AI is no longer stuck in the cloud. Instead of relying on powerful computers with GPUs, the past few years has brought AI to small devices thanks to TinyML – machine learning models that can run on microcontrollers. You may already have devices that use this around you, from voice controlled smart speakers to fitness trackers. In this 2-part show, Jim gets his hands dirty with TinyML, building out a fitness tracker that can distinguish between rowing and running using a small microcontroller from Seeed studios – the Seeed XIAO BLE. Training and deploying these models is super complicated, so ..read more

Smart phones were the first step in bringing the internet, data, and AI away from the desk and allowing us to be connected and sense some of the world around us wherever we go. The next step was wearables. These started as smart watches and fitness trackers, but this is slowly expanding into smart connected clothing and other devices. In this series we learn how to build some smart wearables, leveraging the power of the cloud to make our clothes come to life along with Raspberry Pi's amazing new board, the Pi Zero W 2! Learn how to add subtitles to your speech with a smart t-shirt, light up ..read more

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a big fan of IoT and LEDs. I love using IoT devices to control lights, from the LEDs behind my desk to smart pumpkins! I've been giving the .NET IoT libraries a spin for an upcoming project using a Raspberry Pi Zero W 2. I'm usually a Python person when using a Pi, but the project I'm working on needs a service that doesn't have Python libraries that run on a Pi. Instead it has a .NET library, so it was time to break out my C# skills for the first time in years. I wanted to build an LED panel that can display text, either static text or scrolling text. So I picke ..read more

?‍☠️ Arrrrrrr, ye swarthy land lubbers. Come set sail with your pirate captain, the Dread Pirate Jim and his pirate crew as we sail the seven seas to find the finest treasure in the land – knowledge! ? In this series our trusty pirates set sail on the Sea of Thieves, and share their galleon with a range of special guests from across the tech industry. Each episode will mix sharing tales of tech quests large and small to pass the time whilst we sail, with intense piratical action as we try to claim treasure. ? This is the only series from the Microsoft Reactor where you can both learn how folk ..read more

I've been wanting to build a tool to post markdown automatically to blogging platforms. That way I (or anyone else) can write a blog post in markdown, save it in a GitHub repo, and have it automatically posted to a blogging platform of their choice. I've created a small Python app to do this, and you can find it on GitHub at github.com/jimbobbennett/auto-blog-poster. You add some special folders to any folders containing README.md files, and it will create a blog post from the markdown. It will also track when the README file changes and update the blog post. It's slightly annoying to have to ..read more

The bane of ever new developers life is getting your environment set up to be productive. And when I say new developer - I don't just mean a dev who is new to a team, but every developer who needs to work on a project they haven't worked on before. Each project has it's own dependencies, required tools, required libraries, a whole swathe of things that need to be installed, and can in some cases cause problems when projects have conflicting requirements. I certainly remember having to uninstall/reinstall different tooling versions when switching projects, sometimes multiple times a day ?. Wha ..read more

? Ah yes, a post title that's cheesier than the best Parisian Fromageries. Actually it's not a new me, I'm still the same old me, but I have changed jobs! I've just started as a Regional Cloud Advocate working for the Microsoft Reactor team, based in Redmond, WA, USA. A red neon sign saying Reactor Fun ZoneWhat is a 'Microsoft Reactor'? The Microsoft Reactors are our community spaces. We have 12 Reactors around the world, and we use these spaces to run events and bring communities together. We see these as spaces to learn and grow, to build your networks and build your skills. The video below ..read more

It is our very great pleasure to announce the release of a new, free, MIT-licensed open-source curriculum all about the Internet of Things: IoT for Beginners. Brought to you by a team of Azure Cloud Advocates, Program Managers, and Microsoft Learn Student Ambassadors, we hope to empower students of all ages to learn the basics of IoT. Presuming no knowledge of IoT, we offer a free 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum to help you dive into this amazing field. If you liked our first two curricula, Web Dev for Beginners and Machine Learning for beginners, you will love IoT for Beginners! Join us on the ..read more

Jim built an AI model that runs on a microcontroller to identify different fart sounds. Be warned - this blog post is a stinker! TLDR; Find a complete hands-on lab to build a TinyML audio classifier at github.com/microsoft/iot-curriculum/tree/main/labs/tiny-ml/audio-classifier. My 8-year-old daughter bought me "Farts - a spotters guide" - a book with some buttons down the side and when you press them, they make different fart sounds. This is the height of humor for an 8 year old, and still pretty funny as an adult. I thought it would be fun to see if I could distinguish between the different ..read more

At the end of last year I splashed out on a shiny new Apple MacBookAir with the M1 processor as I was fed up with an old Intel-based MacBookPro that was wuite honestly crippled by corporate anti-virus software. Out the box thsi machine is amazing. It's ridiculously fast, and lasts for ever on battery. Seriously - I charge it every 2 days and manage a full day of coding, writing, emails, Teams, the lot. Did I also mention it's fast? I can have all the things running and it barely breaks a sweat, even with only 8GB of RAM. The downside is that not all software works on the new ARM-64 architectu ..read more