Sai Yamanoor - Raspberry Pi Embedded Projects

Sai Yamanoor is a mechatronics engineer working for a private start-up school in the San Francisco Bay Area where he builds devices that help students achieve their full potential. He completed his degree in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, and his undergraduate work in mechatronics at Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore, India. His interests, deeply rooted in DIY and open software and hardware cultures, include developing gadgets and apps that improve quality of life, Internet of Things, crowdfunding, education, and new technologies. In his spare time, he plays with various devices and architectures such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Galileo, Android devices, and others. Sai shares his adventures with mechatronics at the aptly named "Mechatronics Craze" blog at http://mechatronicscraze.wordpress.com/.

I want to thank my parents for encouraging me in all my endeavors and for making me what I am today. I am grateful to my brother who has helped shape my career all these years. I look forward to working with Srihari on similar projects in the future. I sincerely thank Mr. S. Balaji Raghavendra who has been a great source of inspiration to me while pursuing my undergraduate degree. I am also thankful to Susmita Sabot and the entire support team at Packt Publishing who were patient and understood the circumstances during difficult times.

Srihari Yamanoor is a nature photographer and mechanical engineer with experience working in medical device design and CAD/CAM. He completed his master's in science as well as a degree in engineering from Stanford University. His work and interests in medical devices include women's health, cancer, orthopedics, and cardiovascular diseases, as well as newer areas such as digital health and electronic health records. He has several thousands of hours of CAD experience behind him and is also certified among other things as a SolidWorks expert, simulation professional, and a SolidWorks instructor. His interests range from engineering and education to social entrepreneurship, animal welfare, and crowdfunding.

I would like to thank my parents, Narasimhan and Yasoda Venakatakrishnan, for their steadfast support in my education and efforts throughout the years, culminating in projects such as this book. Over the course of the years, many friends have helped both Sai and me grow in many ways. For this reason, I would like to say a big word of thanks, in no particular order, to Rika Catherine Hirachi, Anna Liu Jao, Shirupa Gupta, Patrick Nguyen, Vishnu Prasad Ramachandran, Andrew Eib, Christopher Ma, and Karthik Palaniappan. I am sure I am missing some names, and for this, I apologize in advance. I would also like to thank my gracious mentors, Dr. Kevin Waldron, Dr. James Stubbs, Russell Sampson, Mukund Patel, and as I fondly call him, Cyril "Master", all of whom have given me advice and shown me the way. I would like to especially thank my first cat, Squeaky, and the felines Bob, Saxon, and Fishbone, that have followed me, for inspiring me and pushing me to stay on track and keep an eye on the big picture.

Sreedhar Vaddi has 4 years of experience in big data, 4 years in cloud computing, and 15 years in Java. His experience includes work in the fields of big data security, biomedical/healthcare, mobile security, financial services (wholesale, mortgage, investment, and brokerage), the Web (marketplace, crowdsourcing, and advertising), news and entertainment, property and casualty insurance, software product development, and scientific research.

He has hands-on experience as an architect working on enterprise mobile applications, Hadoop, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, the cloud, rich enterprise applications, n-tier enterprise systems, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) in web-enabling legacy systems, IBM Mainframe and SAP, and SOA web services with Java2 and JEE.

He has also worked in all phases of SDLC, namely designing, developing, performance testing, and implementing Web-2.0, Web-UI, server-side, middleware, and mobile applications. He has also worked with Big 5 Consulting and Fortune 100 companies. He has led teams of sizes varying from 2 to 80 across the globe in different time zones, cultures, and dialects.

He is an administrator of JEE containers (Geronimo, WebSphere, Weblogic, JBoss, and Tomcat) and CDH. He is also a technical consultant at a stealth mode start-up in animal care in the clinical trials industry. He is a diligent worker and quick learner with excellent problem solving, presentation, and mentoring skills.

Cheuk Yu is pursuing a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with an emphasis on circuit and signal processing. He worked on multiple embedded systems projects using various microcontrollers such as Arduino, Teensy, and Raspberry Pi. As a student researcher for the ELFIN CubeSat Mission at UCLA, he also has hands-on experience working on printed circuit boards, including designing and testing avionics and ground support equipment boards. Besides work and study, he is also an amateur radio operator and astronomer.