My Story: TIBCO Accelerators and Mountain Guides
Blog: The Tibco Blog
Last month at TIBCO NOW, we demonstrated the Connected Vehicle Accelerator using a LEGO EV3 robot and a game resembling a warehouse optimization application. And, over the next two months, I will climb three major US mountains in support of the American Lung Association’s Climb for Clean Air program. The rapid start, reduced risk, and faster time to market delivered by TIBCO accelerators is somewhat analogous to this personal project.
Using the robot was fun and provided a great visualization and a fantastic conversation starter. Demo development had a number of challenges: connecting a LEGO robot to TIBCO products, producing multiple routes with variables known and unknown, determining the schedule for routes through the warehouse. Once these non-TIBCO challenges were solved, the Accelerator, aptly named, accelerated our ability to visualize the routes in real time and set rules around schedules—without additional coding or development!
Using a third-party communication library (.Net) for the LEGO platform, we created a StreamBase front-end to handle commands to the robot and receive streaming sensor data. StreamBase also acted as a streaming data aggregator and filter, each second producing a variety of sensor data consolidated into events.
TIBCO Accelerators—for connected vehicles, big data, foreign exchange dealing, and industrial equipment—take complex problems, and at times, intricate TIBCO product configurations, and reduce the work to a simplified configuration. In producing the connected robot demonstration, we realized all these benefits.
When viewed in their entirety, connecting vehicles and climbing mountains are both daunting and mentally challenging projects. For the American Lung Association’s fundraising program, all of the mountains are technical climbs, meaning gear and experienced technique are required to safely travel across glaciers, rock, ice, and snow as we ascend and descend mountains.
While a TIBCO accelerator helps reduce the complexity of the solution, minimize risk, and provide a rapid start, mountain guides deliver many of these same benefits to climbers. Without the support of the guides, climbers would be have to carry provisions, establish camps, know conditions at all times, choose the safest route for the current conditions, know when the summit is just not safely attainable, and be accountable for all climbers’ safely descending all the way back down the mountain.
There is a saying in the climbing community, “Getting to the top is optional, getting down is mandatory.” Guides are my accelerator to solving the complexities of safely climbing up—and down—a potentially dangerous and life-threatening mountain.
Here are some photos from previous climbs, and my personal story and donation page. I certainly appreciate any support, verbal, monetary, or both. All donations are tax deductible and made directly to the American Lung Association’s Climb for Clean Air program!
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