Announcing Syntrino: Syntro + Arduino

There’s no question that the Arduino has to be the most popular platform for all kinds of small projects in very diverse fields. It’s low-cost and easy to use and so accessible for a large number of people. Once enabled with Ethernet (either with a shield or with an onboard Ethernet interface), the Arduino becomes a great way to connect all kinds of “things” to a network. Given the ubiquitous nature of the Arduino and the ubiquitous computing capabilities of the Syntro Lightweight Compute Cloud, it’s only natural that we’d want to provide support for the Arduino and make it really easy to integrate with a Syntro cloud. We are calling this software Syntrino.

We’re hoping to have Syntrino as part of the first open source release of Syntro. It will include the SyntrinoLib library that will handle all of the Syntro-related networking and present an easy to use API to the top level sketch. In addition, there’ll be a demo application to show just how easy it is to write sketches that can leverage the power of a Syntro cloud.

Syntro Pipeline Stream Filter Demonstration

One of the really cool features of Syntro is that it’s possible to pick up a stream from a Syntro cloud, do some fancy processing on it and then make it available to other Syntro apps. The screen shot shows this in action. An app called SyntroVideoFilter is picking up a couple of video streams, performing a Canny edge detect function on both and then passing the results back as two new video streams. The viewer displays the raw and processed streams side by side. In a real application, SyntroStore could be storing any or all of these video streams for later review via the SyntroCFS Cloud File Storage system. The very nice thing is that, even with OpenCV code, there are only about 40 lines of code that had to be written for the client class.

Syntro Working on Mac OS X

The screenshot shows SyntroControl running on an iMac with Mac OS X 10.7. Thanks to Qt, getting it running on the iMac was pretty painless! The remaining apps will follow very quickly now. This will bring Mac OS X up to a fully supported platform along with Linux (currently being tested on Ubuntu) and Windows.

Syntro-Enabled Network Devices

Connectionless or connection-orientated? Even better – integrated connectionless over connection-orientated!

We’re working on an interesting idea about how to combine SyntroControl with Ethernet switches and routers – Syntro-enabled network devices. First though a bit of background on what SyntroControl does.

SyntroControl is a core Syntro component that performs two main functions – message switching and distributed directory management. A key design principle of Syntro is that each Syntro app only has to maintain a single connection into the Syntro network. Contrast this with something like ROS for example. ROS implements a centralized directory but components set up direct links between themselves as necessary. This certainly avoids having messages go through a single switch component but also has some disadvantages. There’s nothing to help components out with loading so each component may have to replicate messages for multiple clients and multicast. It also makes the data flows in the network hard to visualize (although there are tools to assist with that).

Syntro’s Cloud File System (CFS)

An important feature of the first release of Syntro is going to be its Cloud File System – SyntroCFS. SyntroCFS allows both real-time and historical data collected by a Syntro system to be accessed in a  very flexible way by Syntro client apps.

For example, Syntro’s intelligent multicast distribution system allows large number of client apps to monitor a subset or all of a large number of media streams (audio, video etc) in real-time and at high data rates but does not allow for a “DVR-like” capability where it’s possible to pause a stream, go back to an arbitrary point in history, replay at a different rate etc. SyntroCFS adds that capability.

Syntro and Qt

One of the objectives for Syntro is that it be supported on as many platforms as possible. In order to achieve this, we selected Qt as our application framework. While Qt provides many platform-independent mechanisms for things such as threading and inter-thread message passing, one of the primary advantages is that it allows the implementation of GUIs that will work on any supported platform without significant (or indeed any) modification. This has greatly accelerated development as Syntro components can be developed on one OS (we typically use Visual Studio 2010 on Windows) and then all they need to be ported to other platforms is to recompile on that platform. Qt’s Qt Creator could be used for development just as easily incidentally. Syntro releases will include VS2010 projects and Qt Creator .pro and .pri files to simplify the process.

Syntro is currently being supported on both Windows and Linux (we test on Ubuntu) and support on MAC OS will hopefully follow very soon.

Introducing Syntro

Pansenti’s flagship technology is called Syntro, a ground breaking open source Lightweight Compute Cloud (LCC) implementation that offers unbelievable flexibility for geographically distributed data collection (video, audio and anything else), reliable and scalable storage, processing of the data and then presentation of the data to users.

To give a sense of how Syntro might be used, consider the case where a large number of surveillance cameras are generating video and audio feeds, perhaps over a very large area. All of these data feeds need to be stored for future data mining. A monitoring center needs access to all of the feeds on demand in real-time, as do remotely located staff using tablets or smartphones. At the same time, sophisticated processing of the feeds is taking place in both real-time and on historic records, perhaps to track an interesting object backwards in time. Tools are provided for users to access the processed information in the same way as the real-time feeds.

Welcome to the Pansenti Blog

Pansenti is a new company developing open source massively scalable data middleware solutions based on the Lightweight Compute Cloud (LCC) concept. More info and a company website very soon!