Headworx

I have been having very little time over the recent months to visit the wooden cabin in the country. It is a beautiful place but the intensive work/travel schedule offers barely any opportunities to go there, even for a couple of days. My seldom visits, however, are all maintenance visits. Which is the sad illustration of the false economy we all live in. That cabin has been a great test bed for many systems. This is where - over 10 years ago - I realized the IoT opportunity has been the software opportunity. And I was foolish to think that it was only software that was unreliable those days. With efforts focused on designing defensive software architectures and building ultra reliable smart home management software, I hit the hardware problem hard. In a nutshell: while the software keeps on running without a single reboot for 7 years now, the hardware parts are falling apart. Things break for different reasons. Last summer we had an invasion of mice which were followed by mart...

Several months ago we witnessed a very peculiar behavior of a fairly small setup of a wireless sensor network. There were several sensors reporting data periodically, each sending a message on average every minute. Every now and then there was a pair of sensors that appeared to stop working. No messages were received from the two. When we rolled out traffic sniffing equipment to analyze what was happening we found nothing wrong. The data was coming periodically from both. We packed and went home just to be notified there were reports missing from another pair of sensors. Came back to the site to find nothing wrong again. And the story repeated. It was peculiar. Finally when we diagnosed the installation, we found the root of the problem were slowly drifting clocks. The sensors were reporting at the same cadence, but each had randomized delay on start, so the radio messages were fairly randomly distributed in time, to avoid collisions. But except for the randomized startup delay, th...

On a more practical and lighter note today, I'm happy to have my portable astrophotography setup finally ready. This has been several months of trials and errors and iterative approach. The goal has been to have something that gives me the most precise tracking while keeping the weight low (and I do mean low) and being able to fit everything in a carry-on case. That includes a 71mm scope ( William Optics Star 71 71mm f/4.9 APO refractor), a camera body (D810A) and several lens. Some examples of my baby steps in this category are available on my photo blog ( It's All About Light ). Living way away from any dark sky location, but traveling a lot, having a portable balanced setup has been a priority for me. The set consists of: Really Right Stuff TFC-24 Series 2 Carbon Fiber Tripod. The sturdiest/lightest I could find. Very solid legs, no center column, The biggest that fits in a carry on. Mine weighs 1474 grams. RRS are a class of their own. This tripod is stellar. Abso...

Netflix has a great documentary on The Last Man on the Moon . This came to my mind when listening to a great "Lighting and the Smart Building" panel at the DLC Stakeholder Meeting in St. Louis. The Edge was brought multiple times. Again. And then - almost nothing else. It was the example of a Smart Building a year ago. And three years ago... It still seems there is no other Edge. Like Saturn-5/Apollo. The Edge has been the first smart building. And the last. The reason is clear. While technically possible, the technologies that make The Edge are like those that allowed landing men on the Moon, and bringing them back. Out of reach for commercial implementations. We all know what needs to be done and how to do it. The challenge though is to make it all affordable. Bluetooth mesh holds a great promise here. It is "just" a matter of putting it all together in a package that can land in any building, especially those that do not have extra budgets for fancy st...