A personal IoT journey
In this post, I reflect on my personal journey in IoT. I suspect my story is not all that uncommon in that it represents a natural progression.
Looking back I’d have to say that it was my time as a games developer — building a game library in C/C++ and assembly language —that prepared me for a brief foray into IoT. Reportedly, that may have been several years before the term IoT was coined.
In early 2001, I joined American MSI — a manufacturer of temperature controllers for Injection molding machines used in the plastics industry. American MSI was later acquired by Husky. I worked on an Industrial Network Automation project and lead the small team that created a device called a Digital Integrator. The DI was essentially an internet appliance on a single board computer running embedded Linux. The device communicated with Injection molding machines via serial interface (RS232) and relayed protocol data via TCP/IP to enterprise servers.
Each of these devices used PoE (power over ethernet) and was latched onto a machine where it read serial data and sent it to an aggregation server which offered a systems view of a factory floor. One of the toughest parts of that project was reading manufacturer documentation and building a protocol convertor for the machine’s serial output. Let’s just say that fluency in Chinese would have been helpful. And for some reason, each manufacturer had a different cyclic redundancy check implementation. To be fair, that was years before the Web took off so easy access to information simply didn’t exists.
A decade and a half later my interest in IoT resurfaced. In the summer of 2015 I join Flywheel Sports — a leader in indoor stadium cycling. At that point, Flywheel already had five years of experience adding microcontrollers and sensors to stationary stadium cycling bikes in order to offer customers performance metrics.
Inspired by the work we were doing to create an innovative new at home bike, I started familiarizing myself with Arduino’s and Raspberry PI’s. It was amazing to see how far tiny computers have come since I last explored them.
No doubt that the drop in costs and increase in performance were fueled by the early PDA and later mobile phone industry.
I immediately fell in love with the Raspberry PI as it was not all that different from my earlier embedded Linux experience. This time around I wasn’t writing code in C/C++ and instead was eager to run NodeJS on those tiny machines. I had good reason for wanting to do this. During that time I was largely focused on building Hydra — the framework for the microservices designed to power our FlyAnywhere experience. So my first Raspberry Pi project involved installing NodeJS and Hydra to build a device which could monitor microservices:
My next project would be considerably more ambitious and require actual soldering. Given that Hydra was designed to enable light-weight microservices, I had ambitions to build a small Raspberry Pi cluster to help get that point across.
The hobby project took about a month to complete. The core of the cluster was a set of $5 Raspberry Pi Zeros.
I learned a fair amount from this effort. There was no question… I had caught the Maker Bug.
The effort resulted in a project I named eKatana and it’s the subject of my next post.
