We’re pleased to release our free Open Source Cellular Platform for Arduino. Visit IoTConnection.net to get an at-cost hardware kit with optional on-demand cellular connectivity.
Open Source Cellular IoT
Jalali Hartman
Robots and Dinosaurs
A few years back I was hiking in the New Mexico desert with some friends. I came across this petroglyph of what looked like the Robauto logo. I loved thinking about some ancient version of myself etching out some googley eyes on a cave wall. (Actually, what is this a sketch of?).
Fast forward to 2022.
Japanese robotics experts have built some very lifeline T-Rex dinosaurs. Robotics purists would argue this is animatronics, not robotics but either way, it’s an impressive show of engineering.
We’ve come along way since the dawn of man. Instead of etching robots on cave walls we’re posting them on Reddit.
NVIDA: A.I. Makes Strides towards Breast Cancer Detection
Michelle Horton wrote an interesting article as part of the NVIDIA Developer program that caught my attention as it relates to breast cancer. Cancer is such a heinous disease – and one that could actually be impacted by the use of Artificial Intelligence.
I’m interested in what the computer did to help, because it’s applies to A.I. in general and where and how it’s useful to society. I am not a radiologist, but I know some cancerous masses take certain shapes. When scanned properly a radiologist can tell if a mass is a cancerous or not depending on the physical attributes.
In reality, this in itself isn’t that difficult. In fact NVIDA’s Jetson TX2 comes pre-loaded with image detection software. I haven’t dug into all of it but basically the idea on this stuff is that you tell the machine what to look for and then it goes and looks for it.
When it detects a shape (or pattern within a shape) and can cross reference that with what it knows and make a decision based on that match.
Why would this be exciting for cancer detection? In the future you could self-assess yourself. In the case of this study, the researchers found that it could reduce the need for unnecessary biopsies, which in itself is a huge step forward.
To learn more about this specific research, which involved more than simple image detection you can read the study as published on Science.org.
Can you use an Arduino with an industrial motor?
If you connected the Arduino to the proper motor controller, you could certainly power a motor of any size, assuming you understood how to power both the Arduino and the motor.
The issue is, however, Arduino’s are not compliant, fast enough or run on the right power to be actually included in a secure industrial system. So the real answer – start learning about control systems and put those Arduino’s away for now.
Robots In Society
For more than 10 years we’ve been building robots. We’ve built robots to talk, robots to roam and robots to work. More than anything, robots are hard. They are generally mobile and struggle to stay connected. Their controls never work as planned, the sensors are buggy and generally nothing works like you’d imagine.
But they are still the future.
A few areas where robots are working really well already:
-Manufacturing
-Recycling
-Lawn mowing
-Restaurants
A few areas where they have a long way to go still:
-Humanoid robots
-Full voice recognition and A.I. driven conversations
-Offline functionality
-Power usage and storage
Watch over the next few years as robots begin to incorporate into our society, but beware of the robot hype. They are not yet ready to take the place of humans!
The Age of A.I.
Artificial Intelligence is mainly hype. Trillions of dollars have been thrown at this problem and we still, as humans, really don’t benefit much from it yet. Sure, there are areas where machines augment our work, such as finance, security, healthcare, advertising and fraud detection.
But for the most part, A.I. gets us 90% of the way, but leaves us with a gap we can’t solve yet.
Still, Google’s CEO came out recently and said A.I. may be more important and impactful than electricity. It’s one of those areas that organizations need to start yesterday beginning to understand, but may not need to implement anything quite yet.
HoneyBadger and the Digitization Gap
Society is badly in need of automation and robotics. The issue is that suddenly the tidal wave of demand has been met with supply chain and labor shortages. Expert labor that understands the old paradigm, plus the new at the same time pretty much does not exist.
This gap is real.
Caleb Eastman and I have talked quite a bit on this topic of total digitization universality. Otherwise old systems can’t talk to new. We’ve even a new startup HoneyBadger Controls specifically to be a new type of Zapier of Industrial IoT. Zapier by the way, is an amazing piece of technology that Zaps data back and forth between SaaS applications so you don’t have to go ask your dev team to do it. Thanks to Andy Hayes for telling me about Zapier years ago. It basically put my custom integrations business out of business, but saved thousands of dollars in the meantime for customers.
We’re in stealth mode still but basically we just love badgers and see a real need for some better cross-domain connectivity.
The Concept of a Tugboat Computer by Caleb Eastman
Caleb Eastman is a friend and colleague. His LinkedIn profile says he’s ‘always worried about time and timing’. He is busy, but it’s also a play on words that only control engineers get.
Simply put Caleb spends a lot of time getting data from different types of hardware and software to talk on time, in a way that everyone, including the machines, understands.
It can be frustrating and tedious – yet data acquisition is also the limiting factor in organizations truly harnessing the power of data (See: Data is the New Oil).
Which is why he’s busy.
I was coming back from a refresh in the wilds and got a text from him with a link from his Medium blog.
He has a great analogy about computers and tugboats. It’s not actually what you think – but worth the read.
(Oh and Tom originated it.)
If you are interested in the future of A.I. and distributed computing you are going to want to check out the full article here.
Sending Clear Signals vs a Smokescreen to Feed the Machines
You may not realize the impact A.I. is having on your business. It’s not about what is coming, it’s what is already happening. Let’s take a look at very common example: Search Engine Optimization. What does SEO have to do with A.I. you ask?
Basically it is one of the original algorithms on the web. And it powers a lot. In simple term, engines like Google work to serve the best possible results and that is based on signals it receives. How fast is the site? Do people engage with it? What are the underlying meta tags?
All of these things lead to whether or not a site ranks well, which can lead to almost overnight gains or losses in traffic.
For example, take a look at PressureWashNow.com. It experienced a change drop in rankings after moving the website to a new host. Now it is starting to gain rankings after articles like this link to it – or send Google a signal that it’s important. The same things applies to new shopping sites and any kind of content you put on the web. The likes, comments, traffic and speed of the page all send a signal that the machines then use.