Category: Kev’s Blog

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Lightweight Java microservice frameworks/libraries

This is primarily a personal todo list of Java-based microservice frameworks to investigate. If I’ve already looked at any of these then I most likely have a separate post about them elsewhere.

As I investigate each of these, you may find implementation examples as part of this Git repo here (https://github.com/kevinhooke/JavaRESTFrameworkComparison) – check the readme in the repo for those which I’ve built examples already.

Libraries and Frameworks:

Useful/Interesting REST and microservice related articles:

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Arduino powered radio alarm clock – part 1

I had an idea to build an Arduino based radio alarm clock by re-purposing some other components I had lying around from other projects:

  • an Arduino Uno
  • an Adafruit 16×2 RGB LCD Pi Plate (for the display and control buttons)
  • an Adafruit Ultimate GPS breakout (for the time – what better way, albeit slightly over-engineered, to get the current time if not from GPS signals?)

The only part missing was an FM radio tuner. I was wondering how easy it would be to build a radio tuner from scratch (but not sure how I’d control it via the Arduino), so decided to take the easy approach to get started and use a TEA5767 based FM tuner on a chip. To make it even easier, I got a TEA5767 based breakout board for $5 on ebay that includes two jacks, one for an antenna and one for audio out.

Simon Monk has an Arduino library for the TEA5767 that has one function call to set the tuner frequency.

So far, pretty easy going. I have a start on combining the LCD to display time and GPS coords here. Now to add the radio library, add some controls from the Pi Plate buttons, and I’m almost there!

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Microsoft teaming up with Red Hat for RHEL on Azure (and RH looking at node.js and Java integration options)

Red Hat recently announced a partnership with Microsoft where Microsoft is now offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as an option on Azure. Although Microsoft has been offering Linux based IaaS offerings on Azure for a few years already, adding RHEL to the mix introduces an option with the backing of Red Hat enterprise support.

Red Hat are also apparently looking to increase integration options between Java and node.js for it’s clients, according to Rich Sharples, senior director for product management at Red Hat, recently speaking at a node.js conference in Portland.

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Wiring an Adafruit i2c LCD PiPlate to an Arduino (update 2)

I just dug my Arduino and LCD Pi Plate out of the cupboard for a little project. When I last posted about the PiPlate to Arduino wiring, I linked to a page that showed the names of the GPIO pins, but not the numbers I was referring to. Here is a better reference for the GPIO pin numbers.

The PiPlate to Arduino pin wiring I had before is still correct, providing you’re using the same pin numbering as in the above linked article.

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