Luc Bors Weblog

In my previous post I showed you how to setup a simple weather-station using Raspberry Pi, GroovyPi sensors and Python. It worked very well, but there is definitely room for improvement. In this short post I describe some of these improvements. First you will learn how to start the weather-station when you reboot the Pi. Next I will show you how to create some decent log info. Autostart The weather-station works like a charm, but if the Raspi is rebooted, you need to manually restart the python script. That is not the way I want this to work, I want the weather-station start on reboot. Actually this is very simple. The Raspberry Pi uses Linux as OS and thus we can use the crontab to schedule when to start tasks. With the @reboot directive, a task starts on reboot. The only thin we need to do is to add a line to the crontab that tells that we want to start our weather-station on each and every reboot. You can open te crontab for editing by issuing the following command: $ sudo cron...

Last week I visited ODTUG KScope15 in Hollywood Florida. In this post I will share my findings and hope that you can benefit from it. My general impression of the conference is that it was to hot for me in Florida. At least to hot for a conference. If you can sit on the beach whole day long, it is a great place to be, but hey, I had to work.... From a content perspective, there was a whole lot of Mobile and Cloud, and just a tiny bit of ADF. We need to work on this for next year as per request of the attendees who really were asking for more ADF content. Anyway, here is my week in a nutshell. Saturday Not much to do after an 18 hour trip. So when I arrived at the hotel the only thing to do was enjoy the view and get some Cuban food . What better place to do that then in Southern Florida. The food was good and I went there again during the week. Sunday The Sunday symposium was a very good one from an Oracle ADF Developer Perspective. The Sunday Symposium took a deep look at th...

In September (15th and 16th) we will be organising an IoT Hackathon together with Oracle. I preparation of that I will write several post here concerning IoT. This post gives you an Overview of Grove Pi sensors and some of the fun things that you can do with it. See also this two minute tech tip that is an intro to this post. The GrovePi+ Starterkit Connecting sensors to the Internet of Things (IOT) is really easy! No need for soldering or breadboards: plug in your Grove sensors and start programming directly. GrovePi+ is an easy-to-use and modular system for hardware hacking with the Raspberry Pi and the Internet of Things. Here is what the kit contains: The GrovePi+ Board 12 Grove sensors Grove cables for connecting the sensors to the GrovePi+ board. The following sensors and lights are in the kit: Grove – Sound Sensor Grove – Temperature and Humidity Grove – Light Sensors Grove – Relay Grove – Button Grove – Ultrasonic Ranger Grove – Rotary Angle Sensor Grove – ...

In September (15th and 16th) we will be organising an IoT Hackathon together with Oracle. I will write several post here concerning IoT, starting with this one where I tell you how to do the default setup of your Raspberry PI. See also this two minute tech tip that is an intro to this post. For configuring your raspberry Pi there are several options. I prefer to use a keyboard, monitor and mouse so I can actually see what I am doing. The Pi has several USB ports and also an HDMI port. So if you have a monitor, keyboard and a mouse available, you can plug those into your Raspberry Pi and you are all set. Connect to the power and the Pi will boot into an initial setup screen that allows you to select your preferred OS. That is of course only if you inserted an SD card in the Pi that contains the various available OS's. Select your preferred OS and click install so that the Operating System gets installed. After a short while, the installation is complete. Once the install h...

Sunday symposium took of at 8:30. Unfortunately i had to skip the first two session due to some work That had to be done first. The first session I really got to attend was Brian Fry's session on Oracles Developer Cloud Service. JDeveloper, Eclipse or Netbeans was the way you would work with Oracle Developer Cloud. Now there is a new feature (not publicly available) that is a browser based IDE. It is a full development environment. It is a very flexible, responsive and quick UI. it has an integrated out of the box GIT repository. It can be used for both JavaScript, and Java EE and java SE. Oracle uses the DevCS to build the DevCS with over 145 developers using 27 GIT repositories. So oracle now is drinking their own champagne, which sounds much better then eating their own dog food by the way.        The demo was nice and showed the power of the Javascript editor and the integrated support with GIT. also the Java editor looked very promising. We will have ...

Yesterday ODTUG organised the ODTUG Mobile Day in Utrecht the Netherlands. The event was supported by two local user groups, OGh and OBUG, and sponsored by eProseed NL. This full-day event was dedicated to Oracle's next-generation mobile development, infrastructure, and security solutions: "Going Mobile? Where is Oracle Taking You?". All of this was presented by the world’s leading ACE Directors and ACEs, Lonneke Dikmans – Oracle ACE Director Dimitri Gielis – Oracle ACE Director Roel Hartman – Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman – Oracle ACE Director Mia Urman – Oracle ACE Director Luc Bors – Oracle ACE and several Oracle speakers. Session abstract are published at the ODTUG website . These top experts in the field showed how to implement the latest mobile advancements from the newest technologies, such as Oracle Mobile Cloud infrastructure to building BI mobile dashboards to a deep dive into APEX security for mobile to the latest features in Ora...

One of the new features in version 2.1.1. of Oracle MAF are local notifications. These notifications originate within the MAF application and are received by the same application. They are delivered to the end user through standard mechanisms supported by the mobile device platform (for example, banner, sound) and can work when the application is either in the foreground, background or not running at all. I this post I show you an example of how to work with Local Notifications from Java. I use a simple MAF app. I will not explain how to build this app, but the source can be downloaded here. It is mainly derived from the "LocalNotificationDemo" public sample app. Introducing Local Notifications As with many framework features, MAF supports three ways to set Local Notifications. First you can use the device features datacontrol. To support declarative use of Local Notifications, the DeviceFeatures data control includes the addLocalNotification and cancelLocalNotification...

During the closing keynote at the Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum XX in Budapest my former colleague Lucas Jellema and I delivered a live development demo. It was great fun to do. During this demo I developed an Oracle MAF frontend on top of Oracle SOA Suite 12c REST-JSON services. All in all it was a good session that was exactly delivered on-time with no errors. I think the demo gods where with us. In this post I describe some of the details regarding the Oracle MAF part of this demo. To be more specific, how the MAF application is able to work with the REST-JSON Services. In a later post I will go into the details of how to user interface was built. The details of the SOA suite 12c Backend are described by Lucas at the AMIS Technology blog in the following posts: Preparing  , Implementing part - 1   and Implementing part – 2 Before I start with the details I best describe the case first. We decided to create a tablet app that can be used by flight attendants...

Mobile apps usually have the possibility to toggle the springboard by using an icon that is displayed in the header of the app. The Oracle MAF reference app, Work Better, also tries to implement this behavior. The showing of the springboard works fine, however, hiding it does not really work as expected. In this post I show you how to implement a working custom toggle springboard functionality. Default Toggle Springboard Implementation First let's take a look at how the toggle springboard functionality works out of the box. In your application configuration file you need to set the "Show Springboard Toggle Button" to true in order to enable toggle functionality. All the rest is taken care of by the framework at runtime and these setting results in the default toggle springboard icons to show up on both iOS and Android. Note that this of course also works with a custom springboard. An obsolete way to implement Custom Springboard Toggle (you might want to skip ...