Hi UDOOers,
today we’d like to spend a few words on a sparkling project of our friends of #Toi, ThingsOnInternet, that we first met at the RIOT Internet Festival last year in Pisa – and it has been a good idea indeed to take part to #RIOT, given that from that starting point BETaaS and Viper, two brilliant ideas UDOO-based or UDOO-supporting, have sprung. Viper moreover is already gaining a small (but remarkable, considering the timing) success in Italy – where the founders come from – with a coverage by Wired and Corriere della Sera! How could we avoid to make a post about it?

So, what is Viper?

First of all, let’s take a look at the cute Viper video on Kickstarter!

Viper is a cross-platform development suite for the high level design of interactive objects, which allows the developers to create in Python for Arduino DUE, UDOO, UDOO Neo, Spark Core and Photon and similar boards.
Thus:

VIPER = Viper Is Python Embedded in Realtime.

If you are a developer, VIPER will give you a browser-based, zero-install development environment – the Viper IDE – compatible with Linux, Windows and Mac where you can write Python code with extensive library support and have it executed on any Arduino-compatible board.

This way you can forget the complexity of coding and just focus on the functionalities you want to put into the smart object you got in mind.

And there’s even more. The Toi Team will provide a Viper App, which is part of the suite, to control your creations. Once launched the VIPER App will discover all the VIPER devices available on your network. Once one of them will be selected the App will become its interface. The VIPER App interface are based on HTML templates that you can select and edit through the VIPER IDE integrating them in your VIPER Python scripts.
Practically, you don’t have to write any iOS or Android code!

Toi Shield

The Viper App works out of the box with the Toi Shield, the first shield compatible with Arduino, UDOO, UDOO Neo, Spark Core and Photon footprints.

The Viper Virtual Machine

But the heart of the Viper experience is the Viper Virtual Machine. It is a very simple, but strong concept: install the Viper VM on your boards, and the board once viperized is no longer a simple Arduino DUE or Spark Photon or UDOO (or UDOO Neo) – now it has a multithreaded real-time operating system running on it, as well as a virtual machine ready to execute your compiled Python 3 scripts.
Through VIPER VM you’ll be able to reuse on different boards and do simulation and debugging on a PC.

In the next days we are going to make a post about a Viper project. We are currently in touch with Daniele Mazzei, the leader of the Toi Team, and trust us, these guys deserves your pledge. And many Viper projects are really cute actually!
So, why don’t you take a look at it?