Ayo Ayibiowu, Author at CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

September 9, 2019 by Ayo Ayibiowu - 3 Comments

Daytripper Uses Laser Time-of-Flight Sensor to Hide Your Slacking Off From Your Boss

Have you ever run into that awkward situation where you were actively busy doing something totally off company’s duties on the computer and got caught red-handed, or an unknown intruder ventured into your privacy, and you got in this awkward unexplained situation. If yes, then you are not alone. Work could be boring sometimes, and some of us do like to take some steam off probably by playing some video games, watch funny videos, or do something outside the blues. It is nice until a superior or a colleague catches us doing that. One way to avoid this is by closely observing our surrounding while getting ourselves immersed but doesn’t always work well because it is super easy to slack off. Well, you don’t have to worry anymore thanks to an innovative project designed by dekuNukem called Daytripper. Daytripper is a laser tripwire that will help you automatically hide your […]

September 5, 2019August 10, 2021 by Ayo Ayibiowu - 2 Comments

Microsoft Unveils The Vision AI Developer Kit For AI on the Edge

The field of Artificial Intelligence is getting more exciting every single day, and the big corporations and startups are massively pouring for it. One thing I am undoubtedly sure about is that the future will certainly be remarkable. Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world with sales over $100 billion has been venturing in the domain of artificial intelligence for a while now with cloud computing platform Azure and other related cloud computing services, but instead of its usual cloud computing route for AI, Microsoft is banking on AI on the edge with the introduction of the Vision AI Developer Kit in joint partnership with the semiconductor giant Qualcomm. With millions of data collected at the Edge, the potential of artificial intelligence on the edge is promising. AI cases performed on the Edge will help in making critical decisions, and more data insight can even facilitate important business scenarios. […]

August 28, 2019 by Ayo Ayibiowu - 3 Comments

Nordic Thingy:91 Cellular IoT Prototyping Platform Comes with 16 Sensors

Nordic Semiconductor launched the Nordic Thingy:52 back in mid-2017 in the hopes of bringing app and web developers into the hardware ecosystem as fast and easy as possible. The Nordic Thingy:52 was a Bluetooth 5 IoT sensor development kit based on the company’s nRF52832 WiSoC. Although the Nordic Thingy:52 kit is still very much available for purchase and support always available, Nordic Semiconductor has gone further launching a new development kit called the Nordic Thingy:91 targeting cellular IoT applications. The Nordic Thingy:91 is a cellular IoT prototyping platform with support for LTE-M, NB-IoT plus GPS option. Even though IoT connectivity standards like LoRaWAN, BLE, WiFi, ZigBee, and others are very much growing and expanding, Nordic Semi is fully backing cellular technology, something that has very much been available and most likely will still keep been available, and the adoption of 5G is another testimony to that. Cellular is here, and […]

August 25, 2019 by Ayo Ayibiowu - 4 Comments

ESP32-MeshKit is a Development Kit for ESP32 Mesh Networking

The ESP8266 was a jewel in its peak, it ruled the maker’s world in the need for creating a low-cost WiFi module. Being Arduino compatible also furthered its glory then the ESP32 came in. ESP32 offered so much more than the ESP8266, and most importantly it was also affordable. With support for Bluetooth and WiFi, ESP32 was to open a new frontier for the development of Internet of Things applications. A major drawback of the affordable ESP32 was the lack of official support of mesh network for the chip, something that was easily possible with the ESP8266. Mesh network allows you to build a network of nodes that can communicate with each other, self heal, and many more possibilities. But thankfully, back in 2018, Espressif Systems released the ESP Mesh Development Framework (ESP-MDF) which sits on top of the IoT Development Framework (ESP-IDF), the official development framework for the chip. […]

August 21, 2019 by Ayo Ayibiowu - 15 Comments

Pitaya Go is an IoT development board with multi-protocol wireless connectivity

One of the challenges in starting a new IoT project is the question of what connectivity to use. Depending on the nature of a project, there are several wired and wireless connectivity options that can be used to power a project and ensure it’s a success. We have WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Zwave, LoRa, ZigFox, Thread, NB-IoT, 3G/4G, and others. You can use from anyone, but which one to use is another thing because most development board only support 1 or 2 of those. Well, with the introduction of the Pitaya Go, you don’t have to worry so much about that decision. The Pitaya Go is an IoT development platform with multiprotocol wireless connectivity built-in. The Pitaya Go is based on the Nordic’s high-end multiprotocol SoC nRF52840 and the Microchip’s extremely low power Wi-Fi network controller ATWINC1500B. The nRF52840 SoC is the most advanced member of the nRF52 Series SoC family, and it […]

August 15, 2019August 15, 2019 by Ayo Ayibiowu - 8 Comments

PiVoyager is a UPS for the Raspberry Pi With a Real-Time Calendar Clock

PiVoyager: the smart UPS for the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is a powerful SBC (Single Board Computer), and aside from being used for everyday computing stuff, the Raspberry Pi can be embedded as the brain of various projects. Using the Raspberry Pi for standalone projects do create some concerns about power. How do I power the Pi? Should I get a power bank? Or maybe I need a longer wired connector. If powering your Raspberry Pi based project has always being a concern to you, then you don’t have to worry about it again with the introduction of the PiVoyager. The PiVoyager is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the Raspberry Pi specially designed to work with standard Li-Ion or LiPo batteries. It is shaped in the form a Pi Zero HaT making it fully compatible with PiZero form factor, but nevertheless, it will still work with any Raspberry-PI having the conventional 40-pin header found in the Pi […]

August 8, 2019August 8, 2019 by Ayo Ayibiowu - 7 Comments

MDP-XP is A Modular DC Power Supply Kit For Your Next Project

My love for modular power supply design can not be denied. I find it cool, how you can increase the functionality of relative less powerful device just by adding another device on top or connected to it. With the explosion of the Arduino shields, the Raspberry Pi HaTs, I must say hardware modular design will surely be here for a long time. An interesting modular product discovered on SeeedStudio is the MDP-XP Smart Digital Power Supply Kit. This product is a new product carried by Seeedstudio as it can be seen on the front page, and it is an interesting product indeed. The MDP-XP known as Mini Digital Power System is a system of programmable linear DC power supply inheriting the modular design concept where you can enhance the basic functionality of the device. It is a cost-effective DC power supply, featuring indicators, stability, reliability and distinct user interface comparable […]

August 7, 2019August 11, 2019 by Ayo Ayibiowu - 1 Comment

A Compact Machine Learning Accelerator HAT for your Raspberry Pi

AI for the Edge has been a promising playing field where several players are pushing for. Cloud computing has made it possible to train complex machine learning models for various application, although this seems to be working fine, the performance or the possibility of deploying AI applications on the Edge is enormous. AI on the Edge is expected to help reduces the latency involved in the roundtrip to the cloud, saves the bandwidth and cloud storage costs for enterprises, deploy ML models faster, and build robust, intelligent applications. Generally, Edge devices like the Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, and other embedded boards usually can’t run powerful AI applications. They have limited resources and computing power. Fortunately, this is changing with the introduction of AI Accelerators; modern processors that help assist the edge devices by taking over the complex mathematical calculations needed for running AI models. One of such AI accelerator processor is […]