1stBuild Hackathon -- GE Smart Appliances and Snappy Ubuntu

A prototype is worth a thousand meetings -- Words to live by!

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the 1stBuild Hackathon -- Hack the Home -- sponsored by GE, Canonical, and a host of other smart companies in the IoT space.

Over 250 makers -- hardware and software geeks much like myself -- competed for cash prizes in teams all night long in a 36 hour event at the amazing hackerspace hosted by 1stBuild and the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Mark Shuttleworth recorded this message, played in the kickoff keynote, to start the hackathon:

Several entries did in fact use Snappy Ubuntu as the base operating system, including the 3rd Place entry, a Smart Crockpot!

I'll quote Jason Chodynieki, on the team that built that device, since I couldn't write it any better:

"I wanted to highlight that this project makes use of Snappy Ubuntu Core! Using Snappy, we were able to create a very modular application that could easily be updated across multiple devices if this project ever made it to production. Snappy provided us with the ability to use popular frameworks very easily and to package our application up as a Snap to make it accessible to the world. With Snappy and the associated CrockWatch snap, we are capable of dropping CrockWatch onto any device that is receiving sensor data from a Crockpot. Because of this, the CrockWatch application can not only run on the webserver (on a Raspberry Pi 2) we used for this project, but it can also be used on other devices. Imagine if your set top box on your TV could help show you what's cooking in the Crock Pot or if the screen on your fridge was capable of displaying this information! With Ubuntu Snappy, these thoughts could soon become reality!"

My wife absolutely loves this idea!  She often starts cooking dinner in the morning, in our slow cooker, and then spends the rest of the day running around town, dropping our kids off and picking them up from two different schools.  She would love the ability to remotely "check in" on the food, look at it from a camera, and adjust the temperature and pressure while out and about around town!

GE had a whole array of appliance available at the event, any of which could be controlled through a special interface, and a Raspberry Pi 2 running Snappy, including this fridge.

All in all, it was a fantastic event.  A big thanks to our hosts at 1stBuild and our colleagues at GE that introduced us to the event.  And an even bigger thanks to all the participants that worked with Ubuntu on their devices and to my colleague Massimo who helped them out!

Happy Hacking,

Dustin

Snappy Ubuntu for Devices -- The Year of the Linux Countertop!

Forget about The Year of the Linux Desktop...This is The Year of the Linux Countertop!

I'm talking about Linux on every form of Internet-connected embedded devices.  The Internet-of-Things is already upon us.  Sensors, smart watches, TVs, thermostats, security cameras, drones, printers, routers, switches, robots -- you name it.  

And with that backdrop, we are thrilled to introduce Snappy Ubuntu for Devices.  Ubuntu is now a possibility, on almost any device, anywhere.  Now that's exciting!

This is the same Snappy Ubuntu, with its atomic, transactional updates that we launched on each major public cloud last month -- extended and updated for 64-bit Intel, AMD and ARM devices.

You can check out the official landing page for a comprehensive list of already-enabled devices and services, including: Ninjablocks, openHAB, Open Source Robotics Foundation, Robot Operating System, Erle Robotics, Odroid, Beagleboard, Udoo, Parallella, PCDuino, Banana Pro, Allwinner, DeviceHive, IoTSys, RIOT, Resin.io, Kaa, Nwave, Siralab, OpenSensors.io, Weave, 2lemetry.

Now, if you want a detailed, developer's look at building a Snappy Ubuntu image and running it on a BeagleBone, you're in luck!  I shot this little instructional video (using Cheese, GTK-RecordMyDesktop, and OpenShot).  Enjoy!

A transcript of the video follows...

1. What is Snappy Ubuntu?
• A few weeks ago, we introduced a new flavor of Ubuntu that we call “Snappy” -- an atomically, transactionally updated Operating System -- and showed how to launch, update, rollback, and install apps in cloud instances of Snappy Ubuntu in Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine public clouds.
• And now we’re showing how that same Snappy Ubuntu experience is the perfect operating system for today’s Cambrian Explosion of smart devices that some people are calling “the Internet of Things”!
• Snappy Ubuntu Core bundles only the essentials of a modern, appstore powered Linux OS stack and hence leaves room both in size as well as flexibility to build, maintain and monetize very own device solution without having to care about the overhead of inventing and maintaining your own OS and tools from scratch. Snappy Ubuntu Core comes right in time for you to put your very own stake into stake into still unconquered worlds of things
• We think you’ll love Snappy on your smart devices for many of the same reasons that there are already millions of Ubuntu machine instances in hundreds of public and private clouds, as well as the millions of your own Ubuntu desktops, tablets, and phones!
2. Unboxing the BeagleBone
• Our target hardware for this Snappy Ubuntu demo is the BeagleBone Black -- an inexpensive, open platform for hardware and software developers.
• I paid $55 for the board, and $8 for a USB to TTL Serial Cable
• The board is about the size of a credit card, has a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor, 512MB RAM, and on board ethernet.
• While Snappy Ubuntu will run on most any armhf or amd64 hardware (including the Intel NUC), the BeagleBone is perhaps the most developer friendly solution.
3. The easiest way to get your Snappy Ubuntu running on your Beaglebone
• The world of Devices has so many opportunities that it won’t be possible to give everyone the perfect vertical stack centrally. Hence Canonical is trying to enable all of you and provide you with the elements that get you started doing your innovation as quickly as possible. Since there will be many devices that won’t need a screen and input devices, we have developed “webdm”. webdm gives you the ability to manage your snappy device and consume apps without any development effort.
• To installl you simply download our prebuilt WEB .img and dd it to your sd card.
• After that all you ahve to do is to connect your beaglebone to a DHCP enabled local network and power it on.
• After 1-2 minutes you go to http://webdm.local:8080 and can get onto installing apps from the snappy appstore without any further effort
• Of course, we are still in beta and will continue give you more features and a greater experience over time; we will not only make the UI better, but also work on various customization options that allow you to deliver your own app store powered product without investing your development resources in something that already got solved.
4. Downloading Snappy and writing to an sdcard
• Now we’re going to build a Snappy Ubuntu image to run on our device.
• Soon, we’ll publish a library of Snappy Ubuntu images for many popular devices, but for this demo, we’re going to roll our own using the tool, ubuntu-device-flash.
• ls -halF mysnappy.img
• sudo dd if=mysnappy.img of=/dev/mmblk0 bs=1M oflag=dsync
5. Hooking up the BeagleBone
• Insert the microsd card
• Network cable
• USB debug
• Power/USB
6. Booting Snappy and command line experience
• Okay, so we’re ready for our first boot of Snappy!
• Let’s attach to the USB/serial console using screen
• Now, I’ll attach the power, and if you watch very carefully, you might get to see some a few boot messages.
• snappy help
• ifconfig
• ssh ubuntu@10.0.0.105
7. WebDM experience
• snappy info
• Shows we have the webdm framework installed
• point browser to http://10.0.0.105:8080
• Configuration
• Store
8. Conclusion
• Hey how cool is that!  Snappy Ubuntu running on devices :-)
• I’ve spent plenty of time and money geeking out over my Nest and Dropcam and Netatmo and WeMo lightswitches, playing with their APIs and hooking them up to If-This-Then-That.
• But I’m really excited about a world where those types of devices are as accessible to me as my Ubuntu servers and desktops!
• And from what I’ve shown you here, with THIS, I think we can safely say that that we’ve blown right past the year of the Linux desktop.
• This is the year of the Linux countertop!

Cheers,

Dustin