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...

Last week I was trying to run a fairly simple task, using the iPad. Our patent attorney sent me three PDF files asking to sign them. I wanted to sign them on the iPad and return signed, as attachments to the same email thread. Despite having the latest iOS on the latest Apple device (that includes the "Files"), and having a whole suite of leading edge apps (including Google Inbox and Adobe Fill&Sign), completing this task was just not possible. From the Inbox I can (using the system sharing options) save the attached PDFs to Files. I mean, almost, as it is not possible to create a folder in files. Luckily another app (LiquidText) has already created one, so I could save to the \OnMyiPad\LiquidText. From the Files I could share the PDF to "Copy to Adobe Fill & Sign" In the Adobe app I could add the signature and "share" the document again to Files. So far so good. But then I realized Inbox just did not have an option to add an attachment from ...

The Smart Building conference in Amsterdam was worth attending. Essentially every speaker was reconfirming the smart buildings trends we've been aligned with and pushing at Silvair. Ger Baron (the CTO at the City of Amsterdam) nicely illustrated the evolution of networked systems: from centralized to decentralized and ultimately to distributed peer-to-peer mesh. Bruce Schneier was quoted saying "a luminaire is a connected computer that emits light" (I remember people laughing at me when I was telling them we had 70 developers writing software for light bulbs...). Larry Heisler noted the IoT had not taken off because things lacked interoperability. Music to my ears. One disappointing theme was, unfortunately, The Edge . The world's most famous, most intelligent, most sustainable (the list continues) building. Wonderful. But I herd the same stories back in 2016. So is The Edge still the only one? Why don't we have more smart buildings we could present, study,...

Recently a patent application filed by Canon has surfaced. It describes how a fingerprint reader would work on a DSLR camera. The industry seems to be excited by the fact it moves now into adopting security technologies. Unfortunately this patent does not solve much of the problem. Fingerprint reader is always an icing on a cake. But to put the icing you need the cake baked, which is not the case here. What is missing is the whole standard of how digital signatures and encryption are applied to photo image files. How the security keys are handled. Both in cameras and in associated software applications, including digital post-processing and web sharing. The new digital technologies have poised a big problem for the traditional camera manufacturers. They could grasp the imaging part, by integrating digtal sensors in camera bodies. But they have fallen short on integrating the whole experience around sharing, using smart/connected devices as camera accessories etc. When I see prod...