Llamawerx recently integrated PayPal with Lillies Yarns for a simple, easy-to-use web store. Mags Allen, the owner of Lillies Yarns, wanted to expand her business  online to compliment her brick-and-mortal store in Pennsylvania. PayPal offers an easy to understand interface perfect for selling a few items online. Doug Griswold, CEO of Llamawerx, put it this way, “PayPal is a known and trusted eCommerce platform with an active developer’s community. The ability to easily integrate with the existing site style and PHP backend made it a no-brainer for us.”

For a look at the new store, visit www.lilliesyarns.com and click on “shop”.

Someone – or something – bumps me from behind. I’m trying to listen while activity swirls around me. Bump, I feel it again. I turn to look – nothing. Finally, a tug on my leg and I look down. “Hello,” she says beaming. “Hello to you,” I say. There looking up at me is a little girl about six, the age of my son. She has blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and a sweet smile. She’s pulling a wagon. “What’s your name sweetie?” I ask. “Helen,” she answers before giggling and turning to be with her friends.

Our encounter could be at a park or a bowling alley or a birthday party, but it’s not. We aren’t at a place you or I would consider “fun”. You see, Helen has no hair – and Helen is very sick. In fact, Helen is battling for her life. But watching her run off to be with her St. Jude buddies you would never know it.

This special place is St. Jude Children’s Hospital. My attention returns to our tour. Our doctor recites statistics from 1962 when the survival rate for childhood cancer was horrifying: Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia – 4%, Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma – 7%, Neuroblastoma – 10%. Today, he reports, miracles happen and the survival rate for these diseases has skyrocketed to 94%, 85%, and 55%.

Although researchers at St. Jude Children’s Hospital have made great strides battling against cancer, there will always be a need for funding until we have a cure.

Advances don’t happen by accident. They come from thousands of researchers worldwide searching for cures. Thankfully, it’s 2009 and doctors at St. Jude Children’s Hospital are some of the best. Through my sorority, Epsilon Sigma Alpha, I know the fight personally. In 2008 my North Carolina Sisters and I raised over $300,000 for St. Jude. Nationwide ESA contributed 11 million dollars. I’m proud to say ESA is St. Jude’s largest private fundraising group in the United States.

Cancer is a word no parent wants to hear. What good are statistics if you can’t pay for the cure? What if you can’t afford to travel for the treatment? Where will you stay while you’re there? Our donations answer these questions. St. Jude is the only pediatric cancer research center where families never pay for treatment not covered by insurance. No child is ever denied treatment because of the family’s inability to pay.

Think about that, “No child is ever denied treatment because of the family’s inability to pay.”

That’s where I come in. In December I’m taking time out of my life to travel to Memphis, Tennessee, the home of St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Along with 100 of my ESA Sisters I’ll participate in the Memphis Half-Marathon benefiting the hospital. Twice I’ve walked this course and last year I ran and I’m running again. Maybe not 100%, but if the children can fight cancer valiantly, I can put one leg in front of the other and run.

These are challenging times for all of us, but living with cancer is one challenge that no child should have to face. By supporting my run, you support St. Jude Children’s Hospital – and helping these boys and girls to grow up to be men and women. On behalf of these families, please make a donation, no matter how big or small, so that we can give more than just hope… we can give a child another birthday.

You can support Laura’s run for St. Jude Children’s Hospital, visit her donation page.

Llamawerx and the North Carolina State Council of Epsilon Sigma Alpha have refreshed www.esa-nc.org for 2009-2010.  This website serves North Carolina ESA members and potential members. Epsilon Sigma Alpha International is a leadership and service organization bringing good people together to do good things through programs and projects that make a positive difference…locally, nationally, and internationally. Through a network of thousands of members and more than 1,200 chapters, ESA provides more than 650,000 service hours and over $18 million for charitable causes each year. In 2007, ESA raised close to $11 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the leading pediatric cancer research hospital in the country, with North Carolina chapters raising nearly $200,000.

Llamawerx’s Jumpstart for Open AT provides a proprietary framework for commonly used features like SMS, GPRS, GPS, and GPIO. By layering higher level functionality on top of the Wavecom APIs, Jumpstart for Open AT codifies a design structure that easily expands.

“While writing M2M applications for Open AT, we found ourselves doing the same thing over-and-over – encoding and decoding messages, executing commands, handling local control, queuing output, etc,” explained Griswold. “Why not extract that design, code and the testing that went along with it and package it.”

The advantage is unmistakable. Analysis of a Llamawerx project uncovered 7744 lines of “C” code. Of those 7744 lines, 4505 were new and 3240 were from Jumpstart for Open AT. Applying Jumpstart saved this client at least 88 man-hours of effort. “The ability to quickly get something up and running is a great advantage,” according to Griswold. “It allows us to deliver functionality very quickly that the client can see and use.”

Jumpstart for Open AT goes beyond the Open AT APIs by incorporating higher level functionality and design:

• Flash access
• GPIO monitoring and activation
• GPS positioning
• Local control commands
• Message encoding/decoding
• Non-volatile data structures
• Over-the-air download
• Queuing and retrying output
• Startup coordination and supervision
• State machines
• Tracing and debug output

For more information on Jumpstart AT and other M2M services, contact Llamawerx at m2m-info@llamawerx.com.

Llamawerx recently developed the website for Tarheel Golf.
Tarheel Golf is a non-profit organization providing competitive
golf tournaments for local junior golfers.  Many of the events are
nationally ranked and are played at some of the areas most
challenging courses.  Llamawerx developed the site to be
straightforward and easy to use.

The site will soon be expanded to include event registration
and results.  To take a look at the site, visit www.tarheelgolf.org.

Llamawerx recently redesigned the website for Lillie’s Yarns, a brick-and-mortar and online yarn store in Perkasie, PA. The site design focuses on a simple, easy to use layout. According to Doug Griswold, CEO of Llamawerx, “When people visit one of our websites, we want to make sure the important information is accessible. Lillie’s Yarns is a traditional store and people visiting want to know where it is, how to get there, and what the hours are. Visitors don’t always come in through the home page; search engines can drop them off anywhere.”

During the next phase, we will add an e-commerce component for online shopping.

For a look at the new website, visit www.lilliesyarns.com.

Abloco supplies wireless IP video solutions, integration and network engineering services to clients worldwide.

Llamawerx focuses on design, integration and custom software development for networked and wireless technology.

Llamawerx and the New Jersey Society of Optometric Physicians proudly announce the launch of www.focusonourtroops.org – a website supporting the campaign to provide eyecare items for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As eyecare professionals, the members of the NJSOP are committed to educating the public on the importance of good eye care. With “Focus on our Troops” they want to send that same message to our troops overseas, but they need your help. By sending eyecare items or making a monetary donation, you’ll be helping send the message to our dedicated servicemen and women to FOCUS on their future.

For details on how to help, please visit www.focusonourtroops.org.

30,000 Foot Requirements

1. Monitor remote asset
2. Collect position information
3. Store the information
4. Web-based presentation

System Architecture

The first order of business is to select an architecture and map the functions into it. For this example, consider a smart unit that collects data remotely, does some processing and transmits position and alert information to a server. The server collects the information, stores it in a database, performs further analysis and presents the information via the web-browser. The unit and the server communicate with GSM/GPRS.

Embedded Technology

The remote unit must collect positioning information from a GPS receiver, monitor input/output signals, perform analysis and communicate with the server over GPRS. To reduce costs, a Wavecom wireless processor handles the communications and processing needs. The major M2M module vendors – Wavecom, Telit, Siemens, Motorola and Enfora - offer programmable modules that are more than wireless modems. Developers program Wavecom’s OpenAT environment in the “C” language using an Eclipse IDE.

1. Wavecom Wireless CPU
2. OpenAT
3. “C” programming language
4. Eclipse IDE

Server Technology

The server collects information from the remote units, stores it, performs analysis and delivers it to a dashboard-like web browser application. We selected Ubuntu Linux, a robust and popular open-source operating system, as the foundation for the server software. The remote units deliver their data using GPRS and UDP, and a Python script collects the messages and stores them in a database. MySQL, another popular open-source tool, is the database server. For web access, Apache came with our Linux distribution so why change? PHP provides the server-side scripting.

1. Ubuntu Linux
2. MySQL
3. Apache HTTP
4. Python
5. PHP

Web Technology

For display technology, we stuck with HTML technologies over Flash or Java. Ajax introduces what seems like millions of options for web developers to pursue. Based on their maturity, ease of use and experience we chose to use JavaScript libraries from Yahoo!, Google and Ben Nolan’s Behaviour which in turn depends on Prototype.

1. HTML
2. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
3. JavaScript
4. Yahoo! User Interface Library
5. Behaviour – unobtrusive JavaScript behaviours
6. Google Maps API

Technology Overload

So there you have it – a collection of tools and technologies useful for creating an end-to-end M2M application. There are four programming languages (”C”, Python, PHP and JavaScript) along with a lot of “glue” technology. Many developers specialize in one or two technologies; yet as this example shows there are many involved in a single system. I didn’t even discuss wireless protocols, AT command sets, networking technology, GPS or domain expertise.

Making it all Work

One approach brings multiple experts and project managers together to create the solution. Increased project management, complex architecture and difficulty managing trade-offs are common with this approach. In many cases experts can’t see the forest for the trees and are unwilling to make technology trade-offs for business value.

Another option emphasizes generalists familiar with most of the technology – maybe not a deep understanding, but a working knowledge. In many cases, a generalist approaches the problem with a more open mind and is willing to trade-off designs in order to achieve the business value.

At Llamawerx, we fall into the later camp. Yes, we are experts in some technologies like embedded software, OpenAT and relational databases, but our real strength is the ability to transform vague and conflicting information into working systems that solve real-world problems.

For more details on Llamawerx visit the technology and solutions on our website.