Hello,

Welcome to the 43rd issue of TMPDIR, a weekly newsletter covering Embedded Linux, IoT systems, and technology in general. Subscribe to future issues at https://tinyletter.com/tmpdir and pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to info@tmpdir.org.

Thanks for reading!

Khem and Cliff

Linux

Yoe Distribution 2020.09 Release

Yoe Distribution lives on master branch of various layers and releases with a monthly release cycle. 2020.09 was released at the beginning of October, with lot of new stuff. It can now build weston based graphical images using musl C library for i.MX8 based images using the gcompat porting library that allows some glibc APIs to translate to musl APIs. It has also switched to using ZSTD for compression technology used inside ipk packages, which speeds up image build times. Optimized version of VLC and ffmpeg for rPI was added. Clang-15 was updated to latest minor release on 15.x release series.

IoT

Simple IoT v0.5.1

We have been focused on a use case where we need to stream high rate (15KHz) data over USB from a MCU device, so the focus has been improving the Serial MCU client, figuring out ways to handle high rate data, and a number of bug fixes.

  • handle config changes in influx db client
  • lifecycle improvements
    • fix race condition in http api shutdown
    • shutdown nats client after the rest of the apps
    • store: close NATS subscriptions on shutdown
  • Added Signal generator -- can be used to generate arbitrary signals (currently, high rate Sine waves only)
  • add NATS subjects for high rate data (see API)
  • add test app to determine point protobuf sizes
  • fix synchronization problem on shutdown -- need to wait for clients to close before closing store, otherwise we can experience delays on node fetch timeouts.
  • fix issue when updating multiple points in one NATS message (only the first got written) (introduced in v0.5.0)
  • Serial MCU Client:
    • added debug level for logging points and updated what logging levels mean.
    • don't send rx/tx stats reset points to MCU
    • support high-rate MCU data (set message subject to phr).

Other

Knowledge management systems

We have been using various note taking systems for reminders, remembering key points, meeting minutes and so on. There are many systems out there, from simple text files stored locally, to cloud hosted, feature rich systems offering not only storing and logging key points, but also organising information in certain ways that makes it easy to recall relevant portions easily or compose ideas into larger ideas by defining relationships between notes. It's as if creating an offline brain system. These tools can be the difference between a successful person and a not so successful person in future as humans become increasingly knowledge workers. However, it does have cognitive overhead; therefore, it becomes a matter of balancing act, where optimum time is spent

Quote for the week

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see further. -Thomas Carlyle

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