GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

I was graciously invited to give two panel discussions at the IoT World conference that happened last week in Santa Clara, CA.  Since the panels are not recorded, here are my thoughts and jots from before and during the Wednesday 5/15/2019 panel, entitled  Wrangling IoT Data for Machine Learning .  (Actually, I'm going into even more detail than I had time for at the panel.)  Despite that the conference organizers approached me about speaking on behalf of my former employer about some topics that honestly I was given just a few weeks to investigate and could only report back with failures even now, I managed to convince them that I was fluent in other things that were more generic -- unrelated to the job I knew I was about to quit. (Note: My thoughts and jots for the Thursday 5/16 panel are coming later.) Business Calculations The first question we were tasked with answering in this panel related to the business calculations that must be made before taki...

Ever thought it would be cool to make an Android app that fuses Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence to draw 3D objects on-screen that interact with particular recognized physical objects viewed on-camera?  Well, here's something to help you get started with just that! Making conference talks can be a chicken-and-egg problem.  Do you hope the projects you've already worked on are interesting enough to draw an audience, or do you go out on a limb, pitch a wild idea, and hope you can develop it between the close of the call for papers and the conference?  Well, in this case, the work I did for DevFests in Chicago and Dallas yield a template for talks formulated by either approach. The most impressive part is that you can recreate for yourself  the foundation I've laid out on GitHub  by cloning the Tensorflow Git project, adding Sceneform, and editing (mostly removing) code.  However, it wasn't such a walk in the park to produce.  Here are th...

Are there good full-stack developers? For the past several months, I have been posing as a traditional full-stack developer when I come from a background of software testing, interpreted scripting, and winning hackathons with proof of concept and prototype work.  I suppose "full stack" could also mean twiddling bits of firmware to interface with a BLE stack and then writing software to allow a PC or phone to control an embedded device (which is my kind of full-stack), but here I'm referring to traditional back-end and front-end application development. It used to look easy back when I entered this world roughly four years ago.  You can bang out some pieces in Node, others in Angular, and some deep plumbing in Java, interface with your database of choice, and then call it a day.  I was still usually involved with testing, though, and spent time flipping back and forth between API and UI testing (specifically API contract (such as Pact) type of testing, and  regre...

I've had a Sparkfun ESP32 Thing laying around on my desk since back in May when I met the fellow from Iron Transfer at a pinball convention, and we got to talking about IoT and his devices to remotely administrate pinball machines.  However, I spent tons of time this year planning for exhibitions, and didn't really get to do anything with it -- until now. Before You Begin There are a few choices you need to make up-front about which IDE you wish to use for development, plus which development framework.  I have chosen Microsoft's Visual Studio Code since it is cross-platform, feature-rich without hogging resources, free to download, and based on an open-source product similar to how Google Chrome is derived from Chromium.  It comes with extensions for language support and IntelliSense, which are must-haves when authoring code.  You are free to use an IDE of your choice; it won't really hamper your ability to enjoy the rest of this article. The other decision ...