool magic mirrors out there built with raspberry pis. The goal of those projects is to do something that displays a message of encouragement or displays an agenda. For our version, we're going to do a Magic Mirror that does something a little more advanced than just di...

All projects must start somewhere, and most of the time when working with electronics or embedded programming, you're going to have to deal with a controller board of some kind.  Controller boards can range in capabilities, so we usually look for a balance in capacity of processing and cost requirement in terms of resources.  If you want to work with the Internet of Things (IOT), then you're probably looking at making some object that needs logic.  Just as most projects need something to control them with logic and a Central Processing Unit (CPU), it's probably good to establish how to use one of the better controller boards available for the money. The  DragonBoard 410c comes with Android installed.  As cool as that is, it's not so useful for an IOT (Internet Of Things) object that doesn't use touch to interact. Android does not support running a server on it that can be controlled from other computers.  Android is a very "user facing" operati...