Cypress and the Internet of Things

 

Cypress's Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices (WICED) combines the following features:

Wireless
MCU
Memory
PMIC

This WICED platform can accelerate time-to-market for IOT products. Cypress's WICED and cloud services can easily be adopted for automotive, industrial and consumer products.

Time-to-market is facilitated by the WICED IoT platform consisting of (from Cypress' site):

• Wireless Internet Connectivity for Embedded Devices (WICED)   

    Eliminate the complexity of adding wireless
    Simplifies adding cloud services
    Allows customers to focus on their IoT product development

• The WICED SDK is pre-integrated, pre-tested and courteously updated

    WICED APIs and drivers make wireless connectivity easy and flexible
    Proven production ready stacks (E.g. networking, security)
    Pre-integrated licensed ecosystem libraries (E.g. HomeKit, Weave)
    Pre-integrated world-leading IoT cloud Platforms (E.g. Amazon AWS, IBM BlueMix)

• The WICED Partner Ecosystem accelerates your time-to-market

    Partners who are experts in product development with the WICED SDK
    Partners who are experts in integrating embedded system with mobile and cloud applications
    Partners who deliver a broad portfolio of certified modules optimized for power, range and interoperability
    Professional highly engaged community

Read more about:

• Cypress Solar-powered Sensor Beacons

• IoT products that connect directly to cloud; that connect to Cloud via IoT Gateway and Connect to Cloud via a mobile device

• State-of-the-art wireless: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee connectivity 

Develop Mobile and Embedded apps with Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0

Microsoft SQL Server Compact is an embedded(able) database ideal for desktop, (hand-held) mobile devices and web clients. It is free to download (also free to deploy and redistribute) and comes in the form of just one code-free file. Its small foot print makes it easy to  deploy to a variety of device sizes and requires no administration. It also supports a subset of T-SQL and a rich set of data types.

The latest version in Version 4.0.8482.1 and you can download from here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17876

New features in SQL Server Compact 4.0 (per Microsoft site):

• 
  SQL Server Compact 4.0 is the default database for Microsoft WebMatrix, which is a stack of web technologies for easily building and deploying websites on the Windows platform.
• For enhanced development and debugging capabilities, including designer support, Visual Studio can be used to develop ASP.NET web applications and websites using SQL Server Compact 4.0.
• Enabled to work in the medium or partial trust environments in the web servers, and can be easily deployed along with the website to the third party website hosting service providers.
• Private deployment of SQL Server Compact further simplified by having all the required managed assemblies, and the x86 and x64 DLLs, including the Visual C++ 2008 runtime libraries (x86 and x64) SP1 in a single private folder in the install location of SQL Server Compact.
• Stronger data security with the use of the SHA2 encryption algorithms for encrypting the databases.
• T-SQL syntax enhancement by adding support for OFFSET and FETCH that can be used to write paging queries and new APIs like SqlCeConnection.GetSchema that provides the metadata information of the database.
• Used with ADO.NET Entity Framework, SQL Server Compact now supports the columns that have server generated keys like identity, rowguid etc. and the code-first programming model.
  
  These article provides sufficient information for the previous version and some starting points:

Basics of SQL Server Compact 3.5
http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2010/07/sql-server-compact-35-basics-you-must.html

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2009/11/connecting-to-sql-server-compact-from.html

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2010/07/sql-server-compact-35-with-sql-server.html

Blogger has a problem with the html tag 'pre'

For quite sometime I have had problem displaying HTML code in my blog as the Pre tag did not render correctly. Here I am trying to see what is happening, if any in rendering the Pre tag. I decided to show only screen shots of either the HTML tab in my blog post, or the Compose tabbed page of my blog so that the browser effects are properly seen.

When you want to create a new post in Blogger, this is the HTML code you get and the 'Compose' page is empty.

Pre_00
Now I enter a single line-'This is a test' in the Compose tabbed page.

Pre_01

The HTML markup shows this:

Pre_02

Now I add a 'Pre' tag as shown.

Pre_03

The following is the content of the 'Compose' page.

Pre_04
So far no problem, good.

I now go back to HTML pane. Looks OK, but it has added another repeating line at the top.

Pre_05

Not a big difference. I refresh the browser and everything back to as it was before refresh.
I just draw a line in 'Compose'.

Pre_06

The HTML after this appears as shown. It has added 'Pre' tags as shown. Why 'pre' tags which not just 'p'.

Pre_07

I just added a 'div' tag and I am going to place a 'Pre' tag inside the 'div' tag.

Pre_08

This is the 'compose' page.

Pre_09

I added some 'pre tag' inside the div tag

Pre_10
The compose  now appears as shown.

Pre_11
I add another div and within div I add a pre tag. In the pre tag I add special characters (HTML markup) as shown.

Pre_12

The Compose page after the above appears as shown.

Pre_13

The pre tag did not work as intended for html tags.
I revert to the HTML to see if the blogger's processor has added any thing by itself. It does some time. No change.

Pre-14
I add a dotted line in HTML code.

Pre_15

There is an expected change as shown.

Pre_16

I revert to HTML and I see it has changed.

Pre_17
This time it accommodated the dotted line inside the 'div'. I modify the page with 'code' tags as shown. Some recommendation from some of the Internet sites is to enclose it in 'code'

Pre_18

The 'Compose' page now appear as shown.

The extra > in the last line appears to be an error while typing.
 Page_19

It is getting worse!

I refresh the page and nothing is changed in 'Compose'.

I host the html page on the local IIS Server and the response is as shown.

Page_20

The conclusion is  'Pre' tag is not working in the Blogger as it is supposed to.

Visual Studio 2015 Community and Entity Framework projects

Installing Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3 will not automatically provide you with templates that you can use for working with Entity Frame work. You need get the NuGet Package Manager to install the Entity Framework related package as shown here:

NuGet_00.png

If the link is not showing search for NuGet.

Click the link to install and from File you can launch the NuGet Package Manager Console as shown.

NuGet_01.png

Click Package Manager Console to open the pane for entering commands to NuGet Package Manager as shown. Here I tried the to install the Entity Framework Package.

The package is installed for a saved project. In order to install the package you need to create a solution and save it. After which you can install the Entity Framework package from NuGet Package Manager.

After installing we can see the various appropriate references added to the Windows Forms project I created.

With these references you can work with Entity Framework in Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3. The same procedure can be used for Visual Studio 2013 Community as well.

Have mercy for these suffering creatures

The recent death of Yani, the Sumatran elephant is a shame and the zoo officials should be taken to task. Even better close the zoo. Total disregard for other animals is also reported. I heard a giraffe was found dead with lots of plastic as it could not get the food from zoo keepers.

Here is a picture of Yani in death throes from dailymail.co.uk.

The Mayor of Bandung, Ridwan Kamil should investigate and close the zoo till minimum conditions are met for the zoo animals. It is a shame he does not look into it. It is better to close the zoo.

Travel companies like TripAdvisor.com should not advertise the zoo on their sites and discourage tourists visiting Bandung. Governments of France, Italy and Netherlands should reconsider their involvement with developing Bandung.

Discourage tourism to Bandung!
Bandungtoruism.com email address  dispar@bandungtourism.com

Hands-on Learning Event in Honolulu 1 : Introduction to Structured Query Language

The above course will be offered again for the fourth time (Oct 4 - Nov 3, 2016) as a non-credit course by the Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training.

Course summary:

Databases, organized repositories of information, have become indispensable. Knowledge of databases is a must for professionals and in fact even more relevant since the emergence of Big Data in today's world.

In this introductory course you will learn all about relational databases and the basics of Structured Query Language (SQL) including sorting; grouping result sets; using DDL, DML, DCL, and TCL. All SQL statements will initially be written for one table. Most practical, modern and relational databases will include a large number of tables and SQL queries have to access information from several tables. This course will then introduce you to querying more than one table. With this skill you will be able to query two or more tables in a database. This is a hands-on course which will take you from installing SQL Server 2016; learning the ins and outs of SQL Server Management Studio and of course a full dose of SQL. You will be both coding as well using Graphical User Interface during this training.

During each meeting the students will be assessed for their knowledge, competency and proficiency in SQL.

New this session:

Microsoft SQL Azure Database: SQL Server in Microsoft Cloud
Windows PowerShell for SQL Server
SQL Server 2016


My sincere thanks and best wishes to my students in the previous meets of this course.

Microsoft PowerShell goes Open Source

The great productivity tool, PowerShell has entered the Open Source community (both Linux and Mac) according to an article that appeared in redmondmag.com.

This is what the Inventor of PowerShell said about this move:

 "PowerShell on Linux is now designed to enable customers to use the same tools, and the same people, to manage everything from anywhere," Snover said. The initial ports are available on Ubuntu, Centos and Red Hat, he noted. "PowerShell also now runs on Red Hat Linux and Mac OS X with additional platforms planned for the future. The "alpha" builds and source code are now on GitHub
"

IT pros can use this task-based scripts to provide automaton support to Windows OS and all the other Windows Products.

PowerShell skills are highly marketable and now even more.

R programming gets intellisense support in Visual Studio 2015 Community

R GUI is an interactive window from R Foundation.

When you install Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3 or install Microsoft R Client you can bring up R Interactive within Visual Studio IDE. This is really very nice and you have the full access to intellisense that makes it very easy to use the interface. You would really appreciate if you had the experience of using the Open Source R.

Here are some screen shots of its usage in Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3. You launch R Interactive from R Tools menu in Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3.

This brings up the message that you have logged into your Microsoft Account.

If you are logged in you get to display the R Interactive pane as shown.
 

This looks similar to the one from Open Source, but wait. You can load the library RODBC straight away and you get the functions that you can use, thanks to intellisense.

 

Now I try to establish an ODBC connection to my SQL Server 2016, voila, again intellisense to the rescue. In Open Source you have to look up some documents to get these.

OK, I have a User DSN to my SQL Server 2016 called 'HSQL' and I try to call.

Well, I have the full details of my User DSN.

This is the way to go if you are interested in productivity.

More in my future posts on this blog and the other:
http://hodentekMSSS.blogspot.com

Read the posts related to this post here:


http://hodentekhelp.blogspot.com/2016/08/what-is-needed-to-leverage-r-from.html

http://hodentekhelp.blogspot.com/2016/07/how-are-user-dsn-system-dsn-and-file.html

http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2016/08/viewing-tables-on-sql-server-2016.html

http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2016/07/you-need-this-to-connect-to-sql-server.html

Latest Windows update made my DVD drive disappear

I am one of the Microsoft Windows 10 Insiders and the OS gets updated as and when Microsoft updates. This latest update about 11 days ago has resulted in the loss of my DVD drive. I do not use the DVD as I am not into watching movies or listening music.

Recently I needed to MOUNT an .ISO file and suddenly I was presented with this message.

V_DVD_000.jpg

Not believing the message I must have tried many times. Finally I decided to see the Device Manager and, lo and behold, there was indeed a problem.

V_DVD_00.jpg

The Virtual CD-ROM properties looked like this and the problem was the corruption.

V_DVD_01.jpg

Of course the Volume information was not available.

V_DVD_02.jpg

I immediately thought I would recover to an earlier update and found this:

V_DVD_04.jpg

But the option is greyed out (I was a day late for this fix).

V_DVD_03.jpg

The only option is to reset the OS which will remove all the programs I have installed since I started using Windows 10 (files will not be removed). I hate doing this as I have invested hours and hours of painful installations.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/after-the-dvd-drive-disappeared-the-only-option-is/1b227f49-aac2-4ec9-908a-116cec5ae168

Looks like this problem  is not new to Windows 10, I have seen this in the Technet forum in 2007.

If I fix this problem it will be posted here.

Is Google creating the new operating system FF00FF?

It looks like Google is developing a new open source operating system, FUCHSIA acccording to :
http://www.ibtimes.com/google-replacing-chrome-os-android-fuchsia-2401522?ft=95p2z. It is  not official yet.

This would replace Chrome OS in the near future and even the enormously popular Android OS. As for near future goal it will be used for Rasoberry Pi 3(http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/google-is-working-on-a-new-os-codenamed-fuchsia) In the near term it seems this will be used on some light weight devices before it goes on larger devices. It is supposed run on everything from smart phones to IoT devices using the DART (https://www.dartlang.org/) Programming language.

Well another language to learn.

Let's wait....

Pepper in Palo Alto

Another 6 days to go, Pepper the humanoid robot that can sense emotions will be in Palo Alto store b8ta between August 11 and 18.

  Pepper2.png
Robot developed by SoftBank and a robotics company Aldebaran Robotics  was unveiled in 2014 and it can read human emotions and respond to them accordingly. For all the sophisticated features, it sells cheap, about $1900+. Pepper still needs battery and needs a charge after every 12 hours of use. It uses programming languages like C++, Python and Android.

It is a hot sell in Japan after it started selling in 2015, but may not come to USA any time soon as the local demand is high.

Because of its ability to read and respond to emotions it appears to be ideal for customer facing situations and has even gone on cruise ships to assist passengers.

The images are from Aldebaran's site.

Pepper.png

Read more about Pepper here:

https://www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/robot-invasion-softbanks-pepper-lands-in-the-us/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/softbank-aldebaran-launch-pepper-an-emotional-robot/

Applying Update3 to Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 2

I had wrongly assumed that I had updated my Visual Studio 2015 Community version to Update 3. You can get the Update in a couple of ways. You can update right from Visual Studio IDE as shown here by choosing the option in the Notifications window.

Another way would be to do so from Control Panel. The highlighted item is Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Update 2.

 Right click and click on Change. Visual Studio Starts up as shown.

Click on the checkbox Update 3 inside the window and click Next.

Some Android related items and Update 2 will be removed.

The updating process was successful and the computer needs restarting.

Here is the HELP screen from the updated version.

Updated items added to Control Panel's Programs and Features: