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Tech Guides - IoT and Hardware

25 Articles
article-image-diy-iot-projects-you-can-build-under-50
Vijin Boricha
29 Jun 2018
5 min read
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5 DIY IoT projects you can build under $50

Vijin Boricha
29 Jun 2018
5 min read
Lately, IoT is beginning to play an integral part in various industries, be it at the consumer-level, or at the enterprise side of it. With a lot of big players like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google entering this market, IoT adoption has scaled tremendously. It is said to have jumped from a hobbyist level to an industry infrastructure where everything functions on smart devices, that can talk. The bulk release of popular IoT products prove that this market is getting bigger and a lot of individuals have been amazed with home automation products such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Homepod, Google Home and others. These devices are one of the most sought-after things for hobbyist and enthusiasts who are interested to do simple automation with sensors. Following are 5 IoT projects ideas that you can build without a hole in the pocket. To learn how to actually build similar kind of projects, check out our books; Internet of Things with Raspberry Pi 3 Smart Internet of Things Projects Raspberry Pi 3 Home Automation Projects Weather control station This project will not only help you measure the room temperature but will also help you measure the altitude and the pressure in the room. For this project you will need the Adafruit Starter Pack for Windows 10 IoT Core on the latest Raspberry Pi kit. Along with the Raspberry Pi Kit you will also be using other sensors that read temperature, pressure, and altitude. To make your weather station advanced, you can connect the device to your cloud account to store the weather data. Hardware Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 Breadboard Adafruit BMP280 Barometric Pressure & Altitude Sensor Software Windows 10 IoT Core Approximate total cost Less than $60 Facial Recognition Door Self-built home security projects are some of the most popular DIY projects because they can be cheaper and simple compared to bulky professional installations. Here's a project that controls entry access using facial recognition, thanks to Microsoft Project Oxford. This project from Mazudo, based on Raspberry Pi and Windows IoT, is posted on Hackster.io. This is a handy project for DIY enthusiasts who want to build a quick security lock for their homes. Hardware Raspberry Pi 3 Breadboard USB camera Relay switch Speaker Software Windows 10 IoT Core Approximate total cost Less than $50 Your very own Alexa Echo Alexa Echo has always been a handy device, which can take notes, schedule reminders for your appointments, and play podcasts for you. Brilliant, isn’t it?  You can build a fully functional customized Alexa Echo with all the features of Alexa, apart from accessing official music servers like Amazon prime. It will also have an integration with recently included third party apps like todoist and Any.do. This DIY Echo can also be connected to your cell phone devices to manage notifications when the timer goes off, and so on. Only one thing that your DIY will be missing is the ability to function as a bluetooth speaker. Hardware Raspberry Pi 3 Breadboard USB speaker and mic Software Raspbian Approximate total cost Less than $50 Pet Feeder You surely don’t want your pet to starve when you’re away, do you? This customized pet feeder is controlled via the internet; set timings and feed your pet automatically later. These pet feeders are directly connected to WiFi using ESP8266 chip. We can easily add features like controlling the device using cell phone and making dashboards using Freeboard. This project can be later upgraded or rightly reprogrammed to fill your snack bowl at regular intervals as well. Hardware Arduino PIR motion sensor ESP8266 ESP-01 Software Arduino IDE ESP8266Flasher.exe Approximate total cost Less than $40 Video Surveillance Robot Video surveillance is a process of monitoring a scenario, person or an environment as a whole. A video surveillance robot can capture the activities happening in the surrounding where it is deployed and can be controlled using a GUI Interface. For further enhancements, you can even connect your device to the cloud and save the recorded data there. Hardware Raspberry Pi ARM Cortex- A7 CPU L293 motor driver Software Raspbian Approximate total cost Less than $50 These are few economical yet highly useful Internet of Things projects, which can be leveraged to improve your daily activities. Still not convinced?. Think of it this way. Buying the microchip board is a one time investment as it can be reused in separate projects. The sensors and other peripherals aren’t that expensive. You might say, it’s just way easier to buy an IoT device. I would argue that, buying an IoT device is not as satisfying as building one for the same purpose. In the end, there are multiple advantages of building one as you can brag about it to your friends and most importantly include it in your resume to give you that edge over others in an interview. Cognitive IoT: How Artificial Intelligence is remoulding Industrial and Consumer IoT Windows 10 IoT Core: What you need to know 5 reasons to choose AWS IoT Core for your next IoT project  
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Guest Contributor
15 Jan 2019
5 min read
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How are Mobile apps transforming the healthcare industry?

Guest Contributor
15 Jan 2019
5 min read
Mobile App Development has taken over and completely re-written the healthcare industry. According to Healthcare Mobility Solutions reports, the Mobile healthcare application market is expected to be worth more than $84 million by the year 2020. These mobile applications are not just limited to use by patients but are also massively used by doctors and nurses. As technology evolves, it simultaneously opens up the possibility of being used in multiple ways. Similar has been the journey of healthcare mobile app development that has originated from the latest trends in technology and has made its way to being an industry in itself. The technological trends that have helped build mobile apps for the healthcare industry are Blockchain You probably know blockchain technology, thanks to all the cryptocurrency rage in recent years. The blockchain is basically a peer-to-peer database that keeps a verified record of all transactions, or any other information that one needs to track and have it accessible to a large community. The healthcare industry can use a technology that allows it to record the medical history of patients, and store it electronically, in an encrypted form, that cannot be altered or hacked into. Blockchain succeeds where a lot of health applications fail, in the secure retention of patient data. The Internet of Things The Internet of Things (IoT) is all about connectivity. It is a way of interconnecting electronic devices, software, applications, etc., to ensure easy access and management across platforms. The loT will assist medical professionals in gaining access to valuable patient information so that doctors can monitor the progress of their patients. This makes treatment of the patient easier, and more closely monitored, as doctors can access the patient’s current profile anywhere and suggest treatment, medicine, and dosages. Augmented Reality From the video gaming industry, Augmented Reality has made its way to the medical sector. AR refers to the creation of an interactive experience of a real-world environment through superimposition of computer-generated perceptual information. AR is increasingly used to develop mobile applications that can be used by doctors and surgeons as a training experience. It stimulates a real-world experience of diagnosis and surgery, and by doing so, enhances the knowledge and its practical application that all doctors must necessarily possess. This form of training is not limited in nature, and can, therefore, simultaneously train a large number of medical practitioners. Big Data Analytics Big Data has the potential to provide comprehensive statistical information, only accessed and processed through sophisticated software. Big Data Analytics becomes extremely useful when it comes to managing the hospital’s resources and records in an efficient manner. Aside from this, it is used in the development of mobile applications that store all patient data, thus again, eliminating the need for excessive paperwork. This allows medical professionals to focus more on attending and treating the patients, rather than managing database. These technological trends have led to the development of a diverse variety of mobile applications to be used for multiple purposes in the healthcare industry. Listed below are the benefits of the mobile apps deploying these technological trends, for the professionals and the patients alike. Telemedicine Mobile applications can potentially play a crucial role in making medical services available to the masses. An example is an on-call physician on telemedicine duty. A mobile application will allow the physician to be available for a patient consult without having to operate via  PC. This will make the doctors more accessible and will bring quality treatment to the patients quickly. Enhanced Patient Engagement There are mobile applications that place all patient data – from past medical history to performance metrics, patient feedback, changes in the treatment patterns and schedules, at the push of a button on the smartphone application for the medical professional to consider and make a decision on the go. Since all data is recorded in real-time, it makes it easy for doctors to change shifts without having to explain to the next doctor the condition of the patient in person. The mobile application has all the data the supervisors or nurses need. Easy Access to Medical Facilities There are a number of mobile applications that allow patients to search for medical professionals in their area, read their reviews and feedback by other patients, and then make an online appointment if they are satisfied with the information that they find. Apart from these, they can also download and store their medical lab reports, and order medicines online at affordable prices. Easy Payment of Bills Like in every other sector, mobile applications in healthcare have made monetary transactions extremely easy. Patients or their family members, no longer need to spend hours waiting in the line to pay the bills. They can instantly pick a payment plan and pay bills immediately or add reminders to be notified when a bill is due. Therefore, it can be safely said that the revolution that the healthcare industry is undergoing and has worked in the favor of all the parties involved – Medical Professionals, Patients, Hospital Management and the Mobile App Developers. Author's Bio Ritesh Patil is the co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech that helps startups and enterprises in mobile technology. He’s an avid blogger and writes on mobile application development. He has developed innovative mobile applications across various fields such as Finance, Insurance, Health, Entertainment, Productivity, Social Causes, Education and many more and has bagged numerous awards for the same. Social Media – Twitter, LinkedIn Healthcare Analytics: Logistic Regression to Reduce Patient Readmissions How IBM Watson is paving the road for Healthcare 3.0 7 Popular Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
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Raka Mahesa
24 Jan 2018
4 min read
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Why Metadata is so important for IoT

Raka Mahesa
24 Jan 2018
4 min read
The Internet of Things is growing all the time. However, as IoT takes over the world, there are more and more aspects of it that needs to be addressed, such as security and standardization. It might not be ideal to live in a wild west where everything is connected but there are no guidelines or rules for how to manage and analyze these networks. A crucial part of all this is metadata – as data grows in size, the way we label, categorize and describe it will become more important than ever. Find our latest and forthcoming IoT eBooks and videos here.  We probably shouldn’t be that surprised – if IoT is all about connecting things that wasn’t previously connected – traffic lights, lamps, car parts – good metadata allows us to make sure those connections remain clear and legible. It helps to ensure that things are working properly. A system without definitions, without words and labels, would, after all, get chaotic pretty quickly. Metadata makes it easier to organize IoT data If metadata is, quite simply, data about data, it’s not hard to see why it might be so important when dealing with the expanse of data that is about to be generated thanks to the internet of things. While IoT will clearly largely run on data – information and messages passing between objects, moving within a given system, metadata is incredibly useful in this new world because it allows us to better understand the systems that we are developing. And what’s more, once we have that level of insight, we can begin to do more to further improve and optimize IoT systems using machine learning and artificial intelligence.  Consider how metadata organizes your media library – it would be a mess without it, practically unusable. When you scale that up, we’ll be able to make much smarter use of IoT. Without it, we might well be lost in a chaotic mess of connections.  Metadata, then, allows us to organize and catalog data.  Metadata solves IoT's interoperability problem Metadata can also help with the biggest problem of IoT: interoperability. Interoperability refers to the ability for one device to communicate and exchange data with another device. And this is really important in the context of the Internet of Things, because having great interoperability means more devices can connect with each other.  How does metadata solve interoperability? Well, by using metadata, a device can quickly identify a new device that tries to connect to it by looking at its model number, device class, and other attributes. Once the new device has been identified, our device can find a suitable communication protocol that's supported by both devices to exchange data. Metadata can also be added on the exchanged data, so both devices can read and process the data correctly, just like adding image format metadata allows any application to display that image. Metadata helps to protect legacy hardware and software There's another aspect that metadata can help with. The Internet of Things is an evolving technology where new products are introduced every day, and bring along with them changes and innovations. But what happens to the old products that have been replaced by new ones? With metadata, we can archive and protect the future accessibility of our devices, making sure that new devices can still communicate with older, legacy devices.  That's why metadata is important for the Internet of Things. There are many benefits that can be gained by having a robust system of metadata in the Internet of Things. And as the Internet of Things grows and is used to manage more crucial aspects of our lives, the need for this system will also grow. Raka Mahesa is a game developer at Chocoarts who is interested in digital technology. Outside of work, he enjoys working on his own projects, with Corridoom VR being his latest relesed gme. Raka also regularly tweets @legacy99.
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Prasad Ramesh
31 Dec 2018
10 min read
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How to choose components to build a basic robot 

Prasad Ramesh
31 Dec 2018
10 min read
This post will show you how to choose a robot chassis kit with wheels and motors, a motor controller, and some power for the robot, talking through the trade-offs and things to avoid. This article is an excerpt from a book written by Danny Staple titled Learn Robotics Programming. In this book, you will learn you'll gain experience of building a next-generation collaboration robot Choosing a robot chassis kit The chassis, like the controller, is a fundamental decision when making a robot. Although these can be self-made using 3D printing or toy hacking, the most simple place to start is with a robot chassis kit. These kits contain sets of parts to start off your robot build. A chassis can be changed, but it would mean rebuilding the robot. The internet has plenty of robot chassis kits around. Too many, so how do you choose one? Size Getting the size for a robot right matters too. Take a look at the following photos: Chassis 1 is 11 cm in and just about fits a controller in it, but is too tiny. This will make it hard to build your robot. Squeezing the controller, power, and all the sensors into this small space would need skill and experience beyond the scope of a first robot build. Chassis 2 is Armbot. This large robot is 33 cm by 30 cm, with an arm reach of another 300 mm. It needs eight AA batteries, big motors, and a big controller. These add to the expense and may cause issues around power handling for a new builder. It has lots of space, but issues around weight and rigidity. Armbot is one of my most expensive robots, excluding the cost of the arm! Chassis 3 in the preceding image will fit the Pi, batteries, and sensor, but without being large and bulky. It is around the right dimensions, being between 15-20 cm long and 10-15 cm wide. Those that have split levels might be great for this, but only one or two levels, as three or four will make a robot top heavy and may cause it to topple. This has enough space and is relatively easy to build. Wheel count Some robot chassis kits have elaborate movement methods, legs, tank tracks, and tri-star wheels, to name a few. While these are fun and I encourage experimenting with them, this is not the place to start at. So, I recommend a thoroughly sensible, if basic, wheels on motors version. There are kits with four-wheel drive and six-wheel drive. These can be quite powerful and will require larger motor controllers. They may also chew through batteries, and you are increasing the likelihood of overloading something. This also makes for trickier wiring, as seen in the following: Two-wheel drive is the simplest to wire in. It usually requires a third wheel for balance. This can be a castor wheel, roller ball, or just a Teflon sled for tiny robots. Two wheels are also the easiest to steer, avoiding some friction issues seen with robots using four or more wheels. Two wheels won't have the pulling power of four or six-wheel drive, but they are simple and will work. They are also less expensive: Wheels and motors A kit for a beginner should come with the wheels and the motors. The wheels should have simple non-pneumatic rubber tires. The most obvious style for inexpensive robots is shown in the following photo. There are many kits with these in them: The kit should also come with two motors, one for each wheel, and include the screws or parts to mount them onto the chassis. I recommend DC Gear motors, as the gearing will keep the speed usable while increasing the mechanical pushing power the robot has. Importantly, the motors should have the wires connected, like the first motor in the following photo: It is tricky to solder or attach these wires to the small tags on motors, and poorly attached ones do have a frustrating habit of coming off. The kits you will want to start with have these wires attached, as can be seen in the following: Another point to note is that where the motors are mounted, the kits should have some encoder wheels, and a slot to read them through. The encoder wheels are also known as odometry, tacho, or tachometer wheels. Simplicity You don't want to use a complex or hard-to-assemble kit for your first robot build. I've repeated this throughout with two-wheel drive, two motors with the wires soldered on and steering clear of large robots, or unusual and interesting locomotion systems, not because they are flawed, but because it's better to start simple. There is a limit to this, a robot kit that is a fully built and enclosed robot leaves little room for learning or experimentation and would actually require toy hacking skills to customize. Cost Related to simplicity is cost. Robot chassis kits can be brought from around $15, up to thousands of dollars. Larger and more complex robots tend to be far more costly. Here, I am aiming to keep to the less costly options or at least show where they are possible. Conclusion So, now you can choose a chassis kit, with two wheels and a castor, two motors with wires soldered on them, slots, and encoder wheels. These are not expensive, and widely available on popular internet shopping sites as "Smart Car Chassis," with terms like "2WD": The kit I'm working with looks like the preceding photo when assembled without the Raspberry Pi. Choosing a motor controller The next important part you'll need is a motor controller. Much like the motors, there are a number of trade-offs and considerations before buying one. Integration level Motor controllers can be as simple as motor power control driven from GPIO pins directly, such as the L298. This is the cheapest solution: a generic L298N motor controller can be connected to some of the IO pins on the Raspberry Pi. These are reasonably robust and have been easily available for a long time. They are flexible, but using parts like this will take up more space and need to be wired point to point, adding complexity to the build: Others are as complex as whole IO controller boards, many of which hide their own controller similar to an Arduino, along with motor control chips. Although the cheapest and most flexible ways are the most basic controllers, those with higher integration will reduce size, keep the pin usage count low (handy when you are connecting a lot to the robot), and may simplify your robot build. They often come integrated with a power supply too. Motor controllers can be bought as fully integrated Raspberry Pi hats, boards designed to fit exactly on top of a Raspberry Pi. These tend to have a high level of integration, as discussed before, but may come at the cost of flexibility, especially if you plan to use other accessories. Pin usage When buying a motor controller in Raspberry Pi hat form, pin usage is important. If we intend to use microphones (PCM/I2S), servo motors, and I2c and SPI devices with this robot, having boards that make use of these pins is less than ideal. Simply being plugged into pins doesn't mean they are all used, so only a subset of the pins is usually actually connected on a hat. To get an idea of how pins in different boards interact on the Raspberry Pi, take a look at https://pinout.xyz , which lets you select Raspberry Pi boards and see the pin configuration for them. Controllers that use the I2C or serial bus are great because they make efficient use of pins and that bus can be shared. At the time of writing, PiConZero, the Stepper Motor Hat, and ZeroBorg all use I2C pins. The Full Function Stepper Motor Hat is able to control DC motors and servo motors, is cheap, and is widely available. It also has the pins available straight through on the top and an I2C connector on the side. It's designed to work with other hats and allow more expansion. Size The choice of this depends on the chassis, specifically the size of the motors you have. In simple terms, the larger your chassis, the larger a controller you will need. The power handling capacity of a motor controller is specified in amps. For a robot like the The Robot Kit I'm Using image, around 1 to 1.5 amps per channel is good. The consequence of too low a rating can be disaster, resulting in a robot that barely moves, while the components cook themselves or violently go bang. Too large a controller has consequences for space, weight, and cost: The level of integration can also contribute to size. A tiny board that stacks on a Pi would take up less space than separate boards. Related to size is if the board keeps the camera port on the Raspberry Pi accessible. Soldering As you choose boards for a robot, you will note that some come as kits themselves, requiring parts to be soldered on. If you are already experienced with this, it may be an option. For experienced builders, this becomes a small cost in time depending on the complexity of the soldering. A small header is going to be a very quick and easy job, and a board that comes as a bag of components with a bare board will be a chunk of an evening. Here, I will recommend components that require the least soldering. Connectors Closely related to soldering are the connectors for the motors and batteries. I tend to prefer the screw type connectors. Other types may require matching motors or crimping skills: Conclusion Our robot is space constrained; for this reason, we will be looking at the Raspberry Pi hat type form factor. We are also looking to keep the number of pins it binds to really low. An I2C-based hat will let us do this. The Full Function Stepper Motor Hat (also known as the Full Function Robot Expansion Board) gets us access to all the Pi pins while being a powerful motor controller: It's available in most countries, has space for the ribbon for the camera, and controls servo motors. I recommend the 4tronix PiConZero hat, or assembling a stack of PiBorg hats. These may be harder to source outside of the UK. The reader will need to adapt the code, and consider a tiny shim to retain access to the GPIO pins if using a different board. In this article, we learned about selecting the parts needed to build a basic robot. We looked at the size, wheel, cost, and connectors for the robot chassis and a controller. To learn more about robotics and build your own robot check out this book Learn Robotics Programming. Real-time motion planning for robots made faster and efficient with RapidPlan processor Boston Dynamics adds military-grade mortor (parkour) skills to its popular humanoid Atlas Robot Sex robots, artificial intelligence, and ethics: How desire shapes and is shaped by algorithms
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Fatema Patrawala
23 Aug 2019
7 min read
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Hot Chips 31: IBM Power10, AMD’s AI ambitions, Intel NNP-T, Cerebras largest chip with 1.2 trillion transistors and more

Fatema Patrawala
23 Aug 2019
7 min read
Hot Chips 31, the premiere event for the biggest semiconductor vendors to highlight their latest architectural developments is held in August every year. The event this year was held at the Memorial Auditorium on the Stanford University Campus in California, from August 18-20, 2019. Since its inception it is co-sponsored by IEEE and ACM SIGARCH. Hot Chips is amazing for the level of depth it provides on the latest technology and the upcoming releases in the IoT, firmware and hardware space. This year the list of presentations for Hot Chips was almost overwhelming with a wide range of technical disclosures on the latest chip logic innovations. Almost all the major chip vendors and IP licensees involved in semiconductor logic designs took part: Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Arm, Xilinx, IBM, were on the list. But companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon also took part. There are notable absences from the likes of Apple, who despite being on the Committee, last presented at the conference in 1994. Day 1 kicked off with tutorials and sponsor demos. On the cloud side, Amazon AWS covered the evolution of hypervisors and the AWS infrastructure. Microsoft described its acceleration strategy with FPGAs and ASICs, with details on Project Brainwave and Project Zipline. Google covered the architecture of Google Cloud with the TPU v3 chip.  And a 3-part RISC-V tutorial rounded off by afternoon, so the day was spent well with insights into the latest cloud infrastructure and processor architectures. The detailed talks were presented on Day 2 and Day 3, below are some of the important highlights of the event: IBM’s POWER10 Processor expected by 2021 IBM which creates families of processors to address different segments, with different models for tasks like scale-up, scale-out, and now NVLink deployments. The company is adding new custom models that use new acceleration and memory devices, and that was the focus of this year’s talk at Hot Chips. They also announced about POWER10 which is expected to come with these new enhancements in 2021, they additionally announced, core counts of POWER10 and process technology. IBM also spoke about focusing on developing diverse memory and accelerator solutions to differentiate its product stack with heterogeneous systems. IBM aims to reduce the number of PHYs on its chips, so now it has PCIe Gen 4 PHYs while the rest of the SERDES run with the company's own interfaces. This creates a flexible interface that can support many types of accelerators and protocols, like GPUs, ASICs, CAPI, NVLink, and OpenCAPI. AMD wants to become a significant player in Artificial Intelligence AMD does not have an artificial intelligence–focused chip. However, AMD CEO Lisa Su in a keynote address at Hot Chips 31 stated that the company is working toward becoming a more significant player in artificial intelligence. Lisa stated that the company had adopted a CPU/GPU/interconnect strategy to tap artificial intelligence and HPC opportunity. She said that AMD would use all its technology in the Frontier supercomputer. The company plans to fully optimize its EYPC CPU and Radeon Instinct GPU for supercomputing. It would further enhance the system’s performance with its Infinity Fabric and unlock performance with its ROCM (Radeon Open Compute) software tools. Unlike Intel and NVIDIA, AMD does not have a dedicated artificial intelligence chip or application-specific accelerators. Despite this, Su noted, “We’ll absolutely see AMD be a large player in AI.” AMD is considering whether to build a dedicated AI chip or not. This decision will depend on how artificial intelligence evolves. Lisa explained that companies have been improving their CPU (central processing unit) performance by leveraging various elements. These elements are process technology, die size, TDP (thermal design power), power management, microarchitecture, and compilers. Process technology is the biggest contributor, as it boosts performance by 40%. Increasing die size also boosts performance in the double digits, but it is not cost-effective. While AMD used microarchitecture to boost EPYC Rome server CPU IPC (instructions per cycle) by 15% in single-threaded and 23% in multi-threaded workloads. This IPC improvement is above the industry average IPC improvement of around 5%–8%. Intel’s Nervana NNP-T and Lakefield 3D Foveros hybrid processors Intel revealed fine-grained details about its much-anticipated Spring Crest Deep Learning Accelerators at Hot Chips 31. The Nervana Neural Network Processor for Training (NNP-T) comes with 24 processing cores and a new take on data movement that's powered by 32GB of HBM2 memory. The spacious 27 billion transistors are spread across a 688mm2 die. The NNP-T also incorporates leading-edge technology from Intel-rival TSMC. Intel Lakefield 3D Foveros Hybrid Processors Intel in another presentation talked about Lakefield 3D Foveros hybrid processors that are the first to come to market with Intel's new 3D chip-stacking technology. The current design consists of two dies. The lower die houses all of the typical southbridge features, like I/O connections, and is fabbed on the 22FFL process. The upper die is a 10nm CPU that features one large compute core and four smaller Atom-based 'efficiency' cores, similar to an ARM big.LITTLE processor. Intel calls this a "hybrid x86 architecture," and it could denote a fundamental shift in the company's strategy. Finally, the company stacks DRAM atop the 3D processor in a PoP (package-on-Package) implementation. Cerebras largest chip ever with 1.2 trillion transistors California artificial intelligence startup Cerebras Systems introduced its Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), the world’s largest-ever chip built for neural network processing. Sean Lie the Co-Founder and Chief Hardware Architect at Cerebras Lie presented the gigantic chip ever at Hot Chips 31. The 16nm WSE is a 46,225 mm2 silicon chip which is slightly larger than a 9.7-inch iPad. It features 1.2 trillion transistors, 400,000 AI optimized cores, 18 Gigabytes of on-chip memory, 9 petabyte/s memory bandwidth, and 100 petabyte/s fabric bandwidth. It is 56.7 times larger than the largest Nvidia graphics processing unit, which accommodates 21.1 billion transistors on a 815 mm2 silicon base. NVIDIA’s multi-chip solution for deep neural networks accelerator NVIDIA which announced about designing a test multi-chip solution for DNN computations at a VLSI conference last year, the company explained chip technology at Hot Chips 31 this year. It is currently a test chip which involves a multi-chip DL inference. It is designed for CNNs and has a RISC-V chip controller. It has 36 small chips, 8 Vector MACs per PE, and each chip has 12 PEs and each package has 6x6 chips. Few other notable talks at Hot Chips 31 Microsoft unveiled its new product Hololens 2.0 silicone. It has a holographic processor and a custom silicone. The application processor runs the app, and the HPU modifies the rendered image and sends to the display. Facebook presented details on Zion, its next generation in-memory unified training platform. Zion which is designed for Facebook sparse workloads, has a unified BFLOAT 16 format with CPU and accelerators. Huawei spoke about its Da Vinci architecture, a single Ascend 310 which can deliver 16 TeraOPS of 8-bit integer performance, support real-time analytics across 16 channels of HD video, and consume less than 8W of power. Xiling Versal AI engine Xilinx, the manufacturer of FPGAs, announced its new Versal AI engine last year as a way of moving FPGAs into the AI domain. This year at Hot Chips they expanded on its technology and more. Ayar Labs, an optical chip making startup, showcased results of its work with DARPA (U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Intel on an FPGA chiplet integration platform. The final talk on Day 3 ended with a presentation by Habana, they discussed about an innovative approach to scaling AI Training systems with its GAUDI AI Processor. AMD competes with Intel by launching EPYC Rome, world’s first 7 nm chip for data centers, luring in Twitter and Google Apple advanced talks with Intel to buy its smartphone modem chip business for $1 billion, reports WSJ Alibaba’s chipmaker launches open source RISC-V based ‘XuanTie 910 processor’ for 5G, AI, IoT and self-driving applications
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Savia Lobo
02 May 2018
5 min read
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Should you go with Arduino Uno or Raspberry Pi 3 for your next IoT project?

Savia Lobo
02 May 2018
5 min read
Arduino Uno and Raspberry Pi 3 are the go-to options for IoT projects. They're tiny computers that can make a big impact in how we connect devices to each other, and to the internet. But they can also be a lot of fun too - at their best, they do both. For example, Arduino Uno and Raspberry Pi were used to make a custom underwater camera solution for filming the Netflix documentary, Chasing Coral. They were also behind the Autonomous racing robot. However, how are the two microcomputers different? If you're confused about which one you should start using, here's a look at the key features of both the Arduino Uno and the Raspberry Pi 3.This will give you a clearer view on what fits your project well, or maybe just help you decide what to include on your birthday wishlist. Comparing the Arduino Uno and Raspberry Pi 3 Raspberry Pi 3 has a Broadcom BCM2837 SoC with it can handle multiple tasks at one time. It is a Single Board Computer (SBC), which means it is a fully functional computer with a dedicated processor, memory, and is capable of running an OS - Raspberry Pi 3 runs on Linux. It can run multiple programs as it has its own USB ports, audio outputs, a graphic driver for HDMI output. Arduino Uno is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega328, an 8-bit microcontroller with 32KB of Flash memory and 2KB of RAM, which is not as powerful as SBCs. However, they are a great choice for quick setups. Microcontrollers are a good pick when controlling small devices  such as LEDs, motors, several different types of sensors, but cannot run a full operating system. The Arduino Uno runs one program at a time. One can also install other operating systems such as Android, Windows 10, or Firefox OS. Let's look at the features and how one stands out better than the other: Speed The Raspberry Pi 3 (1.2 GHz) is much faster than Arduino (16 MHz). This means it can complete day-to-day tasks such as web surfing, playing videos, with greater ease From this perspective, Raspberry Pi is the go-to choice for media centered applications. Winner: Raspberry Pi 3 Easy time interface Arduino Uno offers a simplified approach for project building. It has easy time interfacing with presence of analog sensors, motor, and other components. By contrast, the Raspberry Pi 3  has a more complicated route if you want to set up projects. For example, to take sensor readings you'll need to install libraries and connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Winner: Arduino Uno Bluetooth/ Internet connectivity Raspberry Pi 3 connects to Bluetooth devices and the internet directly using Ethernet or by connecting to Wi-Fi. The Arduino Uno can do that only with the help of a Shield that adds internet or Bluetooth connectivity. HATS (Hardware Attached on Top) and Shields can be used on both devices to give them additional functionality. For example. HATs are used on the Raspberry Pi 3, to control an RBG Matrix, add a touchscreen, or even create an arcade system. Shields that can be used on the Arduino Uno include a Relay Shield, a Touchscreen Shield, or a Bluetooth Shield. There are hundreds of Shields and HATs that provide the functionality that you regularly use. Winner: Raspberry Pi 3 Supporting ports The Raspberry Pi 3 has an HDMI port, audio port, 4 USB ports, camera port, and LCD port, which is ideal for media applications. On the other hand, Arduino Uno does not have any of these ports in the board. However, some of these ports can be added on the Arduino Uno with the help of Shields. Arduino Uno has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. Winner: Raspberry Pi 3 Other features Set-up time Raspberry Pi 3 takes longer to set up. You'll also probably need additional components such as a HDMI cable, a monitor, a cable, and a keyboard and mouse. For the Arduino Uno you simply have to plug it in. The code then runs immediately. Winner: Arduino Uno Affordable Price Arduino Uno is much cheaper. It's around $20 compared to Raspberry Pi 3, which is around $35. It's important to note that this excludes the cost of cables, keyboards, mouse and other additional hardware.As mentioned above, you don't need those extras with the Arduino Uno. Winner: Arduino Uno Both Arduino Uno and Raspberry Pi 3 are great in their individual offerings. Arduino Uno would be an ideal board if you want to get started with electronics, and begin building fun and engaging hands-on projects. It's great for learning the basics of how sensors and actuators work, and an essential tool for one's rapid prototyping needs. On the other hand, Raspberry Pi 3 is great for projects that need an online connection and have multiple operations running  at the same time. Pick as per your need! You can also check some of our exciting books on Arduino Uno and Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi 3 Home Automation Projects: Bringing your home to life using Raspberry Pi 3, Arduino, and ESP8266 Build Supercomputers with Raspberry Pi 3 Internet of Things with Arduino Cookbook   How to build a sensor application to measure Ambient Light 5 reasons to choose AWS IoT Core for your next IoT project Build your first Raspberry Pi project
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Michael Ang
31 Dec 2014
5 min read
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FreeCAD: Open Source Design on the Bleeding Edge

Michael Ang
31 Dec 2014
5 min read
Are you looking for software for designing physical objects for 3D printing or physical construction? Computer-aided design (CAD) software is used extensively in engineering when designing objects that will be physically constructed. Programs such as Blender or SketchUp can be used to design models for 3D printing but there’s a catch: it’s quite possible to design models that look great onscreen but don’t meet the "solid object" requirements of 3D printing. Since CAD programs are targeted at building real-world objects, they can be a better fit for designing things that will exist not just on the screen but in the physical world. D-printable Servo controlled Silly-String Trigger by sliptonic FreeCAD distinguishes itself by being open source, cross-platform, and designed for parametric modeling. Anyone is free to download or modify FreeCAD, and it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. With parametric modeling, it’s possible to go back and change parameters in your design and have the rest of your design update. For example, if you design a project box to hold your electronics project and decide it needs to be wider, you could change the width parameter and the box would automatically update. FreeCAD allows you to design using its visual interface and also offers complete control via Python scripting. Changing the size of a hole by changing a parameter I recommend Bram De Vries’ FreeCAD tutorials on YouTube to help you get started with FreeCAD. The FreeCAD website has links to download the software and a getting started guide. FreeCAD is under heavy development (by a small group of individuals) so expect to encounter a little strangeness from time to time, and save often! If you’re used to using software developed by a large and well-compensated engineering team you may be surprised that certain features are missing, but on the other hand it’s really quite amazing how much FreeCAD offers in software that is truly free. You might find a few gaping holes in functionality, but you also won’t find any features that are locked out until you go "Premium". If you didn’t think I was geeky enough for loving FreeCAD, let me tell you my favorite feature: everything is scriptable using Python. FreeCAD is primarily written in Python and you have access to a live Python console while the program is running (View->Views->Python console) that you can use to interactively write code and immediately see the results. Scripting in FreeCAD isn’t through some limited programming interface, or with a limited programming language: you have access to pretty much everything inside FreeCAD using standard Python code. You can script repetitive tasks in the UI, generate new parts from scratch, or even add whole new "workbenches" that appear alongside the built-in features in the FreeCAD UI. Creating a simple part interactively with Python There are many example macros to try. One of my favorites allows you to generate an airfoil shape from online airfoil profiles. My own Polygon Construction Kit (Polycon) is built inside FreeCAD. The basic idea of Polycon is to convert a simple polygon model into a physical object by creating a set of 3D-printed connectors that can be used to reconstruct the polygon in the real world. The process involves iterating over the 3D model and generating a connector for each vertex of the polygon. Then each connector needs to be exported as an STL file for the 3D printing software. By implementing Polycon as a FreeCAD module I was able to leverage a huge amount of functionality related to loading the 3D model, generating the connector shapes, and exporting the files for printing. FreeCAD’s UI makes it easy to see how the connectors look and make adjustments to each one as necessary. Then I can export all the connectors as well-organized STL files, all by pressing one button! Doing this manually instead of in code could literally take hundreds of hours, even for a simple model. FreeCAD is developed by a small group of people and is still in the "alpha" stage, but it has the potential to become a very important tool in the open source ecosystem. FreeCAD fills the need for an open source CAD tool the same way that Blender and GIMP do for 3D graphics and image editing. Another open source CAD tool to check out is OpenSCAD. This tool lets you design solid 3D objects (the kind we like to print!) using a simple programming language. OpenSCAD is a great program–its simple syntax and interface is a great way to start designing solid objects using code and thinking in "X-Y-Z". My first implementation of Polycon used OpenSCAD, but I eventually switched over to FreeCAD since it offers the ability to analyze shapes as well as create them, and Python is much more powerful than OpenSCAD’s programming language. If you’re building 3D models to be printed or are just interested in trying out computer-aided design, FreeCAD is worth a look. Commercial offerings are likely going to be more polished and reliable, but FreeCAD’s parametric modeling, scriptability, and cross-platform support in an open source package are quite impressive. It’s a great tool for designing objects to be built in the real world. About the Author Michael Ang is a Berlin-based artist and engineer working at the intersection of art, engineering, and the natural world. His latest project is the Polygon Construction Kit, a toolkit used to bridge the virtual and physical realms by constructing real-world objects from simple 3D models. He is one of the organizers of Art Hack Day, an event for hackers whose medium is tech and artists whose medium is technology.
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Vincy Davis
26 Jun 2019
9 min read
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10+ reasons to love Raspberry Pi

Vincy Davis
26 Jun 2019
9 min read
It’s 2019 and unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what a Raspberry Pi is. A series of credit-card-sized board computers, initially developed to promote computer science in schools, has now released its Raspberry Pi 4 Model B in the market yesterday. Read More: Raspberry Pi 4 is up for sale at $35, with 64-bit ARM core, up to 4GB memory, full-throughput gigabit Ethernet and more! Since its release in 2012, Raspberry Pi has had several iterations and variations. Today it has become a phenomenon, it’s the world's third best-selling, general-purpose computer. It's inside laptops, tablets, and robots. This year its offering students and young people an opportunity to conduct scientific investigations in space, by writing computer programs that run on Raspberry Pi computers aboard the International Space Station. Developers around the world are using different models of this technology to implement varied applications. What do you do with your Raspberry Pi? Following the release of Raspberry Pi 4, an interesting HN thread on applications of the Raspberry Pi exploded with over a thousand comments and over 1.5k votes. The original thread poster asked, “I have Raspberry Pi and I mainly use it for VPN and piHole. I’m curious if you have one, have you found it useful? What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?” Below are some select use cases from the thread. Innovative: Raspberry Pi Zero transformed a braille display into a full-feature Linux laptop A braille user transformed a braille display into a full-feature Linux laptop, using a Raspberry Pi Zero. The user used a braille display which featured a small compartment with micro-USB and converted it into a ARM-based, monitorless, Linux laptop with a keyboard and a braille display. It can be charged/powered via USB so it can also be run from a power bank or a solar charger, thus potentially being able to run for days, rather than just hours, without needing a standard wall-jack. This helped the user to save space, power and weight. Monitor Climate change effects Changes in climate have been affecting each and everyone of us, in some way or the other. Some developers are using Raspberry Pi innovatively to tackle these climatic changes. Monitoring inhouse CO2 levels A developer working with the IBM Watson Group states that he uses several Raspberry Pis to monitor CO2 levels in his house. Each Raspberry Pi has a CO2 sensor, with a Python script to retrieve data from sensor and upload it to a server, which is also a Raspberry Pi. Later, on detecting that his bedroom has high level of CO2, he improved ventilation and reduced the CO2 levels around. Measuring conditions of coral reefs Nemo Pi is a Nemo foundation’s technology, which works as an underground weather station. It uses Raspberry Pi computers to protect coral reefs from climate change by measuring temperature, visibility, pH levels, and the concentration of CO2 and nitrogen oxide at each anchor point. Checking weather updates remotely You can also use the Raspberry Pi for ‘Weather Monitoring’, to check the changes in the weather remotely using a smartphone. The main conditions in the weather monitor are the temperature, humidity, and the air quality. Raspberry Pi 3 model B, can be programmed such that it takes data from Arduino, and depending on the data acquired, the cameras are actuated. The Pi receives data from sensors and uploads it to the cloud so that appropriate action can be taken. Making Home Automation feasible Raspberry Pi has been designed to let you create whatever you can dream of, and of course developers are making full use of it. There are many instances of developers using Raspberry Pi to make their home automation more feasible. Automatic pet door drive A developer have used this technology to install a fire-protection-approved door drive for their pets. It is used along with another Raspberry Pi which analyzes a video stream and detects the pet. If the pet is in the frame for ‘n’ amount of time, a message is sent to the Pi connected to the door drive, which opens up slightly, to let the pet in. Home automation Raspberry Pi 3 model works with the Home Assistant with a Z-Wave USB Dongle, and provides climate, covers, lights, locks, sensors, switches, and thermostats information. There are many takers of the RaZberry card, which is a tiny daughter card that sits on top of the Raspberry PI GPIO connector. It is powered by the Raspberry PI board with 3.3 V and communicates using UART TTL signals. It supports home automation and is not only compatible with all models of Raspberry Pi, but also with all third party software. Watering a plant via a reddit bot! There’s another simple instance where a subreddit has control over the watering of a live plant. The Pi runs a reddit bot that reads the votes, and switch on the pump to water. It also collects data about sunlight, moisture, temp and humidity to help form the decision about watering. Build easy electronic projects Raspberry Pi can be used to learn coding and to build electronics projects, and for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word processing, and browsing the internet to learn programming and execute projects. Make a presentation Rob Reilly, an independent consultant states that he uses Raspberry Pi in his Steampunk conference badge while giving tech talks. He plugs it in the HDMI, powers up the badge and runs slides with a nano-keyboard/mousepad and LibreOffice. He says that this works great for him as it displays a promotional video on it's 3.5" touch-screen and runs on a cell phone power pack. Control a 3D printer, a camera or even IoT apps A user of Raspberry Pi states that he makes use of the Raspberry Pi 3 model to use OctoPrint.  It is an open source web interface for 3D printers which allows to control and monitor all aspects of printer and print jobs. A system architect says that he regularly uses Raspberry Pi for digital signage, controlled servos, and as cameras. Currently, he also uses a Pi Zero W model for a demo Azure IoT solutions. Raspberry Pi is also used as a networked LED marquee controller. Read More: Raspberry Pi Zero W: What you need to know and why it’s great FullPageOS is a Raspberry Pi distribution to display one webpage in full screen. It includes Chromium out of the box and the scripts necessary to load it at boot. This repository contains the source script to generate the distribution out of an existing Raspbian distro image. Also a developer, who’s also the Former VP of Engineering at Blekko Inc search engine states that he uses Raspberry Pi for several purposes such as running the waveforms live software from Digilent and hooks to an Analog Discovery on his workbench. He also uses Raspberry Pi for driving a display which showcases a dashboard of various things like Nagios alerts, data trends, etc. Read More: Intelligent mobile projects with TensorFlow: Build a basic Raspberry Pi robot that listens, moves, sees, and speaks [Tutorial] Enjoy Gaming with Raspberry Pi There are many Raspberry Pi-Exclusive Games, available for its users. Minecraft PE is one such game, which comes preinstalled with Raspbian. Most games designed to run natively on the Raspberry Pi are written in Python. Raspberry Pi is being used to stream PlayStation to backups over SMB by networking the onboard Ethernet port of the Pi, to allow access to a Samba Share service running on the Pi. It allows seamless playback of games with heavy Full Motion Video sequences. When an additional support for Xlink Kai is provided to play LAN enabled games over the Pi’s WiFi connection, it enables smooth connection for lag-free multiplayer on original hardware. A user on Hacker News comments that he uses RetroPie, which has a library of many interesting games. Loved not only by developers, but also by the general public These 35$ masterpieces of Raspberry Pi give big power in the hands of someone with little imagination and a spare of electronics. With its fast processing and better network connectivity, even beginners can use Raspberry Pi for practical purposes. A college student, on Hacker News claims that he uses a Raspberry Pi 3b+ model to automate his data entry job by using Python and Selenium, which is a portable framework for testing web applications and provides a playback tool for authoring functional tests. He says that since its automated, it allows him to take long coffee breaks and not worry about it, while travelling. Kevin Smith, the co-founder of Vault states that his office uses a Raspberry Pi and blockchain NFTs to control the coffee machine. An owner of the NFT, once authenticated, can select the coffee type on their phone which then signals the Raspberry Pi to make the particular coffee type, by jumping the contacts that was previously used to be pressed by the machine's buttons. Another interesting use of Raspberry Pi is by a user who used the Raspberry Pi technology to get real-time information from the local transit authority, and the GPS installed buses to help those stranded at the bus station. Raspberry Pi 3 models can also be installed in a Tesla car within the internal network as a bastion box, to run a software which provides interaction with the car’s entertainment system. Read More: Build your first Raspberry Pi project Last year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched a new device called the Raspberry Pi TV HAT, which lets you decode and stream live TV. It connects to the Raspberry Pi via a GPIO connector and has a port for a TV antenna connector. Tensorflow 1.9 has also announced that they will officially support Raspberry Pi, thus enabling users to try their hand on live machine learning projects. There’s no doubt that, with all its varied features and low priced computers, developers and the  general public have many opportunities to experiment with Raspberry Pi and get their work done. From students to international projects, Raspberry Pi is being used assuredly in many cases. You can now install Windows 10 on a Raspberry Pi 3 Raspberry Pi opens its first offline store in England Setting up a Raspberry Pi for a robot – Headless by Default [Tutorial]
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Michael Ang
26 Sep 2014
7 min read
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What 6 Months with an Open Source 3D Printer Taught Me

Michael Ang
26 Sep 2014
7 min read
3D printing is certainly a hot topic today, and having your own printer at home is becoming increasingly popular. There are a lot of options to choose from, and in this post I'll talk about why I chose to go with an open source 3D printer instead of a proprietary pre-built one, and what my experience with the printer has been. By sharing my 6 months of experience I hope to help you decide which kind of printer is best for you. My Prusa i3 Berlin 3D printer after 6 months Back in 2006 I had the chance to work with a 3D printer when the thought of having a 3D printer at home was mostly a fantasy. The printer in question was made by Stratasys, at the Eyebeam Art+Tech center in New York City. That printer cost upwards of $30,000—not exactly something to have at your house! The idea of doing something wrong with the printer and having to call a technician in to fix it was also a little intimidating. (My website has some of my early experiments with 3D printing.) Flash forward to today and there are literally dozens (or probably hundreds) of 3D printer designs available on the market. The designs range from high-end printers that can print plastic with embedded carbon fiber, to popular designs from MakerBot and DIY kits on eBay. One of the first low-cost 3D printers was the RepRap. The goal of the RepRap project is to create a self-replicating machine, where the parts for the machine can be fabricated by the machine itself. In practice this means that many of the parts of a RepRap-style 3D printer are actually printed on a RepRap printer. Most people who build RepRap printers start with a kit and then assemble the printer themselves. If the idea of a self-replicating machine sounds interesting, then RepRap may be for you. RepRap is now more of a philosophy and community than any specific printer. Once you assemble your printer you can make changes and upgrades to the machine by printing yourself new parts. There are certainly some challenges to building your own printer, though, so let's look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of going with an open source printer (building from a kit) versus a pre-packaged printer. Advantages of a pre-assembled commercial printer: Should print right out of the box Less tinkering needed to get good prints Each printer of a particular model is the same, making it easier to get support Advantages of an open source (RepRap-style) kit: Typically cheaper than pre-built Learn more about how the printer works Easier to make changes to the machine, and complete plans are available Easier to experiment with, for example different printing materials Disadvantages to pre-assembled: Making changes may void your warranty Typically more expensive May be locked into specific software or filament Disadvantages of open source: Can take a lot of work to get good prints Potentially lots of decisions to make, not pre-packaged May spend as much time on the machine as actually printing Technical differences aside, the idea of being part of an open source community based on the freedom to share knowledge and designs was really appealing. With that in mind I had a look at different open source 3D printer designs and capabilities. Since the RepRap designs are open source, anyone can modify them and create a "new" printer. In the end I settled on a variation of the Prusa i3 RepRap printer that is designed in Berlin, where I live. The process of getting a RepRap printer working can be challenging, because there's so much to learn at first. The Prusa i3 Berlin can be ordered as a kit with everything needed to build the printer, and with a workshop where you build the printer with the machine's designers over the course of a weekend. Two days to build a working 3D printer from a pile of parts? Yes, it can be done! Most of the parts in the printer kit Building the printer at the workshop saved an incredible amount of time. Questions like "does this look tight enough?" and "how does this part fit in here?" were answered on the spot. There are very active forums for RepRap printers with lots of people willing to help diagnose problems. But a few questions with even a one day turnaround time quickly adds up. By the end of the two days my printer was fully assembled and actually printed out a little plastic robot! This was pretty satisfying knowing that the printer had started the weekend as a bundle of parts. Quite a lot of wires Assembling the plastic extruders Thus began my 6-month (so far) adventure in 3D printing. It has been an awesome and at times frustrating journey. I mainly bought my printer to create connectors for my Polygon Construction Kit (Polycon). I'm printing connectors that assemble with some rods to make structures much larger than could be printed in one piece. My printer has been working well for that, but the main issue has been reliability and need for continual tweaking. Instead of just "hitting print" there is a constant struggle to keep everything lined up and printing smoothly. Printing on my RepRap is a lot more like baking a soufflé than ordering a burger. Completed printer in my studio Some highlights of the journey so far: Printing out parts strong enough to assemble some of my Polycon sculptures and show them at an art show in Berlin Designing my own accessories for the printer and having them downloaded more than 1,000 times on Thingiverse (not bad for some rather specialized tools) Printing upgrades for the printer, based on the continually updated source files Being able to get replacement parts at the hardware store, when one of the long threaded rods in the printer wore out Sculpture with 3D printed connectors. Image courtesy of Lehrter Siebzehn. And the lowlights: Never quite knowing if a print is going to complete successfully (though this can be a problem with many printers) Having enough trouble getting my first extruder working reliably for long prints that I haven't had time to get dual-extrusion prints working Accessory I designed for calibrating the printer, which I then shared with others As time goes on and I keep working on the printer, it's slowly getting more reliable, and I'm able to do more complicated prints without constant intervention. The learning process has been valuable too - I'm now able to look at basically every part of the machine and understand exactly what it's supposed to do. Once you really understand how a 3D printer works, you start to wonder what kind of upgrades are possible, or what other kinds of machine you could design. Printed upgrade parts A pre-packaged printer makes a lot of sense if you're mostly interested in printing things. The learning process for building your own printer can either be interesting or a frustrating obstacle, depending on your point of view. When you look at a print from your RepRap printer, it's incredible to consider that it is all built off the contributions and sharing of knowledge of a large community. If you're not just interested in making things, but making things that make things, then a RepRap printer might be for you! Upgraded printer with polygon sculpture About the author: Michael Ang is a Berlin-based artist and engineer working at the intersection of art, engineering, and the natural world. His latest project is the Polygon Construction Kit, a toolkit for bridging the virtual and physical worlds by translating simple 3D models into physical structures.
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Savia Lobo
15 May 2018
8 min read
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Cognitive IoT: How Artificial Intelligence is remoulding Industrial and Consumer IoT

Savia Lobo
15 May 2018
8 min read
Internet of Things (IoT) has gained a huge traction due to the ability to gather data from sensors embedded within a variety of IoT devices including Close-circuit cameras, vehicles, smart homes, smart appliances, and many more. Think of IoT as a network of devices which gathers raw and real-time data, analyzes them, and provides desired outputs that benefit the users. But what after the data is analyzed? What is done with the analyzed report? The data has to be acted upon. Here, Artificial Intelligence can do the needful. AI can get hold of all that data crunched by IoT devices and act on it in a successful and organized manner. Industries that already use IoT devices can automate certain mundane workflows such as documentation, machine maintenance notification alert, and so on when powered by AI. Intelligent things with AI-backed IoT The saying, ‘With great power come great responsibilities’, is true for AI powered IoT.AI backed IoT devices can make complex decisions, perform self-learning, and can carry out autonomous decision making. One can group IoT applications broadly into two categories based on who the end user is, i.e. Industrial IoT for enterprises and consumer IoT for individual consumers. Let’s look into some of the major domains that AI has enhanced. 1. Industrial IoT Also known as the IIoT, IoT has impacted industries by bringing in unprecedented opportunities. However, it has also brought in a wave of new risks to businesses. IIoT provides the internet with a new ability to control machines, factories and the industrial infrastructure. Some of the characteristics of IIoT include, Improved Interoperability where the machines and sensors communicate via IoT Availability of Transparent information with the presence of more sensors, which means abundance of information. Autonomous decision making now lies in the hands of the IoT devices, where they can detect emergency situations, for instance when a machine servicing is required and can act on it immediately.    Manufacturing Manufacturing is by far the biggest industry affected by the IoT wave. According to a report, ‘global manufacturers will invest $70 billion on IoT solutions in 2020, which is up from the $29 billion they spent in 2015’.Let’s see how some of the processes in manufacturing get a lift with AI enabled IoT: Detection of machine health using Predictive maintenance : Predictive maintenance involves collection and evaluation of data from machines in order to increase efficiency and optimize the maintenance processes. With predictive maintenance, manufacturers can determine the condition of their equipments and also predict when machines need maintenance. A startup named Konux, based in Munich, Germany, has developed a machine-learning powered monitoring system for train switches. The Konux switch sensor can be retrofitted onto existing train networks, providing real-time monitoring of track conditions and rolling stock. Data is transmitted wirelessly to the Konux Kora platform, which uses predictive algorithms based on machine learning to alert staff to specific problems as well as drive recommendations for maintenance. Supply Chain Optimization : With an IoT-optimized supply chain, manufacturers can get hold of real-time data and analyze issues to act upon them before the onset of any major problem. This in turn reduces inventory and capital requirements. In order to track a product, companies have set up smart shelves, which keep a record of when the product has been removed, the total no. of products, and so on. This smart shelf is connected to their entire network which is linked to their planning and demand sensing engine. Here, the AI powered decision support systems help to translate those demand signals into production and order processes. Read ‘How AI is transforming the manufacturing Industry’ for a more indepth look at AI’s impact on the manufacturing industry. Retail Adoption of IIoT in retail has upped the game for online retailers. Retail stores now comprise of in-store advertising and gesture walls. These walls help customers search merchandize, offers, and buy products with simple gestures. Retailers also have Automated Checkouts, or most simply self-checkout kiosks. This enables customers to avoid long queues and pay for products using a mobile app based payments system which scans the QR code embedded on the products, contactless payments or other means. With IoT enabled sensors, retailers can now extract insights about the most popular areas people pass by and where they stop to see the merchandize. Retailers can then send promotional text messages, discount coupons directly on the customer’s phone while they are in the store’s vicinity. For instance, Apple’s iBeacon enables devices to alert apps and websites about customer location. Retailers have also adopted Inventory Optimizations by using digital shelf and RFID techniques for managing their inventories effectively. Healthcare IoT in healthcare is proving to be a boon for patients by decreasing costs and reducing multiple visits to doctors. With these healthcare solutions, patient monitoring can be done in real-time. Due to this real-time data, diseases can be treated well in advance before they reach a malignant stage. These IoT enabled healthcare solutions provide accurate collection of data, automated workflows which are combined with data driven decisions.This cuts down on waste, reducing system costs and most importantly minimizes errors. Also, creation and management of drugs is a major expenditure in the healthcare industry. With IoT processes and devices, it is possible to manage these costs better. A new generation of “smart pills” is allowing healthcare organizations to ensure that a patient takes his or her medication, while also collecting other vital data. Apart from these major applications of IoT in the Industrial sectors, it has also affected sectors such as telecommunications, energy, and in the Government. Next up, we move on to explaining how AI backed IoT can affect and enhance the consumer domain. 2. Consumer IoT Consumers go for services that provide them with an easy way to do mundane tasks. Let us have a look at some examples where AI has intelligently assisted IoT for consumers benefit. Connected Vehicles Connected vehicles are vehicles that use any of a number of different communication technologies to communicate with the driver, other cars on the road (vehicle-to-vehicle [V2V]): This tech helps wirelessly exchange information about the speed and position of surrounding vehicles. This helps in avoiding crashes, ease traffic congestion, and improve the environment. roadside infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure [V2I]): These technologies capture vehicle-generated traffic data wirelessly and provide information such as warnings from the infrastructure to the vehicle that inform the driver of safety, mobility, or environment-related conditions. the “Cloud” [V2C]: A Vehicle-to-Cloud infrastructure integrates NaaS (Network As A Service) into the automotive ecosystem and allows provisioning of vehicle-based services for automobile user. Connected homes These AI enabled IoT devices and services can automatically respond to preset rules, be remotely accessed and managed by mobile apps or a browser, and send alerts or messages to the user. For instance, Google Home, with a built-in Google Assistant, controls home and helps people with lists, translation, news, music, calendar and much more. Google Home can also answer any questions asked to it. This is because of Google’s huge Knowledge Graph that it is connected to. Similarly, Amazon’s Echo, a voice-controlled speaker and Apple’s homepod also assist in collecting data they get via voice. The AI can also get all devices within the home connected, with the help of Wi-Fi. With the latest IFTTT technology, your Google Home can talk to Nest and adjust the temperature of your home as per your requirement or the external temperature change. Health and lifestyle AI integrated with predictive analytics within the embedded devices such as fitness apps, health trackers, diet planners, and so on, makes them intelligent and personalized. For instance, Fitbit coach app paired with the Fitbit has a huge database. The app uses complex algorithms to extract meaningful information from the user data. This data is further used to recommend highly-tailored workout plans. Also, AthGene, uses ML algorithms to convert genetic information into valuable insights for customizing fitness regimen, diet plans, and lifestyle changes for users. IoT was only about devices monitoring data and giving insights in real-time. But AI added the efficiency factor, and also gave the power to these systems to take decisions. AI with IoT has a bright future; one can expect smart machines managed via Echo or Google Home in the future. Read Next How Google’s DeepMind is creating images with artificial intelligence Customer Relationship management just got better with Artificial Intelligence 5 Ways Artificial Intelligence is Transforming the Gaming Industry
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Raka Mahesa
31 Jan 2018
5 min read
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How IoT is going to change tech teams

Raka Mahesa
31 Jan 2018
5 min read
The Internet of Things is going to transform the way we live in the future. It will change how we commute, how we work, even simple day to day activities. But one thing that’s often overlooked when we talk about the internet of things is how it will impact IT teams. We’ve seen a lot of change in the shape of the modern IT team over the last 10 years thanks to things like DevOps, but IoT is going to shape things further in the near future.  To better understand how the Internet of Things will shape IT teams in the future, we first need to understand the application of the Internet of Things, especially in the sector closest to IT teams, the enterprise sector. IoT in the enterprise sector If you look at consumer media, the most common applications of the Internet of Things are the small-scale ones like smart gadgets and smart home systems. Unfortunately, this class of IoT products hasn't really caught up with mainstream consumers; its audience is limited to hobbyists and people in the tech. However, it's a whole different story with the enterprise sector becuse companies all over the world are starting to realize the benefit of applying IoT in their line of business.  Different industries have different applications of IoT. Usually though, IoT is used to either increase efficiency or reduce cost. For example, a shipping service may apply a monitoring system on their vehicles to track their speed and mileage to find ways to reduce fuel usage. Similarly, an airline company could apply sensors on their fleet of airplanes to monitor engine conditions to maintain it properly. A company may also apply IoT to manage its energy consumption so that it can reduce unneeded expenses. What new skills does IoT demand of tech pros All of these applications of IoT are going to require new skills and maybe even new job roles. So while we’ll see efficiencies thanks to these innovations, to really make an impact its still going to need both personal and organizational investment in skills and knowledge to ensure IoT is really helping to drive positive change. IoT and the second data explosion Let’s start with the most obvious change – the growth of data. Yes, the big data explosion has been happening all around us for the last decade, but IoT is bringing with it a second explosion that will be even bigger. This means everyone is going to have to become more data-savvy. That’s not to say that everyone will need to moonlight as a data scientist, but they will need an awareness of how data is stored and processed, who needs access to it and who needs to act on it. Device management will become more important than ever IoT isn’t just about data. It’s also about devices. With more gadgets and sensors connected to a given network, device management and maintenance will be an essential part of the IT team’s work. To tackle this problem, the team will need to grow bigger to handle more work, or they will need to use a more powerful device management tool that can handle a big amount of connected devices. New security risks presented by IoT An increase in the number of connected devices also presents increased security risks. This means pressure will be on IT departments to  IT team will need to tighten up security. Managing networks is one part of that, but a further challenge will be managing the human side of security – ensuring good practice is followed by staff and taking steps to minimize social engineering threats. IT teams will have to customize IoT solutions to meet their needs IoT doesn’t yet have many standards. That means today’s organizations face opportunities and challenges in how they customize solutions and tools for their own needs. This can be daunting, but for people working in IT teams it’s also really exciting – it gives them more control and ownership of the work they are doing. Third party solutions will no doubt remain, but they won’t be quite so important when it comes to IoT. True, companies like IBM will be working on IoT solutions right now to capture the market; however, because these innovations are in their infancy there’s a limit on traditional technology corporations’ ability to shape and define the IoT landscape in the way they have done with innovations in the past.  And that's just a small bit of how the Internet of Things will affect the IT team. When IoT takes off, it will change our lives in the most unimaginable ways possible, so of course there will be even more changes that will happen with the IT teams in charge of this. But then again, the world of technology is ripe with changes and disruptions, so I'm sure we're all used to changes and will be able to adapt. Raka Mahesa is a game developer at Chocoarts who is interested in digital technology in general. Outside of work, he enjoys working on his own projects, with Corridoom VR being his latest released game. Raka also regularly tweets @legacy99.
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Savia Lobo
19 Apr 2018
5 min read
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5 reasons to choose AWS IoT Core for your next IoT project

Savia Lobo
19 Apr 2018
5 min read
Many cloud service providers have been marching towards adopting IoT (Internet of Things) services to attract more customers. This league includes top cloud merchants such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, and much recently, Google. Among these, Amazon Web Services have been the most popular. Its AWS IoT Core service is a fully-managed cloud platform that provides IoT devices with an easy and secure connection to interact with cloud applications and other IoT devices. AWS IoT Core can keep track of billions of IoT devices, with the messages travelling to and from them. It processes and routes those messages to the AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely. This means, with the help of AWS IoT Core, you can keep track of all your devices and have a real-time communication with them. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of competition around cloud platforms to host IoT services. Users are bound to a specific cloud platform for a varied set of reasons such as a yearly subscription, by choice, or other reasons. Here are 5 reasons to choose AWS IoT core for your IoT projects: Build applications on the platform of your choice with AWS IoT Core Device SDK AWS IoT Core Device SDK is the primary mode of connection between your application and the AWS IoT core. It uses the MQTT, HTTP, or webSockets protocols to effectively connect and exchange messages with this service. The languages supported by the AWS IoT device SDK are C, Arduino, and JavaScript. The SDK provides developers with mobile SDKs for Android and iOS, and a bunch of SDKs for Embedded C, Python and many more. It also includes open-source libraries, developer guides with samples, and porting guides. With these features, developers can build novel IoT products and solutions on the hardware platform of their choice. AWS IoT Summit 2018 held recently in Sydney shed light on cloud technologies and how it can help businesses lower costs, improve efficiency and innovate at scale. It had sessions dedicated to IoT. (Intelligence of Things: IoT, AWS DeepLens, and Amazon SageMaker) Handle the underlying infrastructure and protocol support with Device Gateway The device gateway acts as an entry gate for IoT devices to connect to the Amazon Web Services (AWS). It handles multiple protocols, which ensures secure and effective connection of the IoT devices with the IoT Core. The list of protocols include MQTT, WebSockets, and HTTP 1.1. Also, with the device gateway, one does not have to worry about the infrastructure as it automatically manages and scales huge amount of devices at ease. Authentication and Authorization is now easy with AWS methods of authentication AWS IoT Core supports SigV4, an AWS method of authentication, X.509 certificate based authentication, and customer created token based authentication. The user can create, deploy and manage certificates and policies for the devices from the console or using the API. AWS IoT Core also supports connections from users’ mobile apps using Amazon Cognito, which creates a unique ID for app users and can be used to retrieve temporary, limited-privilege AWS credentials. AWS IoT Core also enables temporary AWS credentials after a device has authenticated with an X.509 certificate. This is done so that the device can more easily access other AWS services such as DynamoDB or S3. Determine device’s current state automatically with Device Shadow Device shadow is a JSON document, which stores and retrieves the current state for a device. It provides persistent representations such as the last reported state and the desired future state of one’s device even when the device is offline. With Device Shadow, one can easily build applications to interact with the applications by providing REST APIs. It aids applications to set their desired future state without having to request for device starting state. AWS IoT core differentiates between the desire state and the last reported state. It can further command the device to make up the difference. Route messages both internally and externally using AWS Rules Engine The Rules Engine helps build IoT applications without having to manage any infrastructure. Based on the rules defined, the Rules engine evaluates all the incoming messages within the AWS IoT Core, transforms it, and delivers them to other devices or cloud services. One can author or write rules within the management console using the SQL-like syntax The Rules Engine can also route messages to AWS endpoints such as AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service with built-in Kibana integration. It can also reach external endpoints using AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). There are many other reasons to choose AWS IoT Core for your projects. However, it is purely one’s choice as many might already be using or bound to other cloud services. For those, who haven’t yet started, they may choose AWS for a plethora of other cloud services that they offer, which includes AWS IoT Core too.  
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Michael Ang
02 Sep 2015
5 min read
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Visit a 3D printing filament factory - 3dk.berlin

Michael Ang
02 Sep 2015
5 min read
Have you ever wondered where the filament for your 3D printer comes from and how it’s made? I recently had the chance to visit 3dk.berlin, a local filament manufacturer in Berlin. 3dk.berlin distinguishes itself by offering a huge variety of colors for their filament. As a designer it’s great to have a large palette of colors to choose from, and I chose 3dk filament for my Polygon Construction Kit workshop at Thingscon 2015 (they’re sponsoring the workshop). Today we’ll be looking at how one filament producer takes raw plastic and forms it into the colored filament you can use in your 3D printer. Some of the many colors offered by 3dk.berlin 3dk.berlin is located at the very edge of Berlin, in the area of Heiligensee which is basically its own small town. 3dk is a family-owned business run by Volker Bernhardt as part of BERNHARDT Kunststoffverarbeitungs GmbH (that’s German for "plastics processing company"). 3dk is focused on bringing BERNHARDT’s experience with injection moulded and extruded plastics to the new field of 3D printing. Inside the factory neutral-colored plastic pellets are mixed with colored "master batch" pellets and then extruded into filament. The extruding machine melts and mixes the pellets, then squeezes them through a nozzle, which determines the diameter of the extruded filament. The hot filament is run through a cool water bath and coiled on large spools. Conceptually it’s quite simple, but getting extremely consistent filament diameter, color and printing properties is demanding. Small details like air and moisture trapped inside the filament can lead to inconsistent prints. Bigger problems like material contamination can lead to a jammed nozzle in your printer. 3dk spent 1.5 years developing and fine tuning their machine before they were satisfied with the results to a German level of precision. They didn’t let me to take pictures of their extrusion machines since some of their techniques are proprietary but you can get a good view of a similar machine in this filament extrusion machine video. Florian (no small guy himself) with a mega-spool from the extrusion machine The filament from the extrusion machine is wound onto 10kg spools - these are big! The filament from these large spools is then rewound onto smaller spools for sale to customers. 3dk tests their filament on a variety of printers in-house to ensure ongoing quality. Where we might do a small print of 20 grams to test a new filament, 3dk might do a "small" test of 2kg! Test print with a full-size plant (about 4 feet tall) Why produce filament in Germany when cheaper filament is available from abroad? Florian Deurer from 3dk explained some of the benefits to me. 3dk gets their PLA base material directly from a supplier that does use additives. The same PLA is used by other manufacturers for items like food wrapping. The filament colorants come from a German supplier and are also "harmless for food". For the colorants in particular there might be the temptation for less scrupulous or regulated manufacturers to use toxic substances like heavy metals or other chemicals. Beyond safety and practical considerations like printing quality, using locally produced filament provides local jobs What really sets 3dk apart from other filament makers in an increasingly competitive field is the range of colors they produce. I asked Florian for some orange filament and he asked "which one?" The colors on offer range from subtle (there’s a whole selection of whites, for example) to more extreme bright colors and metallic effects. Designers will be happy to hear that they can order custom colors using the Pantone color standard (for orders of 5kg / 11lbs and up).   Which white would you like? Standard, milky, or pearl? Looking to the future of 3D printing, it will be great to see more environmentally friendly materials become available. The most popular material for home 3D printing right now is probably PLA plastic (the same material 3dk uses for most of their filament). PLA is usually derived from corn, which is an annually renewable crop. PLA is technically compostable, but this has to take place in industrial composting conditions at high temperature and humidity. People are making progress on recycling PLA and ABS plastic prints back into filament at home but the machines to make this easy and more common are still being developed. 100% recycled PLA print of Origamix_Rabbit by Mirice printed on an i3 Berlin 3dk offers a filament made from industrially recycled PLA. The color and texture for this material varies a little on the spool but I found it to print very well in my first tests and your object ends up a nice slightly transparent olive green. I recently got a "sneak peek" at a filament 3dk is working on that is compostable under natural conditions. This filament is pre-production, so the specifications haven’t been finalized, but Florian told me that the prints are stable under normal conditions but can break down when exposed to soil bacteria. The pigments also contain "nothing bad" and break down into minerals. The sample print I saw was flexible with a nice surface finish and color. A future where we can manufacture objects at home and throw them onto our compost heap after giving them some good use sounds pretty bright to me! A friendlier future for 3D printing? This print can naturally biodegrade About the Author Michael Ang is a Berlin-based artist / engineer working at the intersection of technology and human experience. He is the creator of the Polygon Construction Kit, a toolkit for creating large physical polygons using small 3D-printed connectors. His Light Catchers project collects crowdsourced light recordings into a public light sculpture.
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Richard Gall
01 Aug 2017
3 min read
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Developers are today's technology decision makers

Richard Gall
01 Aug 2017
3 min read
For many years, technology in large organizations has been defined by established vendors. Oracle. Microsoft. Huge corporations were setting the agenda when it came to the technology being used by businesses. These tech organizations provided solutions - everyday businesses simply signed themselves up. But this year’s Skill Up survey painted an interesting picture of a world in which developers and tech professionals have a significant degree of control over the tools they use. This is how people responded when we asked them how much choice they have over the tools they use at work: Half of all respondents have at least a significant amount of choice over the software they use at work. This highlights an important fact of life for tech pros, engineers and developers across the globe - your job is not just about building things and shipping code, it’s also about understanding the tools that are going to help you do that. To be more specific, what this highlights is that open-source is truly mainstream. What evolved as a cultural niche of sorts in the late nineties has become fundamental to the way we understand technology today. Yes, it’s true that large tech conglomerates like Apple, Facebook, and Google have a huge hold on consumers across the planet, but they aren’t encouraging lock-in in the way that the previous generation of tech giants did. In fact, they are actually pushing open-source into the mainstream. Facebook built React; Google are the minds behind Golang and TensorFlow; Apple have done a lot to evolve Swift into a language that may come to dominate the wider programming landscape. We are moving to a world of open systems, where interoperability reigns supreme. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple want consumer control, but when it comes to engineering and programming they want to be empowering people - people like you. If you’re not convinced, take the case of Java. Java’s interesting, because in many respects it’s a language that was representative of the closed systems of enterprise tech a decade ago. But it’s function today has changed - it’s one of the most widely used programming languages on GitHub, being used in a huge range open source projects. C# is similar - in it you can see how Microsoft’s focus has changed, the organization’s stance on open source softening to become more invested with a culture where openness is the engine of innovation. Part of the reason for this is a broader economic changes in the very foundations of how software is used today and what organizations need to understand. As trends such as microservices have grown, and as APIs become more important to the development and growth of businesses - those explicitly rooted in software or otherwise - software necessarily must become open and changeable. And, to take us back to where we started, the developers, programmers, engineers who build and manage those systems must be open and alive to the developing landscape of software they can use in the future. Decision making, then, is a critical part of what it means to work in software. That may not have always been the case, but today it’s essential. Make sure you’re making the right decision. Read this year's Skill Up report for free.
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Vijin Boricha
06 Jul 2018
6 min read
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Amazon Echo vs Google Home: Next-gen IoT war

Vijin Boricha
06 Jul 2018
6 min read
IoT has been around for a while now and big players like Google, Apple and Amazon have been creating buzz around smart devices over past couple of years. But 2018 is seeing a particular interest in smart speakers. That’s no surprise after Amazon succeeding with Echo it was obvious that other market leaders would love to compete in this area. Speaking about competition, Google recently revealed impressive set of enhancements to their not so old Google Home at Google I/O 2018. Like Amazon Echo, Google Home has entered the arena where users can interact with Home to play music, get personal assistance, and control their smart home. With Google being backed with their omnipresent search engine, Echo’s place of staying on top looks a little dicey. With that being said, let's get into the crux of the discussion keeping in mind three major components: Entertainment Personal assistant Smart home controller Entertainment The ideal purpose of a speaker is to entertain you with music but here your smart speaker can interact with you and play your favourite tracks. So, if you are at a moderate distance from your device all you have to do is wake the Echo with the command “Alexa” and Google Home with “Okay Google”. Don’t close your options here as both devices provide users with alternative commands such as the Echo wakes up with "Echo," "Amazon" or "Computer" and Home with "Hey Google”. Both these devices do a fair job of hearing users as they are always listening and their built-in microphone can listen to users over moderate background disturbance. These devices offer almost similar means of connection where your Echo can be plugged in to your existing home system while Home is capable of controlling any Google Cast-enabled speaker. When it comes to connecting these devices to your TV, Home does the job well by partially controlling a CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) supported television. On the other hand, Echo needs to be integrated with Fire TV in order to control your TV. With this you must have already guessed the winner but this does not end here, Google Home has a upper hand when it comes to connecting to multiple speakers to play a single song. Amazon Echo being more than a year older still misses this feature. Personal assistant Considering the variety of personal services Google offers (Google calendar, GTasks, and Google Maps) you must be expecting a straight win for Home here as well. However, Echo hasn’t stayed behind in this race. Echo uses Alexa as its digital assistant whereas Home uses the Google assistant, the digital assistant that is shipped with other Google products such as Pixel, to respond to voice commands. So, if you ask Google Home Who is Harry Potter?, you will get a definite answer from Home. You can follow that question with Which other movie is he associated with?, Home will again provide you a definite answer as it inferred the ‘he’ you referred to is actor Daniel Radcliffe. Similarly, Echo kept up with its standards when Alexa is asked about the weather. Then, when asked How about Thursday?, the response received is accurate despite the word ‘weather’ not being used in the follow-up question. Surprisingly Google falls short when it comes to updating personal tasks. The Echo can set reminders and stack-up a to-do list which the Google Home still cannot. But it would just be a matter of time to see these features added in Google Home. When it comes to assisting a group of people, Google Home supports upto 6 multiple users and when trained is capable of recognizing family member’s voice as long as they don’t sound similar. So, if one of the family members asks for a traffic or calendar update Home will customize the response depending on which member has asked for an update. Unfortunately, Echo lacks this capability. Google Home is still in its initial stages of enhancing its functionalities but already seems to be superior. Apart from a few, Home shares a lot of capabilities that are on Echo and in addition it supports recognizing family members and responding accordingly, so Google steals the show here as well. Smart Home Controller Another major functionality of a smart speaker is controlling your smart home. Both of these devices have displayed versatile functionalities but the winner in this area is a total surprise. Although Echo has a 2 year head start in this market Google Home hasn’t been that far behind in the race. Google has managed to integrate better with IFTTT (If This Then That) than that of Echo. This integration helps in crafting customizable commands. In a nutshell Home has more command options than Echo. So if a bulb is called “desk lamp” in the Philips app, Alexa will not respond to anything other than “desk lamp”. This comes with an additional support twist where you can group all lights and command Alexa to turn on/off all lights and the job’s done. The downside here is that without this grouping you would have to control your appliances with specific names. Well, with Google Home that’s not the case. You can assign a nickname to your home appliance and it would follow your orders. So while you must group your appliances on Echo, Google Assistant automatically groups a particular category of smart appliances helping you refer to it with your choice of command. Although Google Home has a upper hand in customizing commands, Echo is a much better device in terms of home automation control as it supports a vast variety of home appliances unlike Home. So, this time the winner is Amazon Echo. It is kind of difficult to make a clear choice as each of these have their advantages over disadvantages. If home automation is something that matters the most to you, Amazon Echo would be an apt choice. On the other hand, if personal assistant and music is all that your looking for Google Home fits perfectly. So, what are you waiting for, say the command and get things done for you. Related Links Windows 10 IoT Core: What you need to know How to build an Arduino based ‘follow me’ drone ROS Melodic Morenia released
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