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Showing posts from May, 2016

Thinfilm solutions for the Internet of Things

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Using thinfilms on suitable substrates it is possible to provide a means to communicate with Smart Phones. Thin Film Electronics ASA (also known as Thinfilm) , a Norwegian company is a leader in the production of thinfilms using near field communication (NFC). Thinfilm will be participating in the GSMA Innovation City at the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai during June 29-July 1, 2016 Thinfilm has two products, Thinfilm NFC SpeedTap(trademark) ----Connect everyday objects to the Internet of Everything Thinfilm NFC OpenSense(trademark)  ----Thinfilm NFC OpenSense creates a connected “smart package” using printed sensor tags and a smartphone’s Near Field Communications (NFC) capabilities This will have a large scale market as the Internet of Everything becomes more and more popular with Smart Phones as single source of control. Watch this video: 

Intel XDK: Controls 5: Using the You Tube widget

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This post is about the You Tube widget in Intel XDK. A new version has been released: Release date: May 19 2016 Version:      v3357 Intel XDK Cloud services is undergoing significant changes and it is a recommendation from Intel XDK to use this latest version. A few new features have been added to the DEVELOP tab in the user interface and the rest about bug fixes. Start a new project using Standard HTML5 choose App Designer 3. The project is named TestYouTube. The project is just a bare bones HTML project with the main page, index.html. However, it has references to these script files and no other content in the body of the index.html: ------------- cordova.js js/app.js js/init-app.js xdk/init-dev.js -------------------------- Add a header (optional) to keep track of your project.   YouTubeDemo_00 Click on YOUTUBE in the MEDIA folder. YouTubeDemo_01 Drag it and and drop it on the page in DESIGN view. It actually drops a iFrame w

Multiboard programming using Johnny-Five robotics and IOT Platform

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Arduino boards can be programmed using Arduino software (or in Visual Studio Community using Arduino Extensions) and Intel IOT boards can be programmed using Intel XDK IOT . Using JavaScript to program controllers would be very useful as most browsers are HTML5 compliant. The Johnny-Five Robotics and IOT program is an interesting option. Johnny-Five is the JavaScript Robotics and; IOT platform released by the Bocoup group. Johnny-Five is maintained by a growing number of talented developers. What is Bocoup? Bocoup  is a group that championed the cause of Open tools and WorkFlow. They really seems to have people with very varied and diverse talents to tackle web, data, and visualization. How does Johnny-Five handle the Hello World (or Blink for that matter)? It looks like 1-2-3 really. 1. Install Node.js(Preffeer 4.2.1 LTS) 2. Setup your board 3. Run: npm install johnny-five What else is needed? You also need to run the Firmata protocol for the controller boar

Arduino 101 : Implementing the basics

Arduino 101 is an electronics board that makes it easy to test out some simple IOT examples. It is not quite ready for IOT but you can do some Bluetooth tests with it. It also has built-in 6-axis accelerometer and gyroscope.  It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 4 can be used as PWM outputs); 6 analog inputs; an USB connector for serial communication and sketch upload, a power jack, an ICSP header with SPI signals and I2C dedicated pins. These peripherals are the same ones you find on Arduino UNO.  Optionally, the USB connector also supplies power to the board. This post shows how to work with Arduino 101 using the Arduino 1.8.3 program. You can test using the Blink program; a program that you upload to the board that makes an LED to blink. Review this Swaytorial on the docs.com site .

Develop a Side Menu App using Intel XDK - Part 8

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You have developed an APP such as the Side Menu App and now you want to see how it would look when you bring it up on a smart phone. It is true that it is not complete, as yet. But it is always of interest to know how it would look on  a real phone, an Apple phone or some other phone. In the previous post you have seen how you may use the emulators to view the app you designed is rendered. In this post you will learn how you may view it on a handheld device be it an iPhone or something other like a Windows 10 Mobile. This step is needed before you package it to be downloaded by anyone from one of the device stores (Google Play, Apple Store or Windows Store) I assume you have one of these devices at hand, an iPhone or some other compatible with Intel XDK. You will also require Internet Connection via Wi-Fi. The first thing for you to do is to install the Intel XDK Preview app on your device. This app is available on both Apple Store and Windows Store. If it is an Android, it sh

Sandbox CSS attribute of iFrame in Intel XDK

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The Sandbox attribute provides security to your application. Sandbox attribute is like police and it restricts the iFrame related detrimental activities. Sandbox without a value applies all restrictions. You can enable one or more values for Sandbox such as, allow-forms, allow-popups, allow-same-origin, allow scripts etc. With Sandbox attribute present: Iframe content is assumed to be from a unique origin You cannot submit a form You cannot run  script API's are disabled Cannot have links targeting other browser context No plugins allowed (object, applet etc) Will block automatically triggered media features like playing a video or audio. iFrame can take many attributes including Sandbox. iframe {  border: 8px solid red;  padding: .5rem;  margin: 1rem;  box-shadow: 20px 20px 10px #888888;  width: 300;  height: 100;  Sandbox; } Intel XDK has a < ifr/> widget described in my earlier posts. Here I describe how it works in Intel XDK. 1. IntelXDK does

Develop a Side Menu App using Intel XDK - Part 7

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You have developed an APP such as the Side Menu App and now you want to see how it would look when you bring it up on a smart phone. It is true that this app is not complete, as yet. But it is always of interest to know how it would look on  a real phone, an Apple phone or some other phone. The first thing for you to see is how it would look on the emulator. This post is to describe how it would look on an emulator. Let us say, I have finished designing an app, herein Hodentek Books which appear as shown in DEVELOP | DESIGN . appDisplay_00 Using the Emulator: I am now in the DEVELOP appDisplay_01 Now I change over to EMULATE tab as shown: appDisplay_02 The DEVICES panel gets displayed and shows the emulator for the phone type, in this case Apple iPhone 6 . appDisplay_03 The app you designed now appear in the center of IDE as shown. appDisplay_04 From the drop-down handle on DEVICES you can access many different emulators ( Intel XDK Version 32

Use this Arduino software to work with recent Hardware

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If you intend using the more recent Arduino hardware such as Arduino 101 you better use the more recent Arduino IDE 1.6.8. Here is an image of all Arduino products. In a previous post you reviewed using the Visual Studio 2015 with Arduino Extension. In this post you will learn how to download the latest version and install it on Windows 10 computer. You download arduino-1.6.8-Windows.exe from here . You begin installing by double clicking the executable. Here are some of the installation time screen shots for your reference: On Windows 10 it also adds a desktop App to the All Apps menu. You launch it by double clicking the shortcut or the desktop app or the shortcut in the installation folder.   Click Tools in the main menu to find the Board Manager link ass shown. In the drop-down you can see the various hardware that can be accessed. Click Board Manager... to open another drop-down. Scroll down to view the Arduino 101 by Intel. That's all

Using Apache Cordova with Visual Studio 2015 Community

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Intel XDK has great resources for HTML5 Web apps targeting mulitple platforms. Additonally it has debugging support for iOS and Android devices but not for Windows platform. The free version of Visual Studio 2015 called the Visual Studio 2015 Community has excellent support for everything from web to data; on-site, cloud and hybrid applications including Business Intelligence. This support is out of the box for Windows platform. However, for open source and third party there are extensions that can be used. You can add extensions to work with Apache Cordova based apps. Here are some of the extenions presently available online. The Cordova Multiplatform is well suited for HTML5 but the language used is TypeScript. I am not sure if there is one in JavaScript. More information here .