About IT management, cloud, Arduino, and other stuff

This article describes a way to create and manage multiple very simple temperature and humidity sensors based on Arduino MKR1000 , and being able to send their information to Home Assistant . The Arduino MKR1000 is a pretty cool device, which has an integrated Wifi chip, optimized for low power consumption. This post is not addressing the power aspect, but keep in mind that a possible enhancement of the presented configuration could be to leverage the low power and sleep mode possibilities, in order to run the sensor on battery, instead of having it constantly plugged in. Without taking that into consideration, my requirements were the following: - To be able to plug in a sensor in each room of my home, connected to my Wifi network; - To read humidity and temperature every few minutes; - To collect all data on a pre-configured Home Assistant server; - To be able to re-connect automatically, whenever an Internet, wifi or power outage occurs (and in my place, you can expect all t

There is no Foobot module yet available in Home Assistant . Nevertheless, Foobot is offering a RESTful API which you can easily access, and which is configurable with the RESTful sensor component in Home Assistant. The first thing you need to do, is to request a Foobot API key if you don't have one. You can do this here:  https://api.foobot.io/apidoc/index.html On the same API page, you can get your device uuid, by using the Identity API. Just enter your user name, and click "Try it out!": You will be able to read your uuid form the JSON response body. You now have all the information necessary to retrieve Foobot sensor values for a specific period of time. The API allows to get two types of data points: data points read in the last N seconds, or between two specific date and times. As in Home Assistant we would like to read the latest information given by the Foobot, we will use the first one. Using the Data Point API, we are now able to generate a

This article from the PMI Knowledge Shelf explains the rationale behind the creation of an in-house, customized project management methodology, iMAP, at a rapidly growing pharmaceutical company. The authors also describe the priorities that were selected to start with its implementation: a solid project initiation, a clear project life cycle, a special attention to risk management, a first step in reporting standardization, and specific attention to the activities necessary for the transition to operations. They provide an overview of their approach to IT project governance and how a defined project management methodology is the key for its success. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B40T8ZW4GEUJNmYxMTJhY2YtODY3Mi00NWEwLWExZDMtMmNlMGNiZTUyZWEw/edit

When discussing around me about Google Docs in the corporate world, I'm very often surprised to see the difference between the people who use it -and generally love it-, and the people who have never used it -and have tons of reasons for not doing so-. Here are the 10 justifications I'm earing the most: 1. Google Spreadsheets do not support complex data analysis: wrong, the function list contains hundreds of functions for Math, Date, Financial, Statistical, and Engineering Analysis. The database functions even allow Google Spreadsheets to query and process data from other databases. It can be fully customized using Google Apps Scripts, based on Javascript. You can create charts in a spreadsheet and publish them on an intranet webpage, so they get updated every time you update the data, in real time. 2. You can’t send a Google Document easily as an attachment in another format: wrong, you can export a document by selecting “Email as attachment...” and select the document