This happy little notice dropped in my email box this morning, claiming that my birthday was also the sixth anniversary of my joining Twitter.

 

Actually, Twitter may need to adjust its email robot a bit.  Upon further investigation, with the help of the Twopcharts web site, I found more precise information:

 

So, I have been on Twitter a total of 2,500 days (6 years, 10 months and 4 days).  Twitter was only 10 months late sending the Twitterversary message to me.

The burning question is: how much valuable time have you wasted or invested (depending on your point of view) posting tweets on Twitter?  Twopcharts estimates 118 hours for me!

Tweet on, my friends!

This morning, I stumbled upon a Facebook post that explained the different social media services in terms that even I could understand.  I think it originally came from geek.com.  Grab a donut and enjoy!

As a starting point to explore how to implement the YJJ Architecture, let’s take a look at the Oracle Internet of Things platform. The following diagram highlights what parts of the Oracle reference architecture would be installed in the Jeep and which would be in the Yellow Jeep Cloud.

The Oracle architecture is built end-to-end on Java.  At the device and gateway end, Oracle Java ME Embedded can e leveraged in the sensor devices. Oracle Java SE Embedded would be used in the Gateway device that ties multiple sensor subsystems together and communicates wirelessly to the Yellow Jeep Cloud in a data center.

In the Yellow Jeep Cloud, a variety of Oracle middleware and application products, also implemented in Java, can be leveraged, based on the specific application. 

In future posts, I will drive to a deeper level of detail on both the Jeep and cloud sides of the architecture to examine how this reference architecture can be applied to equip my Yellow Jeep for its journey.

This morning, I read the recently-released McAfee Labs Threats Report – Fourth Quarter 2013   The lead story was entitled “The cybercrime industry and its role in POS attacks.”  To introduce a timeline chart that includes successful attacks on well known retailers, the report states:

In December, we began to hear of a series of point-of-sale (POS) attacks on multiple retail chains across the United States. The first story to break was specific to Target; this attack has been ranked among the largest data-loss incidents of all time. Soon we learned of more retail chains affected by POS attacks. Neiman Marcus, White Lodging, Harbor Freight Tools, Easton-Bell Sports, Michaels Stores, and ‘wichcraft all suffered similar POS breaches in 2013. Although there has been no public acknowledgment that the attacks are related or carried out by the same actor, many of them leveraged off-the-shelf malware to execute the attacks.

Two themes in the article particularly stood out:

• Many attacks leveraged “off-the-shelf malware”
• The attacks were executed by a “healthy and growing cybercrime industry”

The article concluded:

We believe these breaches will have long-lasting repercussions. We expect to see changes to security approaches and compliance mandates and, of course, lawsuits. But the big lesson is that we face a healthy and growing cybercrime industry which played a key role in enabling and monetizing the results of these attacks.

Intruders are better prepared, more organized and better equipped than ever.  It’s a crazy world out there.  

Regardless of how many times I see this photo or ones like it, the view is still awe-inspiring.  To look beyond the moon’s horizon to see our beautiful planet rising in the distance must have been a moving experience for the Apollo astronauts who took the first photos from that perspective.

Thanks, NASA!

Much of the discussion of the Internet of Things revolves around the myriad of intelligent sensors that can be used to collect data from almost anywhere (even pulse rate from your ear . But I really think the power of IoT will really be harnessed when data from all those sensors is used to make intelligent decisions and provide feedback control that improves the operation of whatever systems we are using.

I like to think of this in terms of Supervisory Control, a concept I first learned about and applied in implementing manufacturing and process control systems in the 1980’s.  Extrapolating that concept forward to the Internet of Things, I like to use the following diagram as a framework for discussion.

 

Three levels of control are illustrated in this diagram:

1. Device Control

Each individual intelligent device may collect data from multiple sensors and exert control over the device.  

For example, in a Yellow Jeep or other modern vehicle, the Engine Control Unit (ECU) depends on both sensors and actuators to control engine function. The following diagram illustrates how various input sensor are used by the Electronic Control Unit (ECU) to control various actuators (e.g. igniter, injector) and generate operator alerts (e.g. Check Engine Light).

 

2. Gateway or Subsystem Supervisory Control

Gateways or subsystem controllers may be used to aggregate data from multiple devices and provide subsystem-level supervisory control over those devices. 

For example, in the Yellow Jeep example, a video subsystem may aggregate video feeds from multiple cameras while providing synchronized control over video zoom, pan and tilt functions.

 

3. Overall Supervisory Control

As data is gathered from various subsystems into the Cloud, that data can certainly be ingested and stored for historical analysis and visualization, but real time analysis of that data could be used to coordinate may subordinate systems.  

For example, what if an army of Yellow Jeeps were exploring different parts of the world at the same time?  Each of these Jeeps may have one or more subsystems that collect data and perform their own local supervisory control functions.  However, data collected from all those Jeeps could be analyzed in the cloud in real time and fed back to the individual Jeeps to control how they are operated.  I’m not sure just what that supervisory control might be, but it is worthy of exploration.

 

Please let me know what you think.

Roll on Yellow Jeep Journey!

When I posted my thoughts about how to instrument my Yellow Jeep, Ricardo Diaz, an Oracle colleague, offered a great recommendation for extra instrumentation via a LinkedIn message:

Heart beat monitor sensor with GPS SMS alerting for concerned fathers.

I’ve rolled a Jeep once. A slow roll off a sand dune in Florida. My heart jumped out of the Jeep before me!

Well, Ricardo, here’s an idea I found on the web – a pulse rate sensor you can clip to your ear!  Certainly we should be able to capture that rate and generate an appropriate alert when things get hairy in the jeep!

 

The Pulse Sensor team introduces the sensor this way:

Pulse Sensor Amped is a greatly improved version of our original Pulse Sensor, a plug-and-play heart-rate sensor for Arduino.  It can be used by students, artists, athletes, makers, and game & mobile developers who want to easily incorporate live heart-rate data into their projects.  

Maybe it could also be used by a Yellow Jeep guy!  We might even start rating Jeep trails by the high heart rates they cause!

Roll on Yellow Jeep Journey!

Having previously introduced my thoughts about Yellow Jeep Architecture Users and Instrumenting the Jeep  we can begin to explore what functionality should exist in the Yellow Jeep Cloud. Here are some functions I have considered:

Basic Yellow Jeep Cloud functions:

• data ingest
• data storage
• event processing
• historical analysis, trending
• supervisory control functions
• historical route mapping
• authentication
• authorization
• user registration / profile management
• user password/credential management
• API security

Of course, in keeping with modern standards in the API Economy  cloud functions would all be exposed in the Yellow Jeep API, with capabilities such as these:

• ingest data
• ingest audio
• ingest video
• request raw data
• request data summary
• request calculated data
• request supervisory control data
• request video stream/segment
• request audio stream/segment
• authentication
• authorization
• user management

What functionality should I add?  What capabilities do you think should existing in the Yellow Jeep API?

Roll on Yellow Jeep Journey!

What instrumentation do you think I should install in my Yellow Jeep for its long journey?

Here are some of the sensors that I have considered:

• Engine monitoring – via On Board Diagnostic (OBD) port
• tire pressure
• location – GPS coordinates
• internal temperature
• external temperature
• light intensity
• video – forward, reverse, left, right, driver, passenger, roaming camera
• audio – multiple microphones
• driver ID
• passenger ID(s)
• velocity
• acceleration
• yaw, pitch, roll
• altitude
• air pressure
• humidity

Some human input that may be appropriate in the Jeep includes

• audio/video/text comments
• ongoing journal
• still/video camera, independent of vehicle

A friend suggested that fingerprint sensors should be added for identification of the driver and passengers.

What suggestions might you have?

Roll on Yellow Jeep Journey!

When I prepare my Jeep for a long Yellow Jeep Journey, who would possibly use the technology?  What should the User Interface support?

I expect that users will roughly fall into four groups:

1. Driver:  The guy who drives the Jeep 
2. Passengers:  People who come along for the ride
3. Observers:  Folks to may want to monitor trip from afar
4. Technical Support:  People who keep the technology running.

I expect that any one individual may act in any of these roles over time.

I presume that information will be either near real-time (representing stuff that is happening now), or historical (data collected over a period of time).  The user interface should provide tools to appropriately display and interact with either real time or historical data for each category of users.

I suppose that the types of interactions for each type of user include those listed below:

Drivers will be interested in such things as:

• Engine health
• Location/position
• Direction being traveled
• Destination and directions
• Weather – current and forecast

Passengers may be interested in thing such as

• Route planning
• Response to observers questions and comments
• Updating blogs and articles while traveling

Observers may be interested where they Jeep has been and what is happening

• Location
• Direction
• Destination
• Route travelled
• Weather
• Photos, video, audio recordings, blog posts.

Technical support folks may want to monitor

• Health of the electronics
• Alarms and warnings

Do you have any other ideas?  What would you like to see on this blog or accompanying website if you were to monitor my long Yellow Jeep Journey?

Thanks for your input.

Roll on Yellow Jeep Journey!