Summary – it’s getting closer

So far, there has been 15 of 20 posts that have stayed on topic with the goals defined at the beginning of this years studies.  I’ve managed to release at least 3 posts per month that covered the intended material.  Here’s a list of those topics based on grouping.

Raspberry Pi Specific

• Raspberry Pi – The basics
• Command and control as easy as RPi
• RPi email using sSMTP
• RPi Backup and Restore

Hardware

• Selecting an enclosure for your project

Meshed Sensors

• Remote and Local RPi Sensors in Cacti
• XBee, Arduino, and RPi
• Cacti, RPi, and GPIO device readings

Raspberry PI Mashups and Scraping

• Automated web scraping with RPi

Computer Vision

• RPi image processing
• Dynamic Images
• SimpleCV on the RPi

Augmented reality

• Augmented reality

There are 10 weeks left and there are some topics that have yet to be covered, or covered in more detail.  In the coming weeks, I’m hoping to start creating heat maps that will have long term uses.  This will be a key function toward augmented reality applications.  In addition, wireless technology will be central to versatile and rapid deployment of equipment in the field.  This means getting hardware up and running as soon as possible.  Here are the topics that will be the primary focus of the up coming quarter.

• Bluetooth and BLE
• Integrating GPS and sensor readings into data sets
• Google Doc repositories
• Simple CV and object cataloging
• Heat maps in CartoDB

Augmented reality is taking a hit from the restructured topics.  I had hoped to cover texture mapping, but this may need to wait for another time.  That subject might be too advanced at this point, however I may give some lead ins here and there.

VisualSFM is a GUI application for 3D reconstruction using structure from motion, in this example that would be video.  The video above made use of this.

News Update – IoT hardware, software, and services are in alignment

The IoT has taken a bit of a leap over the break.  There was a tweet from Sparkfun about the ESP8266 WiFi SoC board that will pretty much do it all.

New WiFi module is only 7 bucks. You can’t even get a proper sandwich for 7 bucks. We live in the future. https://t.co/dAy7kzfcsH

— SparkFun Electronics (@sparkfun) March 27, 2015

Kevin Darrah did a video back a few months back about this wonderful board.

It has never been easier to connect the “what not” to the IoT and do some crazy things.  Services like Parse have joined the ranks of providers to get IoT in the mainstream.