The Missing Sync?

Posted on by Cas Hoefman

Besides our LabStrip project this past year we have been working on several project related to health data.

We have been using services like FitBit, RunKeeper, Withings and others to track all kind of health data.

We noticed that when using these different services there are ways to sync data between the services but also noticed that several data elements are not being synced. So we decided to build our own sync service to resolve these “Missing Syncs”

Currently the service is in Alpha stage and in the next week or so we will make available the first of 4 missing syncs at The Missing Sync.

Rapid Prototyping with Legos®

Posted on by Brian Noland

It seems like every day we read about the latest and greatest 3D printer that is hitting the “makersphere.”  Kickstarter had 25 3D-printer-related projects listed at the date this blog was written, many that promise to put a 3D printer in your hands for under $500!  With the advent of cheap and ubiquitous 3D printers, the tendency of makers out there is to jump to 3D printed models first.  However, much time and plastic can be wasted in the earliest stages trying to learn the rules of a design as the designer cycles through print after print.  I believe that Legos® can often times fill the gap between your initial ideas and those first higher-resolution models (eg. 3D-printed, or SLA models).

 

You remember Legos® right?  Nearly every kid had a set (or 20 sets like me).  When I was a kid, I was deep into space Legos®.  Several Christmases and birthdays combined left me with quite the collection when I finally outgrew them.  Luckily, when I moved out to go to college, my parents kept my old bins of space Legos® so that I might pass them onto my own kids.  In fact, that very thing happened.  My parents gave me back my bins of Legos® and they were passed onto my kids, who still play with them years later.

 

Fast forward to the Summer of 2011, when I decided to act upon an idea that I had for converting the iPhone into a mobile laboratory.  I was just hearing about the renaissance in 3D printing and was about to invest in a printer or hire contract printing companies in order to realize some of my design ideas.  Then it clicked.  Those bins of Legos® surfaced in my mind and it was clear that the place to start fleshing out my first meter was with a Lego® scaffold.  I began playing around with various basic designs and arrived at one that allowed me to ask several design questions at once.  This became the launching point for a design effort that took several months to arrive at a great industrial design with the help from the highly creative folks at Speck Design of Palo Alto.

Legos® have several attributes that I believe make them a powerful early rapid prototyping platform:

    • inexpensive
    • accessible
    • modular
    • instantly recyclable
    • cloneable designs
    • mechanical features (swivels, hinges, wheels, pulleys, levers, etc.)
    • more expensive kits offer essentially robotic functionality (Lego® Mindstorms)

If you cant find exactly the piece you need, it is not terribly expensive to cut existing pieces or glue additional functionality to existing pieces to augment their native capabilities.  One major downside is that Legos® have a rather low resolution for design features.  However, if you need finer detail, consider building a scaled model with Legos®.

 

I was too quick to deem myself clever in making use of Legos® in design as many others had already beaten me to the punch.  The very large and well known design firm IDEO has mentioned their use of Legos in their design process in several places.  Dr Craig Lawrence, an IDEO engineer, said in an Ask Magazine feature on IDEO:

 “One of my favorite tools for rapid prototyping is Lego®. These ubiquitous children’s toys are a great way to prototype fairly complex mechanisms. During the development of a medical instrument, an IDEO team used Legos to prototype several concepts for a mechanism to convert continuous rotary motion into reciprocating linear motion. These prototypes clearly could not be used for surgery, but they are great for allowing an engineer to visualize a concept and work through some of the complex details rapidly.”

 There is also a link on the OpenIDEO website which makes specific mention of Lego® Serious Play Kits.

 

There is an interesting how-to article on making a Lego case for the Raspberry Pi ARM computer from a young girl named Biz on the Raspberry Pi web site.  I also found an article on some Cal Tech students who used a Lego® core in order to build a smartphone-enabled device to monitor mammalian cells in culture (link).  In an odd twist of fate, I found a video of a Lego® Mindstorm 3D printer:

In actuality, this machine is an automated Lego® model assembler, but I am sure the actual Lego® 3D printer is not too far off.

 

I may not have been the first person to realize that those toy blocks I grew up with can be useful for some grown-up uses.  However the apparent convergent evolution that has led many makers to reach for Legos® as an early prototyping tool at least makes me feel as though I am in good company.


Moltosenso Silver an outstanding SDK for XBEE WSAN Systems

Posted on by Cas Hoefman

A few days ago I posted about the Moltosenso Network Manager™ Bronze, for the low, low introductory price of EURO €25.00 or about USD $32.00 Moltosenso offered the upgraded Bronze release of their Moltosenso Network Manager™ SDK, the Cross Platform XBEE™ configuration utility.

This Bronze version included the same features as the Iron version, basic X-CTU features, available cross-platform on Mac, Windows and Linux, Network Discovery, AT Commands Tab, RSSI Tab and Terminal, that I wrote about a week earlier and than some more.

After talking with Marco Francesco Urso, the CEO of Moltosenso I decided to also check out their competitively priced Silver Release (€150 or about USD $185).

The Silver release is an affordable and very effective tool that in additional to all the features from the cheaper versions lets you easily get and set long list of commands on local and remote Digi International® modules, has the ability to create scripts to get and set parameters of connected or networked module using their easy to use wizard and also, in real-time, debug commands remotely issued to the XBEE nodes in an easy step-by-step fashion!

Checkout the Moltosenso YouTube Channel for some videos of  Moltosenso Silver in action:

Because it introduces the idea of automatic monitoring and actuation the Moltosenso Network Manager™ Silver release is a complete toolkit that can be used to remotely manage your whole XBEE WSAN.

Later this year Moltesenso plans to release a Gold version of their software, adding even more features. I am looking forward to reviewing that once it is released but in the mean time, check it out one of their current releases and let me know what YOU think!

The Internet of Things

Posted on by Brian Noland


The “internet of things” was first coined in the late 1990’s as a way to describe a future where nearly everything in the world would become affixed with an RFID tag and would be subsequently tracked.  My how the vision has grown!  Now, when people talk about the “internet of things”, they are almost invariably describing the proliferation of internet-connected devices and sensors interconnected with what we currently know as the internet.  It has been projected that by 2020, the number of connected devices with be 50 billion.  This would outstrip the estimated 2020 human population 7 times over.

 

What exactly are all of these internet-connected devices?  Some are old familiar standbys like desktop and laptop computers.  In more recent years, mobile devices like cell phones, tablets, music players, and even e-readers are now enabled with some sort of radio that connects them to the internet.  Think of how many sensors are packed into the average cell phone (GPS, accelerometer, gyroscopes, digital compasses, CMOS imager, sound recorders, light sensors, and moisture sensors…hope you don’t find out about that one the hard way!)  All of those sensors can potentially be points of collected data and stored in the cloud.  They can tell a much richer story about you, your habits, and interactions than your laptop or desktop computers ever could.  With the advent of low-powerBluetooth and the dropping of the cost of the chips that drive them means that lots of things now have sensors that never used to have them.  Even the ubiquitous wristwatch  is being brought into this age.  More and more, the signals from all these sensors will be collected, analyzed, and sometimes acted upon.  Chances are, if you have bought a car within the last year, it has at least one wireless radio someplace.  If not, want a LoJack or OnStar?

 

There is still a huge reservoir of data from “dumb devices” that are equipped with sensors but no connectivity.  Roads, electric meters, cars, vending machines, etc. all have sensors and are often collected onto some kind of memory storage device. In some cases there are private repositories of these kinds of measurements languishing in the databases of companies and governments who don’t know what to do with them.  Liberating the data from these sensors hooked to dumb device needs to be an objective for the world in the coming years.  Potential revenue lies in the data reduction and mining of all of this data for the purpose of creating better business, marketing, and legislative decisions.

 

It is not just your cell phone or car that will be loaded up with sensors, it’s actually going to be you!  There is a large movement in the health and fitness areas to include sensors that you wear.  Some have coined facets of this movement as “the Quantified Self.”   Fitbit  and Nike+ are great examples of early entrants to the space.  Fitness monitors are now becoming more akin to life support monitors used in the early space program.  There is currently a sea change within the diagnostics and health management industries as it relates to wireless sensors.  There are a large number of wireless sensors that can measure everything from brain waves, to EKG, to blood fluid levels, to oxygen saturation, to cuff-less blood pressure, to your baby’s intrauterine movements.  The West Wireless Health Institute  was established just a few years ago in the shadow of UCSD, Scripps, Qualcomm and San Diego Biotech to develop wireless sensors to reduce the cost of medical care.  Dr. Eric Topol, who is on the board of the WWHI, has written a book called “The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care” .  Topol has been a vocal advocate for the adoption of wireless health as a means for the masses to take better care of themselves and not rely so much on doctors.  There is already a big business around collecting that data and trying to help patients to live healthier lives and to prevent costly visits to the doctor’s office or even costlier visits to the Emergency Department.

 

Math is now more important to the future than it has ever been.  Increasingly, there will be need for people trained in advanced mathematics who can reduce all of this data and make actionable sense of it.  New methods of analysis and statistical treatments will need to be created to find those parameters that make a difference by themselves and/or when combined together.  We will need increasing numbers of people who can model and simulate data so that we can start to predict the behaviors of the systems that the sensors read measurements from.  What should you study in college if you are unsure, MATHEMATICS!  When I was growing up, my parents told me to finish my dinner.  Now we should be telling our kids, “finish your math homework…then go do the Google-a-Day puzzle!”  For a time, companies were snatching up programmers that could write good apps.  Watch as the trend migrates to companies seeking to buy up the best analysts and statisticians.  Our educational institutions need to better prepare for this trend.

 

I think that ultimately the idea of the “internet of things” will go away and it will just be the internet again.  We shall know have arrived when we stop talking about the “internet of things” and just expect that newly designed things will be built this way.  Anything less will be considered passé and antiquated.  I eagerly await my Bluetooth-enabled toothbrush…but so does my dentist!

Meta Watch launches Bluetooth 4.0 SmartWatch for IOS & Android developers

Posted on by Cas Hoefman

Meta Watch™ launched its new SmartWatch Development System featuring bluetooth® 4.0 wireless technology for connectivity and compatibility with Apple’s iPhone® 4S, iPad 3, and Android platforms!

The Meta Watch Development system sells for USD $199 in the US & Europe and can be purchased directly from TI and from Meta Watch. It’s available either with a stainless steel case with black mask & black leather strap or with a stainless steel case with white mask and white leather strap.

Leveraging the TI’s CC2564 “dual mode” solution, the Meta Watch development system supports both Bluetooth Smart technology and ‘classic’ Bluetooth wireless technology enabling it to function in many new applications.

“We are delighted to be the first company to ship a Bluetooth 4.0 smartwatch compatible with both iPhone and Android platforms” said Bill Geiser, CEO and co-founder of Meta Watch. “While our new development system will greatly expand opportunities for Meta Watch, our goal remains unchanged – to make it simple and profitable for developers to create smartwatch applications. To this end we offer a broad range of customization options for our customers. Embedded system developers can leverage our open source firmware, embedded SDK, and a free embedded programming IDE that runs on most Windows and Linux Operating Systems. Our remote protocol and API’s enable smart phone application developers to leverage their existing iOS or Android code base eliminating the need to create a new code base for a new platform. Last, but certainly not least, our supply chain and production infrastructure was created from the very beginning to scale and allow our ODM/OEM customers to get to market fast.”

Features of the Meta Watch Bluetooth 4.0 development include:

  • Case / strap: 3 ATM water resistant stainless steel leather strap (in black or white)
  • Colors: black or white
  • Display: Mirror polymer network LCD; 96×96. Fully reflective for direct sunlight
  • Lens: scratch-resistant mineral glass
  • I/O: 6 fully programmable buttons, 3 axis accelerometer, vibrating motor & an ambient light sensor
  • MCU: TI’s ultra-low-power MSP430™ microcontroller
  • Radio: CC2564 Bluetooth 4.0 transceiver; with profile support for SPP and BLE-GATT

It takes a Village to raise a business

Posted on by Cas Hoefman

This morning I received an e-mail from George Bennett, the chairman of the Valley Innovators. George pointed out that starting your own business is not only about good ideas but also about building relationships.

Below is an excerpt from his e-mail:

“It takes a Village to raise a business” 

  More precisely, it takes a culture, a group of mutually supportive people willing to share their talents to make things happen. We know you want to start a business. It’s a big job.   If we work together, though, we can become much bigger than we are as individuals.

As you work on your ideas, I ask you to think about the cost in time and effort it takes to find good people, set up contracts, negotiate terms, and settle problems that come up.

 If you help build the Village, the people you need will already be there. Their reputation will be known in the Village. Everybody benefits. 

 I ask you to be a part of the startup culture. Come join us; see what we’re doing to grow great things in the valley.
And George is right you can’t do it all on your own, you need a network of smart people around you, not only to help with the technical elements of your design but also with the business aspects of your new business.

By Starting Valley Innovators, George is creating a village of people that you can depend on, and a slew of services that can help you get ahead faster. To support the community the group will have their next get  together on June 13rd and are sporting some interesting speakers, Lloyd Roberts the brand new Director of Business for DeviceLab will be speaking about Turnkey Manufacturing and Jill Addison will be talking about Online Video’s and how they can help you grow your business.

Besides all of that, just some good friends that help motivate you to do better, encourage you when you feel down and perhaps just take you out for a glass of wine at one of our beautiful wineries or a cup of coffee away from the office once in a while to relax, isn’t a bad idea either. Because you can’t always be working, right?

With that in mind every Saturday the Temecula Valley Software Developers Meetup organizes the Twin Cities Tech Coffee Meetup, an informal gathering of Temecula / Murrieta area Technology Entrepreneurs to share knowledge and experiences, for brainstorming and mentoring.

The intention of this meetup series is to “cowork” in a collaborative environment. There is no agenda, or round table, no formal introductions or preset discussion topics, but sharing knowledge and experiences and brainstorming & mentoring is encouraged.

Bring your laptops or iPads, have a cup of coffee or two and talk about topics that interest you, perhaps even while getting some work done! This Meetup is be held each Saturday from 9am to about 11.30am at It’s a Grind in on Murrieta Hot Springs.

Want even more opportunity to cowork in a collaborative environment? Check out “The Coworking Connection” in Murrieta.

Although coworking has many benefits, people often times have a hard time understanding exactly what it is. Wikipedia defines “coworking” as “a style of work which involves a shared working environment, sometimes an office, yet independent activity. Unlike in a typical office environment, those coworking are usually not employed by the same organization.

Dione Moser the founder of The Coworking Connections explains it as follows “Coworking is most closely related to purchasing a membership at the local gym: you have a pass for the plan you purchased and use the facility according to your plan terms and needs. People workout side by side, not necessarily with each other but can benefit from each other when the need arises… it’s the same scenario for those in a coworking environment”.

SoCal CodeCamp Rocks and so does Bluetooth Smart

Posted on by Cas Hoefman

SoCal Code Camp session on Bluetooth Smart Development for IOS and Android 

If you are interested in Bluetooth Smart,  Low Power Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy – BLE – or Bluetooth 4.0 and building iOS or Android Apps to read Bluetooth sensors or create Bluetooth sensor networks check out my upcoming session at SoCal Code Camp in San Diego at UC San Diego on June 23rd and 24th.

This session is presented by Muhammad Ulislam from Bluetooth.org, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group and myself! Muhammad and I will be talking about:

  • The differences between the different Bluetooth version.
  • The currently available Bluetooth Smart modules and Development kits, (we will have several kits from different vendors on site).
  • How to build a simple Android or iOS App to discover, connect to and read from a Bluetooth Smart sensor using an iPhone 4s, iPad3 or Android devices.
  • Connecting to cloud platforms to store, retrieve manage & maintain and share sensor readings & related data and information.

New Bluetooth 4.0 Development Kit from Rowdy Robot on Kickstarter.com

Posted on by Cas Hoefman

A successfully funded project on Kickstarter, now in it’s final week, is focusing on bringing Bluetooth 4.0 development to the masses. We’ve covered BT4 kits before including the Bluegiga BLE112 Bluetooth® 4.0 single mode Development Kit but Rowdy Robot, the team behind the projects Smart Beacon electronics, is promising a Bluetooth 4.0 device that uses the BLE112-A module with all of the pins exposed for easy development including the debugger pins. This makes it easy to quickly prototype your project and program your own firmware profiles that can be flashed onto their device.

To make things easy for you, if you don’t already have your own TI CC-Debugger, they are providing two development kits. The first runs about $95 and includes the TI debugger unit and one beacon. This really is all you would need to be able to program and flash the device. However, for developers wanting to dive even deeper, they are offering a kit for $155 that includes the TI debugger, a ‘limited edition’ device, one of BlueGiga’s BLED112 USB dongles, and some parts to integrate your own board to their provided data pins. These add-on boards or modules as they call them could be anything from sensors, displays or haptic feedback electronics.

If you already own the TI CC-Debugger, then all you need is the $32 Smart Beacon to get started. The Rowdy Robot team has mentioned that they will begin manufacturing the minute they have funds in their hand and that these beacons should be ready to ship by late July to developers interested in getting a head start coming up with brilliant ways to expand their beacons functionality.
Although they have not released any detailed specifications it would appear that they are simply exposing all 21 of the configurable pins provided by the BLE112-A module. Rowdy Robot will be shipping their beacons with BlueGiga’s EULA to allow for the open development using the BlueGiga SDK which includes BGScript and their single mode BLE stack API. To get a better idea of how you can utilize the BlueGiga module on their board, here’s the link to the BLE112 datasheet.

The cool thing about the tod beacons, we are working on support for them in our initial release of LabStrip Mobile!

If your unfamiliar with the BLE112-A module, here are the essential specs:

Key Features
Bluetooth 4.0, single mode compliant
- Supports master and slave modes
- 4+ simultaneous connection in master mode
Integrated Bluetooth low energy stack
- GAP, GATT, L2CAP, SMP
- Bluetooth low energy profiles
Flexible and simple in-module development:
BG Profile Toolkit™, BG Script™ or C language
Radio performance
- TX power: +4 dBm to -23dBm
- RX sensitivity: -87dBm to -93dBm
Ultra low current consumption
- Transmit: 27mA (0 dBm)
- Sleep mode 3: 0.4uA
Programmable 8051 processor for embedding full
applications
Bluetooth end product, CE, FCC and IC qualified

Bluetooth Low Energy Features
Bluetooth 4.0 single mode compliant radio
Master and slave mode support
L2CAP, GAP, ATT and GATT support
Security manager
Advertising, broadcasting, connections
Built-in profiles

Hardware Features
Bluetooth low energy radio
Integrated antenna, U.FL connector or RF pin
8051 microcontroller
- 8 KB RAM
- 128 KB flash
1-2 x UART
1-2 x SPI
USB 2.0 device
3 x PWM
3 x timer
Analog comparator
Integrated op-amp
Integrated battery monitor and temperature sensor
GPIO and AIO

Electrical Characteristics
Transmit : 27mA (0 dBm)
Receive: 19.6mA
Sleep (timer active): 1.5uA
Sleep (wake-up pin): 0.4uA
Operating voltage: 2.0-3.6V

What really attracts me to this project is the price point and that the tod Development Kit is a is a blank canvas. Other development kits include sensors and extras that are great and allow me to evaluate firmware for controlling those additions if my project uses them. However, kits with those included sensors and add on modules do not allow me to truly prototype my own electronics.

The tod Development Kit is a solid foundation that allows me to add the sensors and electronics I am building my project around quickly and easily thanks to the three 2×5 headers. Being able to jump right into Bluetooth 4.0 firmware development at a fraction of the cost of any alternative is where the tod Development kit excels. With the tod Smart Beacon costing only a few dollars more than a single BLE112A chip, this is a very affordable way to connect your project to the web using Bluetooth 4 or to get started developing your own Bluetooth 4 solution.

The Kickstarter Project hit it’s funding goal with 13 days left and as of today is almost 150% funded with 3 days to go until the project closes on June 3rd. There are several options for getting the tod Development Kit including a Supported Developer reward where the Rowdy Robot team will help you work out your own solution with Skype and Email support with their hardware and software engineers. The team has indicated that they will be launching a Development Community where for hardware and software developers can access spec sheets, white papers and interact with others to create, expand and hack the tod Smart Beacon.

While they will most likely offer a retail solution down the road, it usually takes time for these projects to fulfill their commitments to backers so don’t wait to get yours. I’ve spoken with the Rowdy Robot team and they are very enthusiastic about what the Kickstarter Crowd has helped them accomplish and to move into the next phase as the project comes to a close. With the first step being a launch of the official website at http://todhq.com and the release of the Development Community at http://opentod.org ahead of their initial product shipments.

For more information and to Pre-Order your tod Development Kit visit the project page today.

Checking out the ConnectBlue Bluetooth Low Energy Platform Module OLP425 Development Kit

Posted on by Cas Hoefman

ConnectBlue recently released a Development Kit for their OLP425, Bluetooth Low Energy Platform Module. I ordered a few of them a few weeks ago and just received the shipping confirmation.

The OLP425 is a Bluetooth low energy single-mode platform module. It has a mounting options for a battery holder, a temperature sensor, accelerometers and other custom sensors, this combination makes the OLP425 a complete stand-alone product that requires no additional hardware other than a battery and a housing.

ConnectBlue has based the OLP425 on the Bluetooth low energy SoC TI CC2540 and is ready for the implementation of your own custom software using the Bluetooth low energy profiles, embedded in the module and as the module is fully radio type approved for Europe, US and Canada you don’t have to deal with that.

I can’t wait to get my hands on these modules this week, check back soon for an update!

Using the Moltosenso Network Manager Bronze to Manage XBEE Modules

Posted on by Cas Hoefman

Moltosenso Network Manager Bronze version 1.0 released!

For the low, low introductory price of EURO €25.00 or about USD $32.00 Moltosenso now offers an upgraded Bronze release of their Moltosenso Network Manager™, the Cross Platform XBEE™ configuration utility.

This Bronze version includes the same features as the Iron version, basic X-CTU features, available cross-platform on Mac, Windows and Linux, Network Discovery, AT Commands Tab, RSSI Tab and Terminal, that I wrote about last week and than some more!

I decided to check out the new features and purchased the Bronze version online, the purchase process was easy enough and installation painless.

As I mentioned, the Bronze version includes all the features from the Iron version and in addition, automatic scanning & setting of the serial port to communicate with and Digi International® XBEE™ device plugged into your computer and a quick and easy way to read or set the I/O lines of both locally plugged in and remotely accessible Digi International® XBEE™ devices.

This also works with other Digi International® devices, like the XBEE™ Sensor, as long as they share the same setup procedures as the XBEE™ modules.

Xbee Sensor

The ability to read the inputs of both the analog (mV) and digital input lines and set the output of the digital lines, is pretty cool. It makes for very easy remote control and configuration of any Digi International® XBEE™ powered device and it workes like a charm!

At €25 or $32 the Moltosenso Network Manager™ Bronze is an affordable tool for anyone working on the development of Wireless Sensor Actuator Network services (WSAN Services), it allows for easy access to and monitoring of data from any XBEE™ device or remotely controlled appliance connected to the output lines of a Digi International® XBEE™ module.

Just before publishing this blog post Marco Francesco Urso, the CEO of Moltosenso, reached out to me to thank me for writing last weeks blog post and to check in to see how things where going with the upgrade I purchased.

It was great talking with him and hearing his perspective on the why and how of the development of the Moltosenso Network Manager™. Stay tuned as I might be doing another blog post on the Silver version of their software soon!