Posts made by Neil Kolban

@fossette

Thanks for the suggestion. That was one of the first things I tried (according to my notes back in August). I raised a contact request and got ticket assigned (#2139). I just looked it up and there has been no response. In fact it lists at the top:

"Being Processed since 49 days and 12 hours"

I've got to imagine that the Onion.io chaps are busy.

It's no great secret what I want to chat to them about ... and I'll be very open on the notion ...

With Raspberry Pi, C.H.I.P, ESP8266 and the new ESP32 ... we are rapidly becoming awash in good single board computers of one description or another. My hobby is studying these and writing about them. I also like to make the materials available as cheaply as possible while at the same time trying to cover my own costs (time spent studying and materials to study upon). That's why I make the books available for no charge but with the notion that if one finds value within, one can donate $5 or so to the on-going maintenance.

The reality of that as a commercial venture is laughable ... all told I'm lucky if I earn enough for a large pizza in a day (and many days I'd go to bed hungry). As such I have my day job in the real-world and my passion/hobby (which I suspect many of us here have) in the evening which is tinkering and (for me) writing. My goal in wanting to chat with the staff at Onion is to see if they would be interested in making it worth my while to write the book. One possibility would be a modest contribution from them that we might consider to be a good will gesture to write the book. The book would still be delivered for free with contributions from readers if they perceive quality ... but I would open that information up to Onion and offer to pay them back for their contribution from any revenue that might accrue from the book. This would offset my fears that the demand for Omega 2 resources is too low.

So ... if we work on an assumption that if I wrote a book it would contain content folks might benefit from (and again ... that is the starting assumption) ... then if Onion "underwrote" my effort ... then if Omega and Omega 2 are successful, there will be lots of Omega and Omega 2 users ... contributions to me for the book would come in ... and that would be used to return the fronted offering from Onion. However, if Omega and Omega 2 don't draw the numbers that I fear ... then my effort would be worthwhile for my time (something like an insurance policy).

Hopefully this doesn't sound like too daft an idea. Comments pro or against are also welcome.

Neil

Bump. Am still hoping to have some correspondence with an Onion staff member. If anyone associated with Onion is reading this, can you email me at kolban1@kolban.com.

@None-None
If you or someone else were to run df -k, what do you see as the disk areas on your system?

I booted up my Omega1 for the first time today and immediately connected to WiFi and then ran oupgrade. With my device running and logged in through a serial emulator, I ran df -k and was surprised at the result:

# df -k
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs                    7552       500      7052   7% /
/dev/root                 7680      7680         0 100% /rom
tmpfs                    30576        96     30480   0% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock3            7552       500      7052   7% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay        7552       500      7052   7% /
tmpfs                      512         0       512   0% /dev

This seems to show that my file system is less than 7.5MBytes in size. I had assumed that the filesystem would have been ~16MBytes. Is there a step I missed or some other recipe that I should have been performing.

<NewbieAlert>true</NewbieAlert>

@administrators

Onion staff,
I'm interested in working on a book for the Omega and Omega 2 ... please see the body of this thread. I am hoping that this is a project that would interest you and I believe it might benefit both the Omega community and your own goals for the Omegas. If this is of interest to you, I am hoping that you can contact me at kolban1@kolban.com so that we may discuss.

Neil

Assuming you have access to some PC ... my recommendation would be to get your solution working written in JavaScript using Node.js. There is some documentation on the APIs available to get weather data here:

https://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs

If you are new to JavaScript and Node.js, get some books or surf the tutorials on the Internet. Get the solution you want working ... working on a desktop and then ... later on ... port it to Omega as desired. If you have question on JavaScript or Node.js, don't be tempted to post them here. Rather find newsgroups appropriate to those technologies. StackExchange sites are particularly good and have already had most of the good questions asked and answered.

On a PC or a single board computer with gigabytes of storage, I'd normally recommend JavaScript as my go to language through the Node.js runtime. That may be the way to go on Omega 2 but since the community don't have our hands on them yet, we can't really say. Generically, given that this is a Linux runtime, programming in C is about the most portable and efficient way to go ... however you will have more work to do (compared to Java) to achieve IoT functions list make network requests using HTTP protocols, working with JSON or XML and the like. These are first class components in languages like JavaScript.

Now you ask two programmers to recommend a language, you'll get three answers ... so be aware that such a generic question usually results in a blue vs red communication storm

Commonly there are trade offs in language choices:

• Current skills and familiarity
• Leverage of pre-existing libraries and packages
• Involvement with web protocols and browsers
• How dependent is one on performance characteristics
• Access to assistance from friends, colleagues and community after choosing a language
• Choice of development environment and tools
• and much, much more ...

@Scott-Smith Thanks for the kind words. I'm definitely interested in having a go. The traffic on this forum though is a lot smaller than I would have imagined. C.H.I.P. appears to have between 25K and 75K users and hasn't shipped formally yet with quite high traffic on the forum.

I ordered a couple of Omegas back in 2015 but put them in a drawer when they arrived hoping to get to them later (I was in ESP8266 frenzy then). Then the Pi Zero came out and I got focused on the Pi. I pulled out my Omegas the other day to power them up for the first time only to realize that they were not breadboard friendly nor had I bought any docks at the beginning. As such I've now ordered a dock and some 2.00mm strip board. I'll need to study the forum and see what was said about 2.00mm spacings ... that struck me as very strange and a big restriction to the hobbyist.

I'm also puzzling in my mind the audience for Omega and Omega 2. I'm going to look and see if there were discussions on this area. Specifically, I'm asking myself the core question of "When would one choose a Pi Zero vs a C.H.I.P. vs an Omega?" as a platform. What are the pros and cons of each by task and skill level?

This isn't an arbitrary question (at least to me). Knowing the target audience of Omega and Omega 2 is necessary to know what to cover in a book.

While surfing, I came to this post and followed https://onion.io/docs which now also appears to be an old/broken link. We might want to update this last post with the new new link

Howdy folks,
I'm trying to determine the potential demand/interest for book on the Omega and Omega 2. I have written a number of books for IoT devices including:

• ESP8266/ESP32
• Raspberry Pi
• C.H.I.P.

(I list here so that you may judge the content for yourselves)

These books are supplied in PDF format and are 300-600 pages. They are free to download with a suggested purchase/donation of $4.99 if you find sufficient value within. The effort to create a book is on the order of months with on-going maintenance, corrections, updates and additions on an on-going basis.

What I am trying to learn is the potential readership for such an effort. Do we have any indication on the potential number of Omega users both current and predicted?

I'd be disappointed to invest the effort only to find that the demand/interest for such a book was low.