inx-www, Author at inxware

Edge Media compute

Project Overview The challenge was to support a growing demand for advanced media data processing, real-time generative media, and efficient content distribution while preserving the integrity of existing, field-proven software. Customers needed a solution that could address multiple application areas, including smart cities, IoT connectivity, and edge gateway operations. The new hardware roadmap was designed to provide cost efficiencies, improved reliability, and an adaptable physical form factor, all while enabling developers to leverage a robust, no-code environment. Challenges Service providers…

Domestic Smart Energy

Application Note

Introduction The way energy is produced and consumed has an enormous impact on cost effectiveness and return on equipment investments. Data-driven consumption can not only reduce energy waste but ensure it is consumed when abundant and not over-stretching supply when it is scarce or expensive. IoT-enabled devices include smart meters, smart hot water heating, smart climate control (HVAC), adaptive lighting, smart sockets, micro-generation, battery & thermal storage, Time-of-Use (ToU) tariffs, and Demand-Side Response (DSR) benefits, which that some energy providers…

IoT Enabled Industrial Controller

Case Study

Problem Statement An industrial heating system SME manufacturer required a state-of-the-art Industry 4.0 IoT controller to meet the demand for a diverse range of precision industrial process control applications and to help their wider markets in HVAC (Heating, Ventilation & Air conditioning) provide more energy-efficient and manageable operation. The product has to be easy to use by operators and easy to configure by installers in different deployment contexts. An interactive graphical user interface was proposed as the best way to…

Queue Buffer Function Blocks

FBF

Function Block Friday: Queue Buffers This week, we’re diving into Buffers as Function Blocks. Buffers are essential elements of many robust systems for ensuring actions and data in asynchronous environments are dealt with. Though simple in concept buffers can be deceptively difficult to code robustly and efficiently, especially for memory-constrained applications. Lucid offers a range of buffer types including First-In-First-Out (FIFO), and Last-In-First-Out (LIFO). Queuing buffers are conventionally modelled as push and pop functions, where push adds an element to…

MODBUS Function Blocks

FBF

It’s FUNCTION BLOCK FRIDAY! – This week we are looking at MODBUS. One of the most persistent machine-to-machine communications protocols owing to its simplicity and flexibility that is experiencing a renaissance in applications such as heat pumps and solar PV Inverters and remains common in smart buildings, robotics and industrial automation. MODBUS is a standard for machines to exchange simple data formats and signal command and control. It is simple and cheap to provide on any MCU-based systems and is…

State Machines

FBF

This week we will be showing off Finite State Machines (FSMs) and how easy and functional they are to build in lucid. Why use a state machine? A state machine is a model representing a system that can be in only one state at a time, transitioning between a finite set of states based on inputs or events. When software is built without clearly modelling system states things generally don’t go well. Visual representation of state and transitions between them…

Calculation Function Blocks

FBF

This week, we’re diving into function block Math operations. IoT sensors, controllers or cloud data processing often needs to do some numerical work to make them smart. Lucid makes these operations incredibly straightforward. The most general maths function block allows algebraic expressions to be entered, or you can choose from individual operator function blocks, but let’s start with some simple algebra! Single input single output or multivariate blocks are available, but here we are using a single input value doing…

Graphical UI Function Blocks

FBF

It’s week 3 of FBF and we’re looking at User Interfaces for devices. Graphical UIs in Lucid are built from inxware’s widget library that perform well-known user interactions such as displaying and acquiring text or numerical data from users. More advanced widgets include images, shaped objects, video, graphs, animation and even sound. To get started the Hello World application below shows a simple interactive text box app in the Lucid IDE and inxware enabled device simulation in the window below.…

File I/O Function Blocks

FBF, Uncategorized

Week 2 of the Function Block Friday posts is upon us and this week we are featuring ordinary file read and write blocks. Every programmer will be familiar with how files are accessed programmatically and Lucid does nothing unusual in this respect other than condense many lines of code into a single simple function block. Let’s start with reading data from a file with the simple “File Read Block”. This function block allows you to read data from any file…

MQTT Function Blocks

FBF, Uncategorized

Introducing 🎉 FUNCTION BLOCK FRIDAY 🎉 To kick off this series on Lucid’s library of function blocks we’re introducing the IoT industry’s favourite device connectivity protocol – MQTT! If you don’t know MQTT, it’s a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging protocol used widely in devices and server messaging. Lucid lets you configure and run secure MQTT connections to your favourite MQTT broker service in just a few seconds and NO CODE. For secure connections, you may need a security certificate from your…