Headworx

This time about the "lowercase" edge. The edge of the network. Gartner is all over the edge . So are mobile carriers and smart building engineers. And they all are right. The era when we wanted to process everything in the cloud is over. That was silly. And fortunately never happened. Probably could not happen. I even heard ideas as crazy as mating a light switch with lights in the cloud. But probably the self driving cars made the final argument for the edge: when there are serious low latency requirements in situations that may be life threatening, even the hardest cloud proponents bend... The edge is rational. Very rational. Saves bandwidth, cuts latency and increases reliability. Combined with the new concepts like the ICN ( Information Centric Networking ), the edge becomes the center of the new architecture of connected systems. The edge and the ICN are ideal for building automation systems too. Local traffic stays local. Aggregated statistics are pushed to the c...

With my busy travel schedule, I try to carry a camera whenever possible. Recently I realized (better late than never) that I actually have many opportunities for aerial photography too. I like windows seats (a little bit more space and some unique view opportunities) and not long ago I started experimenting with taking photos through an airplane window. It is still a learning curve, but throughout a couple of travels I realized a compact camera would not do for this task. Finally I settled on the - what I consider the best combo for taking photos from a commercial aircraft - the Nikon D5500 body coupled with the Nikkor AF-S 28-300mm (DX) lens. Considering the 1.5 crop factor of the DX body, the effective range is 42-450mm (which seems to be a perfect range for aerial photos shot through a small window). The D5500 is a phenomenal body, very capable and extremely small (for a DSLR): only 420g (0.93lb). A DSLR is much better at composing a shot in motion. I had tried many smaller lon...

With his provocative post , Karl S. Jónsson of Tridonic sparked a good discussion on the future role of a lighting grid in office buildings. Setting Bitcoins aside, The whole idea of fitting a ceiling with high performance (and high power / heat dissipating) computer nodes "just because" where are lights, there is power, does not have legs (as explained in the comment by Nicolai Eggert ). Ideas of hijacking a lighting grid to power highly dense computing network come fairly often, but I really doubt anyone would be doing that. Lets face it: the power at lighting sockets is not any cheaper than the power at a regular socket. Somebody has to pay the bill in the end. Dissipating heat at a ceiling is not what we want either. Heat goes up, so the hot nodes there will not be able to heat the rooms. There is already too much heat in the plenum space and nobody wants to increase the already high fire hazard there. But the fundamental observation that there is computing capacity...

Wireless gateway: photo by Intel Commercial lighting control systems are now networked. And a significant part of the commissioning process is done using a PC or (better) a tablet. This has become a routine task but it comes with a significant friction caused by a device called gateway. PCs and tablets speak Ethernet or WiFi. Lighting systems usually don't: they use their own networking protocols. Some examples are DALI (2-wire bus) or wireless based on the 802.15.4 radio. Neither PCs nor tablets speak natively DALI nor 802.15.4, so a gateway device is used to translate one (Ethernet) to the other (DALI or 802.15.4). It seems easy but is not. The reason: the gateway (as any Ethernet device) must be connected to a switch. A tablet wants to use a WiFi access point that is connected to this switch too. Both the gateway and the tablet need to be assigned an address. And it all means we have two devices that need to be connected to the building's computer network. And this i...