Pac-Man on a String

Oracle hosted the first-ever company co-sponsored Maker Faire event on November 17, 2016. When I heard of the event, I had something in my mind that I would encourage a group of middle-schoolers to make a game for the event. I have been teaching them occasionally on Arduino, NodeMCU and MQTT concept over some weekends,… Read More

Trip to Black (W)holes

Last week my kids’ school went on a field trip to the University of Santa Cruz to observe a black hole multimedia exhibition. We were invited there by Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, the astrophysicist and the fellow parent at the school. When Enrico is not busy pushing the frontiers of science (he is partial to violent explosions),… Read More

My Life as a (Telepresence) Robot

We have been quietly observing and evaluating our options before we finally decided to get a telepresence robot. Telepresence technology dates back to 1993 (Human Productivity Lab) and telepresence robots are not completely new. There is a growing array of telepresence robot options (see comparison) and the list is bound to get cheaper and better. Before we… Read More

IoT Workshop Guide – part 2

In last post, we have setup development environment for coding and uploading scratches to NodeMCU, an IoT device. This post, we will upload and run two examples to demonstrate how IoT device sending data into Cloud and receiving commands from Cloud. You can find the source code and MQTT library requirement on github. 4. Architecture Diagram It… Read More

IoT Workshop Guide – part 1

Attention:  if you reach this page at Kscope 2017 – IoT Workshop, please follow this link for the updated session content:  https://github.com/raymondxie/iotws/wiki AppsLab and OTN will jointly host IoT Workshop at Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne conference in 2016. We look forward to seeing you at the Workshop. Here is some details about the Workshop with… Read More