hypernephelist n. [from Greek nepho-, cloud] someone who goes above the clouds.

Finding your headless Raspberry Pi IP address at boot time

When working on various Raspberry Pi projects, I mostly use the little buggers in “headless” mode, e.g. with no screen, keyboard or mouse connected. This means I have no obvious way of finding the device’s IP address at first boot after a clean re-installation of the OS, other than using brute-force methods like scanning all my network in anger, looking for some Raspberry Pi MAC addresses or open SSH ports. The scanning approach might work on my home network, but is not a very good idea when I am working back at the mothership, where we have thousands of devices connected to the LAN.


Sending messages to Azure IoT Hub in Python using Qpid Proton

While our Azure IoT SDK team is hard at work on an official Python SDK, we have received some requests from customers who were eager getting started using the service using currently available solutions. Python is a pretty easy language/platform to use when prototyping IoT solutions, especially when using devices like the Raspberry Pi where Python is a first-class citizen with many SDKs covering its hardware capabilities.


Running a .NET Core application on snappy Ubuntu Core

Recently I have been playing with snapcraft, Ubuntu’s new tool designed to help developers package their applications for snappy Ubuntu Core. An intriguing idea was to explore how easy (or hard) it would be to use it to deploy .NET applications. The good news is that it turns out that it is fairly easy to use snapcraft to package and deploy a .NET application using our .NET Core runtime environment for Linux!


Tessel Camera module + Project Oxford Face APIs

In this post I will to show you how to use the Project Oxford Face APIs from a Tessel device. The Project Oxford Face APIs are one of several sets of APIs exposed by the Project Oxford, and the most impressive in my opinion. They allow you to make simple REST calls to identify faces in a picture, and even try to guess their gender and age!


Running Debian 8 "Jessie" in Azure - making it boot faster

I have recently uploaded a hand-made version of Debian “8” Jessie for Azure in the VMDepot repository. It was before I discovered bootrap-vz and its ability to automatically generate Debian images for various virtualised and Cloud environments!