Internet of Things—Telecommunications Growth Opportunity (bonus: Social Media and Infographics tips)

I’m a tactile or visual learner—depending on the subject. If I want something that manifests physically to stick in my mind and really have a good understanding of it, I need to do it myself with my own hands. That’s why I like the Raspberry Pi. It’s a great way for me to learn about programming, Linux, internet hosting and connecting machines to the real world—all by getting into the nitty-gritty and doing it myself. This tactile interaction creates multiple new neural synaptic connections in my brain for the subject I’m learning about. It’s how I learn best.

For intangible subjects, I use visual learning. One of the best visual learning tools is infographics. Being able to see patterns and trends greatly enhances cognition. Infographics play perfectly to this primordial learning method.

A great resource for infographics is Pinterest—the rising star of social media for corporations. Another good source of learning infographics is Twitter. I have cajoled Twitter into being a very useful learning tool for me. I have been meticulous making Twitter Lists of those I’m Following with useful topical sorting criteria. Now that I’ve got a system (more of a discipline, really) to sort Twitter, I can readily find quite useful information.

Example: The Internet of Things

Fabio Moioli has a great #IoE article on LinkedIn Pulse:
Internet of Everything: Technologies & Minds (How the future is happening now)

A telecommunications topic that has caught my interest on Twitter is Internet of Things (#IoT) or Internet of Everything (#IoE). IPv6 will enable countless smart devices to communicate. This will create an explosion of telecommunications traffic and necessitate inventive ways to facilitate this connectivity.

This infographic from The Connectivist illustrates the scale of connectivity based on data from Cisco. Already for the past several years the number of connected devices exceeds the number of people on our little blue planet! The data point for the year 2014 is >14B devices. That excites me. I can foresee a whole new industry emerging of ultra-low-cost communication devices and methods to enable the embedded inter-communication of a broad range of ‘things’.

For those of us in the telecommunications business, it’s time to get the creative juices flowing, embrace this opportunity and figure out business models to capitalize on this exciting emerging market.

Study additional Internet of Things infographics via my Pinterest Board.

quick method to safely shutdown Raspberry Pi computer

I run my Raspberry Pi (RPi) computer headless – that is, with no keyboard, mouse or monitor attached. I do everything on the RPi by remote connection. This is terribly convenient and allows the RPi to sit innocuously out of sight and out of mind. However, whenever I need to turn it off to, say, perform a backup of the memory card, I need to login remotely and execute the shutdown command since pulling the power plug might cause corruption of the RPi filesystem.

I wanted an easy way to safely shut down my Raspberry Pi computer without having to remotely login and execute the shutdown command. I researched various options and decided the most convenient approach is a Windows desktop shortcut that I could then just double-click and the shut down would happen as expected without further interaction.

This turned out to be a little tricky to implement and I found little information about other users who had success. So I pulled up the PuTTY documentation and set about learning how to script it with command line options. Eventually, after some experimentation, I made a shortcut on my Windows PC desktop with the following target:
"[Windows path to putty]\putty.exe" -v -ssh -2 -l [RPi username] -pw [RPi password] -m "[Windows path to script file]\shutdown.txt" [hostname or IP of RPi]

Substitute the square brackets for information appropriate for your Window environment and RPi and, finally, create a text file called “shutdown.txt” the only content of which is “sudo shutdown -h now”.

Voilà, you now have a shortcut you can simply double-click and your RPi will safely shut down and power off.

Raspberry Pi computer as simple web server

I have been playing with a Raspberry Pi computer for a few years now. Known simply as RPi, it’s a tiny credit-card sized all-in-one computer designed from the ground up to promote computer enthusiasm in young people.

It’s very cheap (<$50) and quite powerful. The whole premise is to make it so affordable, anyone can own one and, therefore, young kids can easily cajole their parents into getting them one.

It has drag&drop computing development interfaces for kids to use. For the more accomplished computer types, there’s a full Linux interface available. I use Raspbian on my RPi pictured above with the PiFace Digital add-on interface board to let me talk to the real world using stepper motors and the like.

Lately I’ve been playing with using it as a web server. It’s super easy to setup for this. Everything is built-in to Raspbian already and just needs a little nudging (configuration) to enable it. Add a splash of HTML web pages and a sprinkle of photos to boot and voilà – your very own private web server!

I started by hosting the ancient web site I made 10 years ago (wow!) that documents my 10-day backpacking trip in the Yukon. You can check it out here but I warn you – it’s seriously old-school.

For a fresh spin on the content, check out my new wix.com based site with the same content but gorgeously arranged here.