Hi there,

Welcome to my blog.  The goal is to put my experiences on this blog during my experiments with Java and Raspberry Pi.  I worked early in my career as C developer but got interested in Java pretty soon.  After a period of developing for different companies (CIMAD IBM, Real Software and Fortis Bank) my career evolved the natural flow meaning that you always start as a developer but along the way evolve to other positions and at the end having no close touch anymore with the technology and sitting behind the desk doing administrative stuff : wanted, unwanted or without thinking. I am not saying doing administrative tasks is bad but what I want to say that a good developer should stay a developer unless they are really bored being creative behind their PC. I followed the natural evolutions which goes on in software companies. It started with coaching young developers but rapidly moved towards architecture, project management, coordination, analysis, …, and at the end doing close to no development. At some point a couple of years ago the development team I was coordinating, was doing a brainstorm session for a big project we would be working on. They were talking about J2EE, Spring, Maven, Hibernate, Struts, Jaxb, Junit, Test coverage, Continious integration, deployment, … I heared of those things and mostly knew the basics behind but what happened in that meeting was the fact that I realized that I was loosing touch with the technology and I was sitting behind my desk explaining in words what a system should do instead of inventing the system myself and creating it as developer. There it is, the word creating. During that meeting I realized that I was missing being creative. Being able to create a piece of software which is used by people to help them in their day to day work. So rapidly I started buying books, lots of books to bridge the technical gap I was building up the last years. But that was not enough. More and more I felt that being fulltime architect/analyst was not what I wanted. I wanna do things, I want my fingers on the keyboard doing creative work, I want to do more than being just up to date by reading books and searching info on the internet. So last year I decided to take the step and go back into development. Since them I am developing middleware software based on Apache Camel running in a FUSE environment.
In November I went to a big Java Conference (DEVOXX) in Antwerp. Heaven for any Java developer wanting to know what goes around in the Java world. And there it happened. There were some sessions about Raspberry PI and related java technologies. There was a great presentation by Robert Savage on home automation developments based on Java technology, running on Raspberry Pi (RP). See www.savagehomeautomation.com and www.pi4j.com Yes, the Internet of Things. I had heared of this subject already a few times but this was the first time I was on it. I don’t know what happened but I got so interested in this technology that I immediately bought a Raspberry Pi to make my first circuit connected to a Raspberry Pi. My Hello World was letting the Raspberry Pi lighting on and off a small led. Yes basic but you have to start somewhere. In the meanwhile I have bought some sensors, small LCD screen to continue my experiments with the technology. The goal of my blog is to write about my experiences using PI4J and answer any questions if there are any on the developments I do.

I also have a goal which I want to reach. It would be great to develop a radio controlled car with inside a RP and in the inside all components and sensors controlled by the RP.

Have fun reading my blog

Jan Bylé