Intel Galileo@Senzation2014

SenZations is an annual European summer school on Internet of Things and related

applications. Starting in 2006 with an initial focus on wireless sensor networks, it
has become one of the most important annual educational summer events for
young scientist and researchers in the field, attracting regularly between 40-50
International students.
The summer school program extends over five full days with a mixture of lectures,
hand-on tutorials, team based project work and social event. The project work
allows the participants to put some of the learnings in the tutorials and lectures into
practice by prototyping an IoT application or service that addresses an identified
problem local to the environment. On the final day the teams have the opportunity
to pitch their solution and demonstrate their work in front of a panel.
This years school took place in Biograd, Croatia at the Adriatic Sea. 45 students
attended from 14 different countries. 20 lecturers from academia and industry
provided exciting presentations most of them focused on bleeding edge research in
the IoT field. The school also featured a business and entrepreneurship track which
was attended roughly a third of the students.
The detailed program and presentations can be found here:
http://senzations.net/program/
Intel folks (Alex Gluhak and Jason Wright from the ICRI cities (www.cities.io))
featured at the event with an extensive Galileo tutorial and brought the necessary
HW along (25 Galileo devices were kindly contributed by Raluca Oltean, Corporate
Affairs World Wide).
We also mentored the project work sessions with hands-on advice and organised the
final panel where the student projects where presented and winners selected.
One participant maintained a personal blog about the summer school. For an
interesting day by day account from a participant perspective, you can find more
information here:
Day 1: http://iotmonkey.com/events/senzations-2014-day-1-overview/
Day 2: http://iotmonkey.com/events/senzations-2014-day-2-overview/
Day 3: http://iotmonkey.com/events/senzations-2014-day-3-overview/
Day 4: http://iotmonkey.com/events/senzations-2014-day-4-overview/
Day 5: http://iotmonkey.com/events/senzations-final-presentations-recap/
Final impressions: http://iotmonkey.com/editorial/senzations-2014-things-thoughts/

The Galileo tutorial

The summer school kicked off with a 5 hour tutorial on Intel Galileo at prime time on
the opening day, with the goal of bringing the participants to a level that allows
them to become productive with the platform. The tutorial covered all essential
basics such as Galileo HW/SW, connectivity, Arduino based sensing and actuating
and serial I/O. It also had an advanced part that showed how to use python and
nodejs support, MQTT for advanced network communication and the integration into
IoT platforms such as Xively and social media tools such as Twitter.
The slides where inspired and partially borrowed from the IoT Galileo Curriculum
V1.0 by T. Cooper, M. Royer, D. J. Oliver, A. Burns and E. Nyquist.

Part1: Galileo Basics

Overview of Galileo HW and the Arduino eco-system

Overview of the Galileo SW stack
First steps on programming a Galileo, IDE setup and blink

Slides:
http://senzations.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/66/Senzations14-GallileoOverview.pdf

Part 2: Connectivity Basics

Available connectivity HW on the Galileo

Connecting to your Galileo via Ethernet cable
Setting up Wifi
Enabling SFTP and upload files via an SFTP client
Setting up Bluetooth

Slides:
http://senzations.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/66/Senzations14-GallileoConnectivity-v3.pdf

Part 3: Arduino based I/Os, sensing and actuation

I/O Basics
o Available I/O options on the Galileo
o Serial I/O using Arduino
Sensing and actuating with the Grover Starter Kit
o Digital I/O
o Analog I/O

Slides:
http://senzations.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/66/Senzations14-Gallileo-IOSensing.pdf

Part 4: Web Integration

Xively integration

Social network integration using Paraimpu

Slides:
IoT.pdf

http://senzations.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/66/Senzations-14-Galileo-

Part 5: Networking and node.js

Basics of node.js
How to deploy a node.js server on Galileo
Interacting with Galileo through the browser
Reading and displaying sensor data

Slides: http://senzations.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/66/Senzations14-Networkingnodejs.pdf

Part 6: Using Python on the Galileo

Getting started with Python on Galileo

o Running Python interpreter and scripts
o Importing and using modules
I/O basics in Python
o Serial I/O
o Analog and digital I/O
Network communication using MQTT

Slides:
http://senzations.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/66/Senzations14-GallileoAdvanced-Python.pdf
All lectures were video recorded and should be available on youtube in the coming
weeks.

HW requirements for tutorial

-

Intel Galileo Gen1/2

Grove Starter Kit v3 (by SeeedStudio) to provide basic set of analogue and
digital sensors as well as actuators to play with exposed by an Arduino shield
Wifi/BT module (N135)
4GByte SD card for a Yocto build with Wifi drivers
Ethernet cables for logging onto the Galileo from the laptop via ssh/telnet

SW requirements for tutorial

-

We utilised an image provided by AlexT, as it offered a bit more features such

as a package manager (http://alextgalileo.altervista.org/images/1.0.1/full/)
o The features were mainly useful to install gcc and python setup-tools,
this may be now available in the official distribution so you could easily
use it for your tutorial

The tutorial requires and ssh/sftp client on the laptops. While most MAC and
Linux installations come out of box with one, you may need to provide
additional clients for Windows (e.g. putty/WinSCP).

Some lessons learned

-

We distributed the Galileo Arduino IDE on three memory sticks just before the
tutorial start and it took the crowd only 15 mins to copy all files needed,
which seems a good way in getting the development infrastructure set up, in
the lack of a very high bandwidth internet connection.
Various people did not get the Arduino IDE to work out of the box on their
Windows machines. The main issue seems to be a non-English locale setting
on their laptops (expect this with international students!!!), preventing the
IDE to start. It took quite some time to figure this one out at the expense of
time available for the tutorial.
The whole tutorial took longer time than initially expected. We had 3 hours as
initial plan but then ended up to use 5 hours, which we kindly got from the
organisers.
Expect participants to arrive with all kinds of OS on their laptops (different
versions of Windows, Linux and MAC) provide adequate IDEs/tools for these
on the memory stick and be prepared to have some trouble shooting
experience on all these systems.
Make all tutorial slides available at the beginning of the event so the
participants can use it as a reference during the tutorial. This is sth that we
initially overlooked - we spend quite some time flipping between slides on the
projector.
Expect participants to have different levels of expertise and experience. Try
to leverage experienced participants to help with the less experienced ones
(or team up) so you can effectively move forward with the tutorial material.
An excellent network connectivity is key for the tutorial. Each participant will
use at least two network connections, one for its Galileo and the other for its
laptop ( I am not counting in personal mobiles). This can quickly overload any
Wifi access point that you may use. Make sure you have multiple alternative
access points available or even better a set of Ethernet ports for all Galileos
in the tutorial. One issue we discovered with our Wifi router was that failed to
provide DHCP leases to participants. This was due to default setting in the
router, limiting the maximum number of client devices to 30. Again this took
us some time to figure out - increase this limit to avoid any issues.
If you run this tutorial in a hotel or typical conference site, you are often
required to first register your wireless Internet device with a browser based
authentication step. This cannot be easily done with a Galileo that does not
run a UI. Make sure you have an access point for the Wifi that is under your
control and where you can run with WPA like encryption instead. A
workaround is to use some script that performs the authentication on your
behalf. A student wrote a nice python script that he shared later with other
participants.

We pre-provisioned an SD card image that included all basic configs (e.g. wifi
config, ssh server setup) and some coding examples for nodejs and python.
This saved considerable time during tutorial that would be otherwise wasted.
Various people may come with their own Arduino IDE installed and will try to
program the Galileo with it. Make sure you explicitly tell them to use Intels
IDE.