Month: October 2016

Cypress Academy — WICED WiFi 101

I have spent almost every waking hour for the last month writing a textbook for my new Cypress Academy class. The textbook (as you might gather from the title of this post) is called Cypress Academy–WICED WiFi 101. It has been an adventure learning the chips, modules, development kits and most importantly the WICED Software Development Kit well enough to teach other people. During the next few weeks Ill write about this experience and talk about my experience.

Here is a picture of the textbook. First, as you can tell by the cover, two amazing, bad-ass engineers worked with me on book. James Dougherty, came from the Broadcomm IOT group and is a WiFI bad-ass. And Greg Landry a 27-year Cypress engineer par excellence.

While I was flying to California I was frantically trying to finish the class. Here is a picture of me programming the Development Kit on the airplane. I will say that you get some strange looks from everyone else. You can see the WICED-SDK on my screen.

Finally during the week I taught the first class:

Over the next few weeks I’ll write about the chapters and basically release it into the public domain. Here is the table of contents:

Chapter	Time	Purpose
00-Intro	30	An Introduction to the class (this document)
01-Survey	120	A tour of the WICED WiFi SDK, WiFi Standard, Chips, Modules, and Kits.
02-Peripherals	120	How creating a new project and how to use chip peripherals such as GPIOs, interrupts, UART, I2C, etc.
03-RTOS	120	How to use the Thread-X RTOS in a WICED chip.
04-Library	0	How to use WICED libraries for file systems and graphics LCDs.
05-WiFi	60	How to connect to and interact with WiFi access points.
06-Sockets-TLS	60	Establishing (secure) communication using TCP/IP Sockets
07a-Cloud 07b-MQTT-AWS 07c-HTTP 07d-AMQP 07e-COAP	240	An introduction to cloud Application Layer protocols Building a WICED IoT device using MQTT on the Amazon AWS Building a WICED IoT device using HTTP Building a WICED IoT device using AMQP Building a WICED IoT device using COAP
08-Project	240	Class project.
09-Shield	0	Details on the analog co-processor shield board.
10-Glossary	0	Glossary of terms.

A Day off in Rome

Well this post doesn’t really have anything to do with IOT–actually anything to do with IOT. But when in Rome…

It was a really beautiful day walking around in Rome after Maker Faire. It was blue sky’s and about 70… but I am not sure what temperature that is in goofy units 🙂

Here are a few pictures that I took while wandering around here.

I had the taxi drop me at the Colossseum

Then I walked down the street along the Roman Forum.

In this video you can hear the amazing street band playing Jazz

Next I went around the corner where the church of Santa Luca e Martina

Then into the Capitoline Museum. Here is a bad-ass bust of Medusa by Bernini who did a bunch of amazing statues including the Four Rivers Fountain that I posted about earlier.

And the Emperor Commodus as Hercules (apparently the guy was a real asshole)

And unfortunately I don’t remember the name of this sculpture but it is amazing… look at the thighs on that dude. (Edit: I figured it out. It is a composite of an old fragment of a discus thrower and a 17xx addition by Pierre Etienne Monnot who also sculpted another amazing statue called Andromeda and the Sea Monster.

Another bad-ass who’s name I have forgotten from the Palaza Nuovo. This is looking down the stairs on him… and those giant calves that look like they are carved out of marble. (Edit: It is “The Colossal Status of Mars – sometimes misidentified as Pyrrhus” which for some reason they list as 360cm which is about 12 feet)

Then onto Trevi Fountain

Maker Faire Insanity

I have spent the last weeks traveling like crazy and working to much… The cool thing is that my travels have taken me to Maker Faire NYC and Maker Faire Rome. I will be back onto the Pinball machine shortly… and I will have a new series going soon with WICED WiFi.

Here are some pictures:

With Massimo Banzi in Rome: