For under £10, you can put together a microcontroller development platform, ready to program directly from your PC over USB using free Arduino software. Once programmed, your microcontroller will run autonomously, untethered from your PC, powered by as small a battery power supply as a single 1.5V AAA or 3V CR2032 coin cell. You can have it interact with its environment using dozens of low-cost sensors and motors. Everything you need to explore the exciting world of embedded systems is available to you, typically for less than a day pass on the London underground.
 A homebrew Arduino Nano microcontroller development kit for under £12 (including optional OLED display) Continue reading this article…
By Assad Ebrahim, on November 15th, 2010 (12,021 views) |
Topic: Maths--Data Science
(Statistics and Data Mining II)
Automated decision problems are frequently encountered in statistical data processing and data mining. An heuristic filter or heuristic classifier typically has a limited set of input data from which to arrive at a set of conclusions and make a decision: REJECT, ACCEPT, or UNDETERMINED. In such cases, pre-processing the input data before applying the heuristic classifier can substantially enhance the performance of the decision system.
In this article, I’ll motivate the use of a radar-tracking algorithm to improve the performance of automated decision making and statistical estimation in data processing. I will illustrate using the website visitation statistics problem.
Continue reading this article…
By Assad Ebrahim, on March 19th, 2010 (9,235 views) |
Topic: Technology
The past five years have seen the emergence of a growing array of autonomous swimming, flying, and rolling vehicles, each highly sensored and capable of real-time communication with processors external to themselves. Practical designs are now commercially available for each of the four primary areas of our environment: terrestrial, marine (subsea, surface, and amphibian), atmospheric (gravity constrained), and space (orbital and planetary).
A look at a selection of these achievements in networked sensor systems will set the stage to discuss the communications layer of the ubiquitous computing stack.
Continue reading this article…
By Assad Ebrahim, on March 5th, 2010 (17,038 views) |
Topic: Technology
“Smart dust”, tiny leaf sensors, wearable computing — these and a host of other sensors that make measurements and communicate without requiring human intervention can now be readily integrated into dispersed systems to provide ambient intelligence, situational awareness, and the capability for adaptive behaviors or intelligent process automation.
Whether the sensor’s output is used to control the opening and closing of relays or thermostats, or to automatically raise alerts — the integration of sensors into systems is at the heart of the promise of ubiquitous computing. With the ability to place hundreds of embedded sensors within a given coverage area, each wirelessly streaming information, the possibility of self-organizing sensor networks is increasingly becoming a reality.
This article takes a look at the sensor layer of a basic ubiquitous computing stack.
Continue reading this article…
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