In this week's Wednesday Evening Training we had some great demo's and discussions on our individual projects on IoT and 3D modelling.
Aish also showed us her multi sensor project; a test platform on which all sorts of sensors are installed. We discusses the various sensor types, how to connect and use them and how (combined) measurements can best be done. Interesting stuff! One of the topics we also discussed is the way which the sensors are read in the software. That can be done in a loop but also using interrupts (low level event handlers). The latter method is faster, less error prone and cleaner. We'll be investigating this technique in the upcoming Wednesday Evening Training IoT sessions.
Considering building your own LED cube? Start simple with a 4x4x4 cube (still 64 LEDS, but at least you won't be needing a nuclear plant to power it): https://www.instructables.com/id/4x4x4-LED-Cube-Arduino-Uno/
BabylonJS: https://www.babylonjs.com
Archi: https://www.archimatetool.com
A lot of IoT
Aish showed us her giant LED cube (10x10x10 LED's, that's a lot of soldering!) and explained to us how she managed to build and run it. We discussed powering such a large collection of LED's and how the software was designed. Such a bug LED cube offers plenty of applications, including running 3D animations and games within the cube. We've started building a graphics library for basic LED handling that is going to be a great help in building such applications.Aish also showed us her multi sensor project; a test platform on which all sorts of sensors are installed. We discusses the various sensor types, how to connect and use them and how (combined) measurements can best be done. Interesting stuff! One of the topics we also discussed is the way which the sensors are read in the software. That can be done in a loop but also using interrupts (low level event handlers). The latter method is faster, less error prone and cleaner. We'll be investigating this technique in the upcoming Wednesday Evening Training IoT sessions.
Archimate architecture models in BabylonJS 3D
This week's session, I gave give a demo of my BabylonJS prototype in which an Archimate model view (using the free Archi editor) is converted into a BabylonJS 3D model. For complex architectures, 3D modelling may give more insight than plain 2D models. Worth doing some experiments to see whether this is a good approach. The Technical Proof of Concept is running great. It uses MySQL as a central database and a simple website with some Web Workers to gather model data, generating and continuously updating a JavaScript Archimate model and a derived Babylon 3D model from this in the background. Our colleague Fred van Nimwegen also joined my project and he had experimented with Neo4j in which he stored the Archimate model. Neo4j is a graph database (while MySQL is a relational database). Graph databases have some advantages over relational databases, mainly when querying data collections that naturally resemble networks. And that is exactly what an architectural model resembles: a network of related nodes. Moreover: modern architectures are getting more dynamic and will change over time more rapidly. When analyzing an architecture model to answer architectural questions like "what will happen when I change this?", an efficient query language and dito database are very convenient. We've planned a Wednesday Evening Training session on Graph databases and Neo4j in november. Fred will then share his knowledge gained with us.
Further reading
Do you want to read more on the topics in this post? Here are some links…Considering building your own LED cube? Start simple with a 4x4x4 cube (still 64 LEDS, but at least you won't be needing a nuclear plant to power it): https://www.instructables.com/id/4x4x4-LED-Cube-Arduino-Uno/
BabylonJS: https://www.babylonjs.com
Archi: https://www.archimatetool.com
Archimate tool database plugin: https://github.com/archi-contribs/database-plugin
Neo4j: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo4j
