embedded devices Archives - Dynamic Devices Ltd

Makefest [July 2nd 2022]

Cameron Swift — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 12:08:23 +0000

Introduction to Makefest

Hello everyone! We can officially call Makefest 2022 a complete success!

Firstly, Makefest gives us the brilliant opportunity to demonstrate our brilliant Kettle Companion product to a creative crowd of creators and great people.

Kettle Companion

As a matter of fact, you can see our Kettle Companion kit in action on the left!

The two mini kettles are known as our ‘ambient kettles’. These are the devices which indicate using an LED whether the kettle it is linked to has been boiled yet.

Red indicates that the kettle has not been boiled whereas green evidently indicates that it has!

This is signalled through a monitoring plug and communicated via Wi-Fi to a paired Kettle Companion in another user’s home. A text message alert can also be sent to the owner of this appliance if their Kettle Companion has turned red.

Furthermore, visitors at Makefest were able to talk to our founder Alex about our Kettle Companion product and how to purchase a test kit! For more information on getting yourself a Kettle Companion kit, please visit kettlecompanion.com

Fellow Creators and Makers from DoES & Merseyside

Plenty of our friends from DoES Liverpool were also in attendance and were able to showcase their creative skills!

Have a look at the pictures below for an idea of the inventions featured at Makefest from our friends at DoES.

Additionally, we would like to give a big thank you to everyone who visited our stand at Makefest yesterday as well as everyone who helped bring Makefest together this year.

Also, are looking forward to Makefest 2023 as we’ll have new and exciting projects to show you!

For more info please visit liverpoolmakefest.org

Lastly, click here to see more of our blog posts.

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Speaking at the Yocto Project Summit 2022.05 on Continuous Integration (CI)

Alex Lennon — Sat, 14 May 2022 13:24:14 +0000

“Yocto Project Summit Talk on Continuous Integration (CI) for Yocto Embedded Linux”

To begin with, we’re super excited to announce that our founder and CEO, Alex Lennon, will be speaking on “Building and testing Yocto in an automated fashion with GitHub Actions and self hosted runners”. The talk will be at the upcoming Yocto Project Summit next Wednesday 18th May at 14:50 (UTC) / 15:50 (BST).

Furthermore, I have been maintaining the meta-mono layer for some years. This has involved lengthy builds in order to test new releases of the Mono framework.

About meta-mono

“This is a a Yocto / OpenEmbedded layer which provides support for Mono, an “open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime”. Also, more recently, Microsoft’s .Net is supported, “a free, cross-platform, open source developer platform for building many different types of applications. With . NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build for web, mobile, desktop, games, and IoT”

Over the years I’ve had quite a lot of trouble ensuring that new releases of Mono ran properly for the community. Furthermore, it was taking a lot of time to build for different architectures, with different releases of Yocto. Also, testing and making sure things we’re OK took some time too.

Previously, I’ve tried different approaches, including cloud build providers and my own Jenkins installations.

But now I’ve finally come to where I’ve always wanted to be. With GitHub Actions workflows, leveraging self hosted runners on my own cloud hardware to build and test.

When contributors create a pull request multiple builds are kicked off (qemu-x86-64 and qemu-arm). These are then run up in architecture-specic QEMU virtual machines. Next, a set of simple tests run using the Yocto Test Environment.

Lastly, makes life much easier doing some pre-qualification for contributions and makes me feel more confident that I can keep things working.”

More details on the talk are here.

And you can register for the summit here.

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LCR 4.0 Case Study – The Kettle Companion

Cameron Swift — Tue, 10 May 2022 13:21:45 +0000

“Tackling loneliness through innovative ideas”

In honour of #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek our friends at LCR 4.0 have showcased a case study of our fantastic IoT product, The Kettle Companion.

In short, The Kettle Companion is an assisted living product, that helps those who live apart to stay connected, by illuminating when a loved one activates their kettle at home. This is signaled through a monitoring plug and communicated via Wi-Fi to a paired Kettle Companion in another user’s home. Additionally, if there is a change in pattern of use, for instance, an elderly parent has not had their habitual morning cup of tea by the usual time, the paired Kettle Companion will illuminate red. A text message alert can also be sent to the owner of this appliance, prompting them to check on their loved one.

For the full LCR 4.0 Article, please click here and to see the full case study, please click here.

If you’re interested in purchasing a Kettle Companion kit for yourself and a loved one. Please visit our website at kettlecompanion.com

For more information on #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek please visit here.

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