The Beginner at IoT with the Google Coral Devices - a Blog Repo of Shortcomings, Mishaps, and Resolutions.

For beginners in to IoT Micro-computers and Systems-on-Chips (SoCs) and Systems on Modules (SoMs), 

It's compelling (within budget constraints) to spend some flex on the specs of the baseboard that would be the first (or second, or further) dive in to trying one's hand at Linux and Open Source development, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Science statistics and modeling. 

Given several months in to the hobby (or profession, that it could be, and is, for more established development and manufacturing firms), I've become more familiar with the various current popular devices out there, in the micro-computer "credit-card size," (give or take) field, from the various online retailers who serve the consumer and professional prototyping and  manufacturing niche tech economy. 

It's marketed as a booming industry to come, in the upcoming years, and I'm sure that the appeal of having a dedicated board and development model, for individuals, startups, research and development firms, and mechanical and electronics engineers, is a situably hot topic, as you might infer of me, recently. Perhaps someone you know, personally, has a similar hideaway pastime and hobby in IoT manufacturing aspirations. 

I picked out the Google Coral line for the sake of the fact that Google is known to produce quality services, docementation, and products, at global scale. With their Coral AIY line, they bring a facet of their Cloud Platform data centers and Content Delivery Networks to the home user, with a handful of various uses encapsulated within the primary grounding element of Tensor Processing Unit: Inferencing. 

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Product Review: Magenet Corkea 5Vx3A (15 watt) 13.3 inch portable monitor with mini HDMI, USB-C, and USB-C OTG x 2.

 For mobility tech purveyors purchasers of late-model laptops, such as myself, with my Gold 2020 Apple MacBook Air, the world of portable Thunderbolt 3 USB-C portable monitor additions is a vast online playground. During the recent Amazon Prime Day, internet retailers, in addition to Amazon, themselves, went all-out in a celebratory manner, for the consumer, as it turns out, in what ended up being a massive e-commerce blow-out event that suited the tastes of all manners of shopping fanatics, when store front retailers had been bought out, looted, and ransacked, due to COVID-19 and activist rioting, around town. 

I wanted a monitor that matched the size of my computer, and I wanted a similar pixel frame size, so that I could fit the device in to my backpack. There’s many variables involved in portable monitor Shopping, such as weight, device width behind the screen itself, color profile, connectivity features, etc. Throughout much browsing, for days on end, leading up to deciding upon this monitor, the Corkea 13.3 inch 2560 x 1440 2K IPS monitor, with mini HDMI and USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 connectivity on Amazon, for $159.99 ended up being the winning suitor, with me as a much-satisfied customer. 

The Apple MacBook Air (early 2020) features 2 Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, with support for its native display resolution of 2560 x 1600, in addition to up to 5K on external monitor(s) is for real: big-time display workspace extendable on the cheap, and it’s not much like the days of working with desktop computer monitors - big, bulky, and demanding upon live-work space real estate. Here, I set up my workspace for the night in a new spot in my room, in the corner, just to have an element of novelty new-ness to my working environment. 

Everything is modular, ephemeral, and ad hoc, in this mobility-centric lifestyle workspace assertion. The monitor itself is lightweight, even compared to the MacBook Air, itself. In a backpack, even one pound adds a lot of weight and muscular exertion to an outing. I made sure to compare the device weights on the external monitors I had to choose from, and I chose Amazon, over other internet retailers, such as Walmart.com and Google Shopping, for the simple matter of their prolific and daunting arrays of offerings and features. 

I’m willing to give newcomers and unknown brand names a chance, in my tech device procurements, on account of the fact that it’s a golden age for technology and manufacturing, and for that competition is fierce, whereas a resourceful manufacturer who presents themselves within the competitive ecology of internet retail space has probably stood the tests of enterprise startup infancy, and proven themselves for resilience well enough to make way for advertising and fulfillment space within Amazon’s internet retail ecology. 

I purchased this monitor, in addition to the fact of its compatibility with my MacBook Air, for my IoT edge computing projects, such as the Google Coral Dev Board, which I’m finding to be a much-riddling and arcane experience in bootstrapping the device. Should I port over to Raspberry Pi? I’m somewhat at odds with that notion, given that I feel that it’s simply a matter of getting the right documentation in front of me, paired with the right resources. In any case, I wanted the HDMI port compatibility that this monitor offers, with its mini-HDMI port, and the shipping box included the ported regular-to-mini HDMI cable with it, in addition to what seems like a valid Thunderbolt 3 cable, for power, a 5V x 3A AC power adapter, a 1-to-2 port USB-C to USB-3 female adaptors OTG cable, and a USB-3 to USB-C cable, for plenty of attachments. 

The monitor acts, somewhat, as a Thunderbolt 3 USB-C hub, for the computer, in that it has 2 USB-C OTG ports, for connecting other peripherals, such as storage, or keyboard and mouse. The monitor, once it’s plugged in, and suitably powered on, is capable of externally powering the laptop, through the laptop’s daisy chaining in connectivity to the powered monitor. Alternately, the laptop can power the monitor, drawing energy from the computer, if needed, in a pinch. The monitor draws up to 45 watts of power, I believe, as it’s built with Thunderbolt 3 USB-C capable ports, which the cable and port protocol is known, in the realm of laptop device hubs, batteries, and power adaptors, for example, to pull up to 100 watts of electricity, for all of the devices connected. From dealing with voltage and amperage of smaller devices, adaptors, and external battery devices frequently, that much wattage is a mind-boggling amount of energy to command use of, in a device on-site setup environment, yet the MacBook Air 2020 laptop computer does it in fine form, with the Magenet Corkea 2K 13.3 inch IPS monitor coming through in brilliant resolution and clarity. 

In fact, the Corkea external monitor is capable of delivering much brighter colors and tones than the native Apple MacBook Air monitor. Here’s the Corkea external monitor in HDR mode, and side-by-side with the MacBook Air monitor. This feature disables the user-defined brightness, contrast, and color leveling options of the monitor. 

I’m supposing that this is as bright as it can get. For that matter, the MacBook Air is set to its brightest levels, although, to be fair, the macOS Accessibility options, in System Preferences, allows for single color “Color Filters” to be applied over the display’s output, which can significantly alter the brightness and tonal warmth of the monitor’s output. All this being the case, I commonly do my on-device development and productivity work at night, and in the dark, so I don’t turn the brightness all the way up, anyhow. 

For the price that it’s been offered at on Amazon, I’d venture to say that this is one of the best upgrades for the MacBook Air, as a perhaps little-known and oft-overlooked feature to take advantage of, given the MacBook Air’s native hardware capabilities - in this case, the graphics card GPU is the Intel Iris Plus Graphics card with 1536 MB of VRAM. That means that the GPU can muster the worth of about a third of an entire DVD-R 720P video, from back in optical device drive days - all at once. 

For most every day and typical uses, having an extra external monitor is a significantly handy feature, and it allows the user experience profile to be alternate from the standard on-device navigation and input profile of having everything in front of the user, which helps out, when it comes to lounging and sprawling out with the tech mobility lifestyle setup on the floor, for the sake of a uber-customizable, comfortably suitable posture and body aesthetic set of options. 

Product Review: Choetech mini portable fan with mister.

 Anyone who works with tech in small spaces knows how hot it gets, sometimes. Even the smallest of fans provides some decent relief from overheating, and circulated air is better for us, in our working spaces. I recently went on a vast spending spree, online, and discovered this little gem of the internet. 

The Choetech mini portable fan, with a built-in 2,000 mAh USB-powered battery, with water vapor mister is a neat little device that packs enough air circulatory power to cool off a small personal workspace environment, and, of course, the option to add aromatherapy scents and oils is always available. As an added bonus, the device has a color-changing LED light at the bottom, to spark up some nighttime work shift ambiance. 

The fan itself is reasonably quiet, and I was big on having a 300 mL water tank for the fan’s mister, so that I could customize an ionic mineral spray and fragrance combination. 

The fan is $9.99 plus tax, and there’s a quick October discount on shipping for orders over $15 on Google Shopping. In addition to making fans, Choetech manufactures small tech accessories and devices such as power banks. 

I’d been big in to trying to get my IoT development platform up and running, lately. Lots of expenses.

 Thanks to the California Employment Development Department, 

I’d been fortunate in having been a recipient of Unemployment Insurance money and Pandemic and Disaster Award Money, for having been affected directly by the COVID-19 disaster. My latest procurement is the Apple Watch. I’m interested in its platform basis in that it’s marketed as a tool for communications, but more so compellingly, for me, at this point in time, of that it’s an Apple device that’s concerned with the users’ health and well-being. 

And then, if you’d ever been in to working aspirations in to developing on IoT devices (bare chip boards, with embedded circuitry and processing microcontrollers), then you know how the nights on end can be relentless endeavors of discovering and perusing internet literature and forums for a glimmer of hope, short of being reportedly well-dialed in and having successfully SSH’d or provisioned the hardware and accessories appropriately, attained a fully autonomous Internet of Things microcontroller project, co-processor project, Machine Learning, prototype, or embedded device. 

My current “Things” are a mix mash of trying to maintain finery, amidst the shortcomings of small enterprise, in a world of just-burgeoning documentation, coverage, and marketing of a platform-profiteering move in and on topic of the Google Coral platform, which is the current IoT | AIY platform that I’m (trying) to successfully get up and running. I’d been covering it on Twitter. It’s been a whole lot of splotch bum asides and subsequent coming-clean, of that 

okay, I fwushuthuthuthuthgghhh:

I fwopped it.

In fact, I flopped it so bwamm, that I ended up landing on the first page of Google Search for Google Fwopp:

Here’s how I’ve been getting by:

That’s pretty much that, as far as daily nutritional intake and self care. 

And then, 

I’m working on this orthogonal counter-ingress and directionality assertiveness motive of in-home aesthetics and a bit of complement to the great outdoors, of which this locality features the much of on greatness: the jet stream, which, as for the ionic mineral concentrates that I have, purportedly mills the ions and organum matter of the witting participants of such, as well as that of the gross polluters of the nearby and surrounding ecology of the area. I try to clean up some of the mess, sometimes, as per my charity arm of my enterprise in blogging, at scrumbwitsies.us. 

Just a quick check in, for keeping up with something on here, for posterity’s sake. I’ll try to check in with something more compelling and pleasant soon. 

Product Review - Elevation Terpenes - via Amazon.com

 I procured a hefty load of chemical raw source materials for cosmetics manufacturing, as well as some ionic minerals, which I’ll cover separately, in a recent Amazon shop-jaunt online. I had been gifted a $100 Amazon.com e-gift card from a recent schizophrenia phone interview, during which I was being stalked, as it was earlier on in the COVID-19 and civil unrest rallying (slight) era of DTLA. 

A full spectrum set of Terpenes from Elevation Terpenes.

Terpenes  are common, richly aromatic compounds derived from plants. They are also known as essential oils, in some cases, such as the oil from the peel of the Valencia orange, although essential oils and Terpenes are not mutually interchangeable notions of chemistry reductions, extractions, and distillations, throughout. 

What’s in the works for the new Apple ARM devices? Microsoft already has a deployed alternative.

 There’s a bunch of uproar about Apple Computer transitioning over to their in-house designed ARM processors. There’s a lot to love about the embedded solid-state processing power of the ARM pedigree. With no moving parts to the CPU and embedded GPU co-processors, the ARM archetype is a powerful workhorse machine of lesser wattage needs and extensible flex in the turbo-boosting mode. 

For example, my MacBook Air is sweltering in my hot summer bedroom on the second floor. Comparatively, my iPad Pro, powered by Apple’s variant and subsidized technology built upon ARM technologies is powering through the heatwave, with no fans to the device, at all. It simply runs and does its job to absolution, except when I put it back in its box to do a resonance experiment, the other night, while running iSweep. It overheated and shut the process down, and I took it out of the box, and it was hot. The display parameters of the operating system went in to a dimming “recovery mode,” for a while, which the device seems to have recovered from. 

On the far-reaching outskirts of news-making tech stories, though, Microsoft has emerged as a seeded marvel of manufacturing, in terms of some quick moves, and (seemingly) largely undiscovered territory. As for myself, in discovering this gem of development produce of the tech world, I have a ceded debt to pay to Microsoft, as a former software pirate professional (on craigslist, from 2006-2012, or so). I decided that I needed a CAD | CAM workhorse machine, whereas my Mac and Apple devices would be suitably for “Apple” types of “stuff,” imaginably, of things that I commonly do and would commonly imagine are typical tasks of the Apple Computer, Inc., device world. 

So I checked out Microsoft Stores online. It turns out that they’re all closed, and their online marketplace is full of rich professionalism world of tech articles and product marketing; stuff like that. I did a night and morning of a marketing persona: Jacques Le Coctard. He embellished upon cocktardedness, in to the “essential” shitlessburger, which I was sure I was going to go out and wagon cart the shitlessburger heraldry, as the latest marketing slew of the iPigeon enterprise. That was just me, for a night. Somebody talked me down, from actually doing it, though. 

I figured, alright, their stores are closed, there’s Best Buy, and I was fairly set on purchasing the Surface book 3, a Windows complementary device to my ultra-mobility slim-and-latest model “thing” I have going on, right now, with my MacBook Air, iPad Pro duo, of the moment. I wanted a workhorse equivalent machine that was fair in considering my former transgressions against Microsoft, the organization and company. 

While deliberating between various options offered on the Microsoft website, I discovered that their Surface Pro X device has, in fact, ARM-powered processors, produced in partnership with Qualcomm, which are dubbed the Microsoft SQ1 and SQ2 processors. As it turns out, the processing power of these embedded chips are quite good, clocking in at 3.0 GHz (I believe, off-hand), with graphics processors built in, as well, with record benchmarks to their credit. 

Keeping up with news releases and marketing emails from Microsoft, they’re working diligently to iron out the virtualization and just-in-time (JIT) processor coding side-load bloat of instruction sets and all else of what-not goes in to porting over from a completely separate and distinctive CPU development pedigree, which was an issue in determining just which Surface device I was going to purchase (perhaps?… I wonder?). Maybe not perhaps. Maybe the production and development pros will work out a solution that works with the onslaught of techie-unemployment beneficiaries set out for a series of technology mobility device purchases, of a can’t wait, can-haz, and it’s covered, in full, by the Employment Development Department, and Los Angeles is where we grew up (or ended up), and there’s like, millions of us, (or something). Maybe not all techie mobility types, but if you’re not purchasing a device, then man... that embolism fart bubble up in the neck thing. It gets rough, sometimes.