It’s undeniable: 2014 was the year when the electronics industry decidedly and collectively moved forward to push the Internet of Things (IoT). In year 2015 IoT markets will continue to grow. I think we’re going to see some critical mass on corralling the IoT in 2015. IoT is a young market – no one seems to be clearly leading. Communications are the key here. Over the last 10 years the world has done a remarkably good job of connecting the global wireless world. The last decade has radically changed the way we live. The smartphone and its cousin, the tablet, was the final link to ubiquitous wireless coverage, globally. The fantasy of the IoT is quite grand: everything on the planet can be smart and communicate. The idea is both powerful and impractical.
IoT is entering peak of inflated expectations: The Internet of Things is at that stage when the efforts of various companies involved in it, along with research, are proving to have a lot of promise. At this stage, the Internet of Things should not have too many difficulties attracting developers and researchers into the fold. As we turn to 2015 and beyond, however, wearables becomes an explosive hardware design opportunity. Tie the common threads of IoT and wearables together, and an unstoppable market movement emerges. There seems to be a lack of public appreciation of the extent to which the Internet of Things is going to fundamentally change how people interact with the world around them.
On the other hand, the Internet of Things is getting poised to enter the trough of disillusionment, which means that there is more room for failure now. There are issues of security, privacy, and sharing of information across vertical implementations that still need to be worked out. Until they are, the IoT will not be able to fulfill all its promises.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is beginning to grow significantly, as consumers, businesses, and governments recognize the benefit of connecting inert devices to the internet. The ‘Internet of Things’ Will Be The World’s Most Massive Device Market And Save Companies Billions Of Dollars in few years. BI Intelligence expects that the IoT will result in $1.7 trillion in value added to the global economy in 2019. This includes hardware, software, installation costs, management services, and economic value added from realized IoT efficiencies. The main benefit of growth in the IoT will be increased efficiency and lower costs: increased efficiency within the home, city, and workplace. The enterprise sector will lead the IoT, accounting for 46% of device shipments this year, but that share will decline as the government and home sectors gain momentum. I expect that home, government, and enterprise sectors use the IoT differently.
The IoT is only enabled because of two things: the ability of networks to reach countless nodes, and the availability of cost-effective embedded processors to attach to a multitude of devices. The prices for components and devices continues to decline while the skyrocketing global demand for 24/7 Internet access grows exponentially. The Internet of Things growth will benefit mostly from the autonomous machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity that will make up the bulk of the objects of the IoT. This is the main driver for double-digit growth across verticals in the electronics, and especially the semiconductor industry well into the next decade. The IoT will connect places, such as manufacturing platforms, energy grids, health-care facilities, transportation systems, retail outlets, sports and music venues, and countless other entities to the Internet.
Internet of Things can become Engineering for Everyone. The emergence of open-source development platforms, developed and maintained by dedicated volunteers, has effectively raised the level of abstraction to a point where nonexperts can now use these platforms. The availability of open-source software and, more recently, hardware targeting embedded applications means that access to high-quality engineering resources has never been greater. This has effectively raised the level of abstraction to a point where nonexperts can now use these platforms to turn their own abstract concepts into real products. With the potential to launch a successful commercial venture off the back of tinkering with some low-cost hardware in your spare time, it’s no wonder that open-source hardware is fuelling an entirely new movement. A new generation of manufacturer is embracing the open-source ethos and actually allowing customers to modify the product post-sale.
Exact size predictions for IoT market next few years vary greatly, but all of the firms making these predictions agree on one thing—it’s going to be very big.
In year 2014 very many chip vendors and sensor algorithm companies also jumped on the IoT bandwagon, in hopes of laying the groundwork for more useful and cost-effective IoT devices. Sensors, MCUs, and wireless connectivity are three obvious building blocks for IoT end-node devices. Wireless connectivity and software (algorithms) are the two most sought-after technologies. Brimming with excitement, and with Europe already ahead of the pack, a maturing semiconductor industry looks expectantly to the Internet of Things (IoT) for yet another facelift. The IC sales generated by the connectivity and sensor subsystems to enabled this IoT will amount $57.7 billion in 2015.
Chips for IoT market to grow 36% in 2015, says Gartner as automotive V2X, LED lighting and smart domestic objects are set to drive semiconductor market growth through the year 2020, according to market analysis firm Gartner. The move to create billions of smart, autonomously communicating objects known as the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the need for low-power sensors, processors and communications chips. By 2018, the market value of IoT subsystems in equipment and Internet-connected things is projected to reach $103.6 billion worldwide, which represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.0 percent from $39.8 billion in 2013.
BI Intelligence expects that by 2019 IoT market will be more than double the size of the smartphone, PC, tablet, connected car, and the wearable market combined. A new report by Yole Developpement pegs the market size in the $70 billion range by 2018, with the next five years presenting a golden opportunity for device makers as the IoT enters the growth stage. Device shipments will reach 6.7 billion in 2019 for a five-year CAGR of 61%.
Number of connected devices is expected to to reach 36 billion units by 2020, cautions that “all of this new market opportunity is under threat.” Other estimate according to market research firm Radiant Insights of San Francisco is that the number of Internet connections will grow from 9 billion devices in 2014 to 100 billion by 2020 (twice as many as the estimate from Cisco Systems Inc). IC Insights forecasts that web-connected things will account for 85 percent of 29.5 billion Internet connections worldwide by 2020. Currently fragmented market, the number of cellular M2M connections could rise from 478 million today to 639 million in 2020.
By 2024, the report predicts that overall market value for components will exceed of $400 billion, of which more than 10% will come from hardware alone. Revenue from hardware sales will be only $50 billion or 8% of the total revenue from IoT-specific efforts, as software makers and infrastructure companies will earn the lion’s share. As the Internet of Things grows to a projected 212 billion items by 2020, the question of regulation looms increasingly large.
The growth of the IoT will present some very interesting issues in a variety of areas. You will see some very fast activity because unless it gets resolved there will be no IoT as it is envisioned.
General consensus is that the interconnect protocol of the IoT will be IP (Internet Protocol). As it stands today, the deployment of the billions of IoT objects can’t happen, simply because there just aren’t enough IP addresses with IPv4. While there is still some discussion about how to connect the IoT, most are in agreement that the IoT protocol will be IPv6. The first step will be to convert all proprietary networks to an IP-base. Then, the implementation of IPv6 can begin. Because direct interoperability between IPv4 and iPv6 protocols is not possible, this will add some some complications to the development, resulting in a bit of obfuscation to the transition for IPv6.
Is There Any Way to Avoid Standards Wars in the Emerging Internet of Things? I don’t see that possible. IoT will be in serious protocol war in 2015. There is a wide selection of protocols, but no clear set of winners at the moment. The real IoT standardization is just starting – There are currently few standards (or regulations) for what is needed to run an IoT device. There is no single standard for connecting devices on the Internet of Thing, instead are a handful of competing standards run by different coalitions of companies: The Thread Group (Qualcomm, The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Panasonic), The Industrial Internet Consortium (Intel, Cisco, AT&T, IBM, Microsoft), Open Interconnect Consortium (Samsung, Intel, Dell), Physical Web (Google), AllSeen Alliance (Samsung, Intel, Dell) and huge number of smaller non-standardized protocols in use. Each of the standards vary how they do things.
Anyone who tries to build a physical layer and drive a software stack based on it all the way up to the application layer is a fool. But many companies try to do it this year. Today Zigbee is the most cost effective, but tomorrow WiFi will figure it out. On networking field in every few years there’s a new management protocol – what will happen in IoT, it will keep moving, and people will need open APIs.
Currently the IoT lacks a common set of standards and technologies that would allow for compatibility and ease-of-use. The IoT needs a set of open APIs and protocols that work with a variety of physical-layer networks. The IP and network layer should have nothing to do with the media. The fundamental issue here is that at the moment the Internet of Things will not have a standard set of open APIs for consumers. IoT, it will keep moving, and people will need open APIs. I suspect that at some point, after the first wave of the Internet of Things, open APIs and root access will become a selling point.
It is not just technical protocol details that are problem: One problem with IoT is that it is a vague definition. Do we simply mean ‘connected devices? Or something else? One of the main issues, which will only get worse as the IoT evolves, is how are we going to categorize all the different objects.
Early in 2015, the Industrial Internet Consortium plans to wrap up work on a broad reference architecture for the Internet of Things, ramp up three test beds, and start identifying gaps where new standards may be needed. The group, formed by AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM, and Intel, now has about 115 members and aims to make it easier to build commercial IoT systems. The IIC hopes to finish a first draft of its reference architecture by the end of January and have it ratified by March. It will define functional areas and the technologies and standards for them, from sensors to data analytics and business applications. The framework includes versions for vertical markets including aerospace, healthcare, manufacturing, smart cities, and transportation. A breakout section on security also is in the works. Hopefully the reference architecture could be used to help people construct industrial IoT systems quickly and easily.
With the emergence of the Internet of Things, smart cars are beginning to garner more attention. Smart cars are different than connected cars, which are simply smartphones on wheels. Even though the technology has been on the evolutionary fast track, integration has been slow. For car manufacturers, it is a little tricky to accept driverless cars because it disrupts their fundamental business model: Private resources will evolve to shared resources, centrally controlled, since autonomous vehicles can be controlled remotely.
Over the next few years, we’ll see a torrent of new devices emerge that are connected to the Internet and each other through a wide range of different wireless networking protocols. As a result, there’s a race on, not just to get those devices connected, but also to provide the network infrastructure necessary to managing all of them at scale. WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular networks are nowadays widely used, nut new alternatives are coming to solve applications were those technologies are not most suitable. There are different plans for wide area wireless networks that use licensed or unlicensed wireless bandwidth to transmit small amounts of data from various connected device – this could create its own connection to them in a cost effective manner without relying on existing cellular or WiFi networks.
Recently we have developed a pressing need, or desire to put our refrigerators, and everything we have access to while mobile, on the net, morphing the brave new world of the Internet of Things, into the Internet of Everything (IoE). And that will make that last 100 meters—that final frontier of interconnect—a reality. Today, only about 10% of the last 100 meter devices that will make up the IoT are connected. As the IoT evolves, other small cells such as businesses, city centers, malls, theaters, stadiums, event centers, and the like, will connect much of what they have on premise (soda or popcorn machines, vending machines, restaurants, parking garages, ticket kiosks, seat assignments, and a very long list of others). And, there are a very large number of devices that are short-range in all of these various cells. What was once the last mile for connectivity is now the last 100 meters.
Plenty of people and companies in the technology world tend to come at the Internet of Things by dwelling on the “Internet.” But what if, instead, we started with the “Things?” Knowing intimately what “things” are supposed to do and how they think and behave will be the key to solving one of the IoT’s most pressing issues: application layers. Over the past 18 months, the industry has launched numerous consortia, from Qualcomm’s AllSeen and Intel’s Open Interconnect Consortium to Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Thread. Every entity says it’s targeting the “interoperability” of things at home, but each is obviously concentrating primarily on its own interests, and making their “layer” specifications slightly different from those pursued by others.
It seems that no industry consortium is particularly interested in defining — in gory detail — the specific functions of, say, what a door lock is supposed to do. The library of commands for each function already exists, but someone, or some group, has to translate those already determined commands into an IP-friendly format. One of the standards organizations will take up the challenge in 2015. This will be the first step to “knock barriers down for IoT” in 2015.
Missing today in the IoT are reliability and robustness. Consumers expect their light switched and other gadgets to be infinitely reliable. In many today’s products we seem to be far from reliable and robust operation. Today’s routers can relay traffic between networks, but they have no idea how to translate what functions each device attached to them wants to do, and how to communicate that to other devices. The network needs to be able to discover who else is on the network. Devices connected to network need to be able to discover what resources are available and what new devices are being added. The network needs to be extensible.
Despite the oft-mocked naming scheme, the Internet of Things (IoT) has an incredibly practical goal: connecting classically “dumb” objects—toasters, doorknobs, light switches—to the Internet, thereby unlocking a world of potential. Imagine what it means to interact with your home the same way you would a website, accessing it without geographic restriction. But there is one missing piece of the smart home revolution: smart home operating system. So what will be the system that capitalizes on the smart home in the same way, the enabler of all the applications and actions we want our homes to run and do? There are no ready answers for that yet. And there might not be a singular, cohesive operating system for your home, that this stuff isn’t one-size-fits-all. It might be that the real potential for home automation lies not in local software running on a home device but in the cloud. I think that the cloud is going to be more important over time, but there will always be also need for some local functionality in case the connection to cloud is lost. Right now the Internet of Things is rather disjointed compared to Internet and computers.
When everything will be connected, how about security? In the path to IoT, the issue of data and device security looms large. Security for the ‘Internet of Things’ will be talked about very much in 2015 for a good reason. As Internet of Thigs becomes more and more used, it will be more hacked. Thus security of Internet of Things will be more and more talked about. Virtually anything connected to the Internet has the potential of being hacked, no matter how unlikely. Internet of Things devices often lack systematic protections against viruses or spam. Nowadays most security breaches are software-based, when an application can be compromised. Counter-measures for such attacks range from basic antivirus scanning software, to embedded hypervisors to hardware-bound secure applications tying their execution to uniquely identifiable hardware. There is emerging customer demand for silicon authentication. But the threats extend way beyond software and some hackers will put a lot of effort into compromising a system’s security at silicon-level. Individual devices can get hacked, but all systems should have some way of self-checking and redundancy. Those IoT systems can be very complex at device and system level. The problem with complexity is that you create more attack points and make it easier for hackers to find flaws.
Experts recommend far more layers of cyberprotection than manufacturers have thought necessary. Because many of the devices will often be practically inaccessible, the “patch and pray” strategy used for many desktop software packages is unlikely to be an effective strategy for many forms of IoT devices. Right now, there are hundreds of companies churning out “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices as fast as they can, without thinking too much on the security issues they can cause in the future. The imperative is clear: Do your homework on the specific security features of any IoT device you might consider bringing into the home. What steps are IoT companies taking to keep us safe from others online, and what constitutes a truly “safe” smart appliance?
What we’re opening up is a whole new subject not just of security but of safety. That safety depends on devices to be constantly connected to the Internet the same way they’re connected to the power grid. That’s a whole new area that deserves its own consideration. Keep in mind that IoT is one field where cyber security flaws can kill in the worst case. Connecting unrelated devices in the IoT means many more pieces now affect reliability and security. More devices are now considered critical, such as a connected baby monitor or a smart smoke detector, because wrong information can injure or kill people. The Internet of Things is coming no matter what happens. The people in charge of keeping the public safe and the industry healthy need to be ready.
The European Police Office (Europol) said governments are ill-equipped to counter the menace of “injury and possible deaths” spurred by hacking attacks on critical safety equipment. There are many potential dangers are in transportation: many new cars are Internet connected and potentially vulnerable, SCADA Systems in Railways Vulnerable to Attack and Airline bosses ignore cyber security concerns at their peril. With industrial control systems becoming network-connected, security risks rise and will need a long-term solution. In light of the trend toward the Industrial Internet of Things, development teams must start thinking hard about network security and planning for its long-term viability.
You have to accept the fact that at each point in the IoT there are vulnerabilities to malicious attacks and interception of vital information. Soon, almost every network will soon have some IoT-hacking in it. IDC predicts that in two years from 90 per cent of the global IT networks have met IoT data theft. In a report, cybersecurity firm Fortinet expects greater threats from “denial of service attacks on assembly line, factory, industrial control systems, and healthcare and building management…resulting in revenue losses and reputation damages for organizations globally.” This opens new doors of risks in the areas of corporate extortion, altering of corporate business operations, and the extension of cyberattacks to include physical threats of harm to civilians.
There are lessons to be learned to keep the cyber security in control in the IoT era. There will be lessons to be learned for all the parties of the IoT ecosystem. The companies that figure out how to make security available on multi-stakeholder platforms will be the most successful ones. Figuring out a secure platform is important, but having different levels of security is still important. Different uses have different bars. Security is a self-regulating system to some extent because it is supply and demand. That is the Holy Grail for technology right now, which is how to build systems with enough security—not 100% protection right now—from a unified platform point of view for multiple applications.
The data generated by the Internet of Things has the potential to reveal far more about users than any technology in history: These devices can make our lives much easier … The Internet of Things however, can also reveal intimate details about the doings and goings of their owners through the sensors they contain. As the Internet of Things grows to a projected 212 billion items by 2020, the question of regulation looms increasingly large. There is a lot of effort is going today at the government level. They’re not thinking about whether the Internet goes down. They’re worried about what happens if the Internet gets compromised.
When we have devices on the field, there is question how to analyze the data coming from them. This is easily a “big data” problem because of the huge amount of data that comes from very large number of sensors. Being able to monitor and use the data that comes from the Internet of Things is a huge potential challenge with different providers using different architectures and approaches, and different chip and equipment vendors teaming up in a range of different ways. Many large and smaller companies are active on the field: Intel, IBM, Lantronix+Google, Microchip+Amazon, Freescale+Oracle, Xively, Jasper, Keen.io, Eurotech, and many other.
The huge increase of data is coming. Radiant predicts that wireless sensor networks will be used to monitor and control very many domestic, urban, and industrial systems. This promises to produce an explosion of data, much of which will be discarded as users are overwhelmed by the volume. As a result, analysis of the data within the wireless sensor network will become necessary so that alerts and meaningful information are generated at the leaf nodes. This year has seen the software at the very highest point in the Internet of Things stack — analytics — becoming tightly coupled with the embedded devices at the edge of the network, leading to many different approaches and providers.
Integrating data from one IoT cloud to another will have it’s challenges. Automation services make big steps by cutting corners. Sites like IFTTT, Zapier, bip.io, CloudWork, and elastic.io allow users to connect applications with links that go beyond a simple synch. Check what is happening with integration and related services like IFTTT, ItDuzzit, Amazon Lambda. For example IFTTT is quietly becoming a smart home powerhouse.
Most important sources of information for this article:
With $16M In Funding, Helium Wants To Provide The Connective Tissue For The Internet Of Things
IFTTT, other automation services make big steps by cutting corners
Internet of Things: Engineering for Everyone
IoT in Protocol War, Says Startup – Zigbee fortunes dim in building control
Analysts Predict CES Hotspots – Corralling the Internet of Things
What’s Holding Back The IoT – Device market opportunities will explode, but only after some fundamental changes
Apps Layer: ’800lb Gorilla’ in IoT Nobody Talks About
Analysts Predict CES Hotspots – IoT, robots, 4K to dominate CES
10 Reasons Why Analytics Are Vital to the Internet of Things
Tech More: Mobile Internet of Things BI Intelligence Consumer Electronics – Most Massive Device Market
Wearables make hardware the new software
Zigbee Opens Umbrella 3.0 Spec
IoT Will Give ‘Embedded’ a Shot in the Arm - Connected cities to be largest IoT market
Chips for IoT market to grow 36% in 2015, says Gartner
Apps Layer: ’800lb Gorilla’ in IoT Nobody Talks About
Short-Range, Low-Power Sensors – once the last mile for connectivity is now the last 100 meters
The one problem the Internet of Things hasn’t solved
Plan Long Term for Industrial Internet Security
To Foil Cyberattacks, Connected Cars Need Overlapping Shields
IoT cybersecurity: is EDA ready to deliver?
More Things Are Critical Systems
Silicon, Security, and the Internet of Things
The missing piece of the smart home revolution
Hackers will soon be targeting your refrigerator
10 Reasons Why Analytics Are Vital to the Internet of Things
1,316 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google OnHub Can Has Root
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/07/google-onhub-can-has-root/
It’s always nice to get down to the root directory of a device, especially if the device in question is one that you own. It’s no huge surprise that a Google product allows access to the root directory but the OnHub requires locating the hidden “developer mode” switch which [Maximus64] has done. The Google engineers have been sneaky with this button, locating it at the bottom of a threaded screw hole. Has anyone seen this implemented on other hardware before?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Get Your Internet Out of My Things
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/08/get-your-internet-out-of-my-things/
2014 was the year that the Internet of Things (IoT) reached the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” on the Gartner Hype Cycle. By 2015, it had only moved a tiny bit, towards the “Trough of Disillusionment”. We’re going to try to push it over the edge.
Depending on whom you ask, the IoT seems to mean that whatever the thing is, it’s got a tiny computer inside with an Internet connection and is sending or receiving data autonomously. Put a computer in your toaster and hook it up to the Internet! Your thermostat? Hook it up to the Internet!? Yoga mat? Internet! Mattress pad? To the Intertubes!
Snark aside, to get you through the phase of inflated expectations and on down into disillusionment, we’re going to use just one word: “security”.
In particular, we’re going to focus on the security of the networked autonomous computer that’s inside the thing and how it reacts with the real world that it’s been thrust into. Now, we’ve already got a word for autonomous computers hooked up to the Internet, and that’s “server”. So what the IoT revolution is really doing is putting servers into toasters. Or worse, the IoT is putting servers in your father-in-law’s toaster.
The FBI, IoT and Cybercrime
IC3PressReleaseBanner3
IoT security is starting to become a serious enough issue that the FBI issued an alert on IoT crime “opportunities” in early September. The alert starts off by explaining that adding servers to toasters greatly enlarges the attack surface for “malicious cyber actors” and points out many of the most common IoT security vulnerabilities. They also offer extremely reasonable remedies to close many of the vulnerabilities.
The FBI gives a big mention to Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). The great thing about UPnP is that it enables automatic discovery and remote configuration, so that devices that use UPnP are easily accessible to the other computers within the local network. In particular, for Windows users, this is the magic wand that the “Add Device” wizard relies on to cast his spells.
The worst problem is that UPnP devices often trust whoever is configuring them by default, and this trust can be abused to essentially punch a hole through your firewall. There are many other issues with UPnP, and this report by security firm Rapid7 is an essential read.
Cybercreeps and Baby Cams
We’re sure that you’ve all heard about the couple of cases of people getting their Internet-connected baby monitors and cameras owned by asshats who would then shout at the baby or harass the mother? In at least one case, the problem was that the owners hadn’t changed the monitor’s default password, which can be found with a quick web search. Not changing default passwords is a common father-in-law security threat.
For the record, Foscam, one of the first baby monitor vendors hit, has since done the right thing and gotten rid of the default password entirely
Your Fridge is Leaking (Your Gmail Password)
What to Do?
If the IoT hides a server inside a toaster and hands it to your father-in-law, what can be done? Leaving the responsibility for securing the device and the home network in his lap is hardly fair because it’s not something he’s good at, and there’s really nothing he can do about flaws in the vendors’ security implementations. We’ll have to look elsewhere.
Creating perfectly secure IoT devices would be a start. Then follow that up with perfectly secure cloud services to connect them to, add in perfectly secure mobile apps to control them, and ensure that all communications between all of these are perfectly secure. Perfect! In theory.
In practice, there are always going to be flaws and patches. The security vulnerability footprint gr0ws as you add more computers of different types to a home network. Here’s a simple solution: don’t put the server into the toaster in the first place, and if you do, make it easy to take the things off the Internet.
That’s not as much of a Luddite position as it might sound. Indeed, this Register article claims that none other than Eugene Kaspersky, founder and CEO of a prominent anti-virus and firewall software company, thinks that’s the way to go. More specifically, he suggests air-gapping networks that have access to the Internet and the baby monitor. That is, maintain two networks in the home that don’t connect at all through any device: one network for your baby monitor and other home IoT appliances, and an entirely separate and unconnected network that connects to the Internet. After all, that’s what more security savvy institutions like the US military do with their systems.
Shut it Off
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IoT devices need a physical Internet-off switch with local control overrides. Part of the promise of the Internet of Things is that the physicality of things meets the ethereality of the Internet, so why is it that the security configurations of all of these things are on web pages? They need a button!
If we’re going to embody the Internet in our appliances, they should have physical analogs to the kind of security controls that they should also have online, and starting with the crudest on-off switch is as good a place as any. To quote from the FBI’s report: “Consumers should be aware of the capabilities of the device and appliances installed in their homes and businesses”. Nothing says “aware of capabilities” like a physical switch that lets you turn that capability on and off. Otherwise, our father-in-law is fooled into thinking that the internal server isn’t there, and that the toaster is just a toaster.
Talkback!
Have we gone too far? Or not far enough?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Information technology
ISO/IEC JTC 1
Internet of Things (IoT) Preliminary Report 2014
http://www.iso.org/iso/internet_of_things_report-jtc1.pdf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s OnHub router is actually a Chromebook in disguise
http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2015/10/09/googles-onhub-router-is-actually-a-chromebook-in-disguise/
Here’s a surprise for you: Google’s OnHub router is actually a Chromebook in cylindrical form.
A modder over at Exploitee.rs was able to root the OnHub much in the same way they would with a Chromebook, and indeed, the router runs something very similar to ChromiumOS.
Gaining Root On The Google OnHub
https://blog.exploitee.rs/2015/gaining-root-on-the-google-onhub/
TLDR, The Google OnHub is at heart a Chromebook without a screen modified as a router, and our root method is just a modified version of booting Developer Mode.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Stakes Claim in IoT Cloud Services
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327955&
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is well established as a provider for a wide variety of cloud-based capabilities, including analytics, data storage, computation, databases, and application hosting. Now, the company is expanding to embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) with a new, integrated service that connects devices with its services as well as other devices. Further, developers can try AWS IoT for a year, for free.
“The promise of the Internet of Things is to make everyday products smarter for consumers, and for businesses to enable better, data-driven offerings that weren’t possible before,” said Marco Argenti, Vice President, Mobile and IoT, AWS in Amazon’s press release announcing AWS IoT. “World-leading organizations like Philips, NASA JPL, and Sonos already use AWS services to support the back-end of their IoT applications. Now, AWS IoT enables a whole ecosystem of manufacturers, service providers, and application developers to easily connect their products to the cloud at scale, take action on the data they collect, and create a new class of applications that interact with the physical world.”
AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that forms a bridge between IoT devices and AWS services such as AWS Lambda compute services, Amazon Kinesis data streaming, Amazon S3 data storage, and Amazon DynamoDB. The platform also supports device-to-device communications, device management, and user apps that can connect to devices, even when they are temporarily offline. Software development kits (SDKs) for a variety of hardware options are also available for creating devices to work with the AWS IoT platform.
https://aws.amazon.com/iot/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Create a Weather Station with TE Connectivity Sensors
http://www.eeweb.com/company-blog/digikey/create-a-weather-station-with-te-connectivity-sensors/
In this video presentation, Reid Landsrud, Technical Support Specialist from Digi-Key, discusses three featured products from TE Connectivity in an attempt to create a weather station.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Security Platform for IoT and Industrial Automation
http://www.eeweb.com/news/security-platform-for-iot-and-industrial-automation
Icon Labs announced the integration of Icon Labs’ Floodgate security products with Renesas’ R-IN32M3 industrial network controller ICs and Renesas Synergy™ Platform. The integrated solution creates a secure platform for IoT and industrial automation and extends the Internet of Secure ThingsTM initiative into industrial control systems. This integrated solution is being jointly demonstrated at the Renesas Developers Conference.
Icon Labs’ Internet of Secure Things Initiative defines a platform for developing secure, connected devices. The platform ensures that security is intrinsic to the architecture of the device itself and incorporates security management, visibility, device hardening, data protection and secure communications. These capabilities provide the foundation for the Industrial Internet of Secure Things. Natively securing the devices simplifies protection, audit, and compliance – independent of the secure perimeter, reducing the need for expensive and complicated security appliances.
“Security has become a critical requirement for our customers in all segments especially in industrial and IoT applications.”
“The Industrial IoT provides unprecedented connectivity to the systems we interact with every day, and industrial automation systems are increasingly connected and charged with performing critical functions,” says Alan Grau, CEO of Icon Labs. “Including security in these devices is a critical design task. Security features must be considered early in the design process to ensure the device is protected from the advanced cyber-threats they will be facing now as well as attacks that will be created in the future. By partnering with Renesas, we now are able to offer a solution in which critical security elements are integrated into the platform, ensuring that security is a foundational component of the device.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
GE Embracing Role in IoT and Cloud Analytics Spaces
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327970&
It was a funny place to see GE CEO Jeff Immelt. So funny that one of the first questions he was asked at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015 in Orlando, FL this week was, “What’s the CEO of an industrial company doing here?” The answer was coy, and it didn’t go nearly far enough to contain GE’s ambition of becoming one of the world’s Top 10 software companies by 2020.
Immelt said, “I’m here to learn. Here to meet people. Here to hopefully do a little recruiting on the side.” What Immelt was really doing was laying the foundation for Predix, GE’s new “industrial internet” platform. Predix immediately makes GE a player in the analytics space, the cloud space, and even in security.
Predix is a cloud-based, open industrial analytics platform that will help you run GE or non-GE products on an industrial scale more efficiently. But Predix isn’t exactly the same map everyone else has.
GE Charges Into IoT, Cloud Analytics Space
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/ge-charges-into-iot-cloud-analytics-space-/d/d-id/1322548
GE is going full steam ahead in its efforts to become a digital company. This includes new emphasis on IoT and analytics.
“Even in the 1990s, we believed software was our backbone. But we outsourced everything. We convinced ourselves that we were knuckleheaded and people had to help us with software,” Immelt said. “And then you wake up one day, and you realize that the locomotive you sell is a mobile data center. And you have to change.”
At the heart of GE’s move into digital is this understanding that the value of its product is as much, if not more, in the data created by the product as the product itself. Immelt gave the example: If GE can use data to improve the speed of trains by 1 mph per day, it would mean $200 million to its locomotive customers.
It isn’t the trains themselves being faster, it is managing traffic, uptime, and the tracks. Predix can help trains along the entire rail line go on “cruise control” so each train can respond to the speed and direction of every other train on the tracks.
Immelt calls this being a “digital industrial company.” But InformationWeek readers would recognize this model of offering “x-as-a-service” to customers. In addition to selling the engine, the service is now providing the data on the engine, upgrading the engine through software, and lengthening the value life cycle of the product. It isn’t all that different from what a network services provider might do.
How committed is GE to being a software company? It has $5 billion in revenue from software already. It’s aiming for $20 billion by 2020. If that doesn’t tell you that you’ll be hearing of GE as a software company for a while, this might: “I would say that digitalization of this company is the single most important initiative I’ve ever been engaged in,” Immelt said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Net Gets Boost in Europe
Smart city project adopts wireless M-Bus
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327961&
COPENHAGEN – Add wireless M-Bus to the growing list of communications protocols gaining a foothold in the Internet of Things. A smart city project in Italy is installing 25,000 M-Bus systems this month in a one-year pilot project, inspired in part by plans of the country’s utility to deploy as many as 12 million nodes.
A host of low power wide area networks such as LoRa, Sigfox and Ingenu are jumping in to fill the cellular gap, but none of them are based on standards. The European Commission set the wireless M-Bus standard in 2005.
taly’s utility stated an intention to network 60% of its gas meters, or 12 million systems, by 2018 using M-Bus. “Twelve million end points is quite a significant number,” said Gavazzi, in a talk at a smart city event here.
France also has plans to deploy wireless M-Bus in the 169 MHz band for its gas and water meters starting next year, according to a source in Texas Instruments that makes chips for the link. Germany and the Netherlands are adopting the technology in the 868 MHz band, the representative said.
The approach makes sense for Telecom Italia because it can deploy the wireless M-Bus in parallel to its cellular network using its existing expertise, antennas and towers.
ETSI’s OneM2M protocol provides a service layer hiding from application developers differences in underlying IoT networks.
Separately, the Turin project is also adopting a new cross-platform IoT protocol. The OneM2M protocol became available in January as a standard ratified by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).
OneM2M provides an abstraction layer between applications and various networks ranging from cellular to Zigbee. It reuses elements of the Broadband Forum’s TR-069 standard as well as network management features defined by the Open Mobile Alliance.
“The power of this [OneM2M] platform is in the north-bound interface” which uses Restful APIs so smart-city developers “don’t have to know anything about Sigfox or LoRa or other networks, they just need to know Web languages – it’s very powerful,”
M-Bus standard
http://www.m-bus.com/
The M-Bus (“Meter-Bus”) is a new European standard for remote reading of heatmeters and it is also usable for all other types of consumption meters as well as for various sensors and actuators.
With its standardization as a galvanic interface for remote readout of heat meters this bus wins a great importance for the energy industry as relevant users.
The remote reading of heat meters can take place in different ways, beginnig with the classical method – manual reading by the personnel of the providers – up to the remotely controlled collection of all the meter values for a complete housing unit. The latter is a logical continuation/extension of the technical development of consumption meters and is realizable with the help of the M-Bus.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT’s Wireless Horse Race
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327130
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet-Connected Box Displays Emotion, Basement Dwellers Still Unaffected
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/12/internet-connected-box-displays-emotion-basement-dwellers-still-unaffected/
For one reason or another, Twitter has become the modern zeitgeist, chronicling the latest fashions, news, gossip, and irrelevant content that sends us spiraling towards an inevitable existential ennui. This is a Twitter mood light. It tells you what everyone else on the planet is feeling. You, of course, feel nothing. Because of the ennui.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMpsSjMVLys
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Giving Out (Sort Of) Hackable Amazon Dash Button
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/11/amazon-giving-out-sort-of-hackable-amazon-dash-button/
We’ve seen some interesting hacks of the Amazon Dash buttons, a neat device where you press a button and it orders a product from Amazon for you. Now, [Amazon] themselves are getting into the hacking fun with the AWS IoT Button. This is a Dash button that Amazon is giving out at events to promote their new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Internet of Things (IoT) service.
As part of their efforts to take over the world, the AWS IoT service allows you to create button-based services like ordering pizza or starting Netflix, but without running your own server. Instead, Amazon handles all of the hard stuff behind the scenes on their Lambda engine, which receives the small bit of JSON that the button sends and runs a Lambda function that orders pizza, kicks off Netflix, then starts World War III. Amazon provides sample actions for things like launching the missiles sending a text message over Twilio and writing to a database. Amazon isn’t selling these buttons: they only seem to be available as swag at events.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Push Blood Pressure Data To The Cloud Via ESP8266
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/11/push-blood-pressure-data-to-the-cloud-via-esp8266/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andy Rubin: AI Is The Future Of Computing, Mobility
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327971&
Andy Rubin, the man behind Google’s Android operating system, thinks artificial intelligence will define computing in the future.
“There is a point in time — I have no idea when it is, it won’t be in the next 10 years, or 20 years — where there is some form of AI, for lack of a better term, that will be the next computing platform,” said Rubin onstage at the Code/Mobile conference.
More specifically, Rubin believes Internet-connected devices (smartphones, tablets, thermostats, smoke detectors, and cars, for example) will create massive amounts of data that will be analyzed by deep-learning technologies. This process will be the foundation of the first artificial intelligence networks. They will be able to tell people, for instance, what their thermostat is set to, when it’s time to hit the gym, and whether or not your pool has too much chlorine.
Context is important. “The thing that’s gonna be new is the part of the cloud that’s forming the intelligence from all the information that’s coming,” said Rubin.
Andy Rubin: AI Is The Future Of Computing, Mobility
http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-applications/andy-rubin-ai-is-the-future-of-computing-mobility/a/d-id/1322556?
Andy Rubin, the man behind Google’s Android operating system, thinks artificial intelligence will define computing in the future.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Openremote
http://www.openremote.org/display/HOME/OpenRemote
OpenRemote is software integration platform for residential and commercial building automation. OpenRemote platform is automation protocol agnostic, operates on off-the-shelf hardware and is freely available under an Open Source license. OpenRemote’s architecture enables fully autonomous and user-independent intelligent buildings. End-user control interfaces are available for iOS and Android devices
Integrate: AMX, KNX, Lutron, Z-Wave, 1-Wire, EnOcean, xPL, Insteon, X10, Infrared, Russound, GlobalCache, IRTrans, XBMC, VLC, panStamps, Denon AVR, FreeBox, MythTV, and more.
Cross-platform: Install on Windows, Linux, Mac, Raspberry Pi, Alix, Synology, ReadyNAS, QNAP and others.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NEC partners with Bristol to create the world’s first open programmable city NEC will provide insights, expertise and ICT technologies to enable UK city to develop a wide range of smarter transport, environmental, health and community services
http://www.nec.com/en/press/201503/global_20150310_02.html
NEC is already working with Bristol to virtualise and converge a new high capacity wireless and optical network to support a wider diversity of end-user needs in a highly efficient way. In the smart cities of the future, this is likely to include ultra-low latency connectivity for driverless cars, kilobits per second connectivity for M2M sensors to monitor the health of citizens with long-term chronic conditions, hundred megabits per second for ultra high definition TV broadcasts and terabits per second data transfers for collaborative R&D programmes between global universities.
New services and applications will be trialled on the Bristol Is Open network platform as virtual tenants on pooled servers, eliminating stranded capacity and over-utilised bottlenecks commonly seen in data communication networks. Bristol will be able to create dynamic service chains to enable traffic to take the best path through the network depending on real-time demand and the specific requirements of each smart city service. By being able to easily up-scale and hibernate centralised server resources, Bristol will also be able to minimise energy usage and costs while maximising system resilience.
World’s First Programmable City Arises, Built on Xilinx FPGAs
https://forums.xilinx.com/t5/Xcell-Daily-Blog/World-s-First-Programmable-City-Arises-Built-on-Xilinx-FPGAs/ba-p/642709
By 2050, the human population will have reached 9 billion people, with 75 percent of the world’s inhabitants living in cities. With already around 80 percent of the United Kingdom’s population living in urban areas, the U.K. needs to ensure that cities are fit for purpose in the digital age. Smart cities can help deliver efficiency, sustainability, a cleaner environment, a higher quality of life and a vibrant economy. To this end, Bristol Is Open (BIO) is a joint venture between the University of Bristol and Bristol City, with collaborators from industry, universities, local communities, and local and national governments. Bristol Is Open (www.bristolisopen.com) is propelling this municipality of a half million people in southwest England to a unique status as the world’s first programmable city.
Bristol will become an open testing ground for the burgeoning new market of the Industrial Internet of Things—that is, the components of the smart-city infrastructure. The Bristol Is Open project leverages Xilinx All Programmable FPGA devices in many areas of development and deployment.
PROGRAMMABLE CITY VS. SMART CITY: Smart cities aim to improve and enhance public and private service offerings to citizens in a more efficient and cost-effective way by exploiting network, IT and, increasingly, cloud technologies. To achieve this goal, smart cities rely extensively on data collected from citizens, the environment, vehicles and basically all the “things” present in the city. The more data that becomes available, the more accurately city operations can be analyzed, which in turn will lead to the design and availability of smart-city services.
For the network infrastructure, citywide data retrieval and processing mean massive amounts of sensor data that needs to be collected, aggregated and transferred to computational facilities (data centers) for storage and possibly processing.
Programmable networking technologies offer unique capabilities for raising the performance of smart-city operations.
Software-defined networking (SDN) is one of the main enablers for programmable networks. The SDN foundation is based on decoupling infrastructure control from the data plane, which greatly simplifies network management and application development while also allowing deployment of generic hardware in the network for delivering networking functions.
BIO aims to serve as a living lab—an R&D testbed targeting city-driven digital innovation
At the infrastructure level, BIO comprises five distinctive SDN-enabled infrastructures:
Active nodes as optoelectronic-network white boxes using FPGA programmable platforms and heterogeneous optical and Layer 2/3 networking infrastructure
Heterogeneous wireless infrastructure comprising Wi-Fi, LTE, LTE-A and 60-GHz millimeter-wave technologies
IoT sensor mesh infrastructure
Network emulator comprising a server farm and an FPGA-SoC-network processor farm
Blue Crystal high-performance computing (HPC) facility
On the metro network, the infrastructure offers access to dynamic optical switching supporting multi-terabit/second data streams, multirate Layer 2 switching (1 to 100 GbE) and Layer 3 routing.
The entire platform uses SDN control principles
We are using Xilinx FPGAs that have evolved into system-on-chip (SoC) devices in multiple points within the BIO infrastructure: in active nodes as optoelectronic white boxes, emulation facilities, wireless LTE-A experimental equipment and IoT platforms. BIO uses programmable and customizable network white boxes that consist of programmable electrical (FPGA) and optical (switching, processing, etc.) parts. FPGAs offer several advantages, including hardware repurposing through function reprogrammability, easier upgradability and shorter design-to-deploy cycles than those of application-specific standard products (ASSPs).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
Google Launches Cloud Datalab, An Interactive Tool For Exploring And Visualizing Data
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/13/google-launches-cloud-datalab-an-interactive-tool-for-exploring-and-visualizing-data/#.ojwuxm:cxVJ
Google today launched Cloud Datalab, a new interactive developer tool for exploring, analyzing and visualizing data with just a few clicks. As Google tells us, the service is meant to help developers “get insights from raw data and explore, share and publish reports in a fast, simple and cost-effective way.”
The service uses Jupyter notebooks (previously known as IPython), a format that allows you to create documents with live code and visualizations. Jupyter is pretty well-known in the data science world, and a thriving ecosystem has grown around it, which should make getting started with this new Google tool easier, too.
Using Cloud Datalab, developers can explore, transform, visualize and process data that sits in Google BigQuery, Compute Engine and Cloud Storage. To do so, they can use Python, SQL and JavaScript (using BigQuery user-defined functions). Based on this, they can then use this data to build their data pipelines for deployment to BigQuery or create machine learning models, for example.
To visualize this data, developers can use Google Charting or the matplotlib Python library.
https://cloud.google.com/datalab/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon’s jump start for the IoT
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/eye-on-iot-/4440535/Amazon-s-jump-start-for-the-IoT
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a well-established provider of cloud-based capabilities, but now has set its sights on the IoT. The company is looking to invigorate IoT development with a new, integrated service that connects your devices with its cloud services.
AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that forms a bridge between IoT devices and Amazon’s other AWS offerings such as compute services, data streaming, data storage, and the like. The platform also supports device-to-device communications, device management, and user apps that can connect to devices, even when they are temporarily offline.
The platform has multiple components. Devices link to the service through a gateway using secure communications based on mutual authentication and encryption. The system registers each device that connects with it, assigning a unique identity and storing metadata about the device
The gateway exchanges messages with the device using a publish/subscribe model that allows one-to-many communications.
After data enters the network, a rules engine allows users to build applications that gather, process, analyze, and act on the data their devices generate. Functions can be as simple as triggering an alert when a reading passes a threshold, or be context-based using other device data such as triggering the alert only when a device’s reading exceeds the average reading of several devices. The rules engine also allows definition of when and how data should be passed to other AWS services for handling.
Network connectivity may not always be 100% reliable, so the AWS IoT offers what it calls “device shadows” to simplify the interaction between user apps and the devices on the network. The device shadow serves as a stand-in for a device when it is offline, retaining the last known state of the device for apps to read and preserving any desired future state for the device. The system will then update both the shadow and the device when connection resumes. Developers thus don’t need to provide for the possibility of a device being offline; the shadow device is always available.
Amazon has partnered with a variety of hardware vendors to offer starter kits for AWS IoT. The kits, available through Amazon.com (naturally) as well as direct from vendors, contain the hardware and the SDK needed to create an IoT device and connect it to AWS IoT. Many cost less than $100, and some, like the TI kit based on the CC3200 SimpleLink Launchpad, are available for under $30.
To get developers started, Amazon is offering a Free Tier account that lets developers use the AWS services for one year without cost, subject to some limitations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM Brings SoC ASIC Design to Embedded IoT Mainstream
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327994&
The free SoC tools on ARM’s DesignStart portal have been retargeted from a purely academic and educational focus to offering embedded IoT developers low-cost ASIC design services.
ARM Ltd. this week introduced an ARM Cortex-M0-based system-on-chip design capability that the company expects to change the economics of embedded and IoT application specific IC development. The new tool suite is now available on ARM’s existing DesignStart portal, a free SoC design resource introduced several years ago by ARM for use by academic institutions for educational purposes.
The free development package includes a Cortex-M0 processor and system design kit (SDK), featuring system IP, peripherals, test bench and software, and a free 90-day license for the full suite of ARM Keil MDK software development tools. York said the package will enable the design, simulation and testing of new SoCs using a pre-configured Cortex-M0 processor without incurring the capital costs typically associated with up-front licensing.
Despite its limitations, the academic offering has been used by over 50 universities worldwide since its launch several years ago. York said the company will continue to offer such limited SoC design capabilities free to institutions that express an interest.
DesignStart
http://www.arm.com/products/designstart/index.php
Tomi Engdahl says:
City Aims to be IoT Petri Dish
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327991
Bristol, England, has turned itself into a petri dish for experiments in communications and the Internet of Things. Now it’s seeking tech companies who want to play scientist.
Bristol received grants and gifts valued at 75 million pounds to create wired and wireless infrastructure for a smart city. It aims to build out applications in a wide range of areas from assisted living for seniors to driverless cars and smart energy.
The city’s network is based on a fibre optic backbone. It is developing a software-defined network (SDN) called CityOS running on top of it that will ultimately link four nearby universities. It aims to use the emerging Openflow protocol and be up and running by next summer.
The networks link a science center that includes a 4K high definition data visualization dome as well as a university computer that acts as a network emulator for communications experiments. The city has also launched a startup incubator it calls the Engine Shed.
Bristol also is home to an experimental wireless zone where citizens can connect at a whopping 30 Gbits/second. It will host trials of 5G cellular services as well as 60 GHz networks and communications using Li-Fi, a link based on visible light. The city is also working on a wireless mesh network with 1,500 nodes that will cover 90% of the city.
Officials are now turning their attention to how to make money and improve quality of life using the infrastructure. “We have some ROI, but not even up to the 20 million in real cash we’ve spent yet,” said Paul Wilson, managing director of the so-called Bristol is Open project.
Some applications already taking hold are purely for entertainment. For example, the city created a digital performance space using streetlights that can replay shadow patterns.
“Now we have a whole movement attracting people from all over the world on playable cities,” said Wilson.
Bristol got unexpected revenue from an app letting citizens send texts to streetlights, attracting 70,000 mainly silly texts. When one streetlight went out, texts notified the city immediately. The quick response motivated developers in Brazil and Japan who bought the code for use in Olympic events there.
Open Bristol
http://www.bristolisopen.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Freescale Multi-Mode MCU Pushes IoT Envelope
Shades of gray in ‘multi-protocol’ MCUs
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327995&
The multi-mode radio is the Holy Grail of IoT, since any given connected IoT devices will likely operate not in a single but multiple wireless networks.
The Internet of Things (IoT) community has gotten a little closer to that dream with Freescale’s announcement Tuesday (Oct. 13) of a much-anticipated multi-mode wireless MCU supporting both Bluetooth Low Energy v 4.2 and IEEE 802.15.4 networks.
Freescale’s new multi-mode radio MCU, KW41Z, comes loaded with memory – as much as 512K flash and 128K RAM. The extended memory allows multiple network stacks—Bluetooth, Thread and ZigBee—to run on a single device, enabling developers to design true multi-protocol IoT devices, according to the company.
Further, the new MCU offers a time-slicing solution which—in the eyes of a user—makes the device look like it’s living on both networks (Bluetooth Low Energy and 802.15.4). But in fact, the device is time-slicing and switching very quickly between the two networks.
Freescale explained that the company is offering radios “working concurrently, but not simultaneously.” Emmanuel Sambuis, executive director, MCU and connectivity products at Freescale, told EE Times, “KW41 can switch without any loss communication between Bluetooth Low Energy and 802.15.4,” enabling a dual Personal Area Network solution.
Potential use-case scenario
Consider the example of a smart door lock, said Freescale’s Sambuis. The wireless MCU—designed into the lock—runs both BLE and 802.15.4.
While the host MCU runs Thread protocol in the background, the same MCU operates in BLE, enabling a user to control the lock locally from a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone or tablet. Alternatively, a user can control the lock remotely using the cloud-connected Thread mesh network, Sambuis explained.
Without a multi-mode radio MCU like KW41Z, IoT system designers would need to add to the network a separate BLE chip to communicate with a Thread or ZigBee device.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wireless controls in building systems
http://www.csemag.com/single-article/wireless-controls-in-building-systems/0bf4f5045d736e6e7b97dffde41fb005.html?OCVALIDATE=
There is quite a bit of flux in the wireless building instrumentation and controls protocol market with numerous players jockeying for dominance. Though wireless systems are becoming the norm for product manufacturers in many cases, not all engineers fully understand the best way to specify these systems.
Wired building automation systems (BAS) have been successfully installed in both new construction and renovation projects for many years, and are the standard way a BAS is installed. Recently, wireless technology has become more prominent in the marketplace. This trend will continue, as a significant portion of the construction market consists of renovation work, and these projects pose difficulties for wired networks. As more flexibility is required in the built environment, wireless technologies can be easily reconfigured to support new building layouts.
Most wireless installations today are classified as hybrid systems because they are a combination of wired and wireless systems.
Tier 1 is the primary bus, sometimes referred to as the management level, that is typically a wired solution and generally uses BACnet/IP protocol. This level is where operator interface with the system typically occurs, and devices such as operator workstations, Web servers, and other supervisory devices are networked together.
Tier 2 is the secondary bus and is commonly referred to as the automation level. It is also typically a wired solution and generally uses BACnet/IP, BACnet/MSTP, or LonTalk protocols. This level generally connects field controllers, programmable logic controllers, application-specific controllers, and major mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and lighting equipment.
Tier 3, or field level, is where end-user devices like thermostats and other sensors reside. While wireless networks can be used at all levels, this level is the most common implementation for wireless technologies due to their ease of installation, flexibility, and ease of relocation.
The wireless technology that is most widely used is WiFi (IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n).
ZigBee is a widely accepted wireless protocol used in the building automation industry. This level of acceptance typically keeps development and deployment costs lower than other protocols. Zigbee is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The standard specifies a maximum data rate of 250 kB/sec across a self-forming meshed network. Since Zigbee uses low data rates, the corresponding power consumption is also low and results in a long battery life. ZigBee operates in the same frequency bands as WiFi but can co-exist with WiFi networks when properly configured.
Most battery-operated wireless sensor devices have a battery life of up to 5 yr, though this might vary widely depending on use in the building.
EnOcean devices use self-powered sensors that transmit data at a rate of 120 kB/sec in a mesh network at a low-frequency range. EnOcean devices utilize very low data and frequency rates.
Wireless systems are required to have the same level of reliability as wired systems.
With proper planning and implementation wireless networks can be as reliable and secure as a wired network. Using wireless mesh networks with “smart” routing techniques, challenges like ensuring data packets successfully reach their destination can be mitigated.
The building’s construction characteristics must be considered during the design and layout of a wireless network.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: Is There Space For Open Hardware In Networking?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/15/10/13/191202/ask-slashdot-is-there-space-for-open-hardware-in-networking
Open hardware has got much attention with the advent of Raspberry Pi, Arduino and their respective clones. But most of the devices are focused either on tinkerers (Arduino) or most notably multimedia (Raspberry Pi).
Our company (non-profit) is trying to change this with Turris Omnia but we still wander if there is in fact demand for such devices. Is the market large enough and the area cool enough?
Turris Omnia
https://omnia.turris.cz/en/
More than just a router.
The open-source center of your home.
Home router is necessary to connect you to the Internet but it is idle most of the time, just eating electricity. Why not use it for more tasks?
With powerful hardware, Turris Omnia can handle gigabit traffic and still be able to do much more. You can use it as a home server, NAS, printserver and it even has a virtual server built-in.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel thanks growth in IoT for positive Q3 financials
Customer enthusiasm for the 6th-gen Intel Core processor also helped
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2430382/intel-thanks-growth-in-iot-for-positive-q3-financials
INTEL HAS BEATEN INDUSTRY EXPECTATIONS in its third quarter this year, seeing growth in the data centre, Internet of Things (IoT) and non-volatile memory businesses.
Intel said that quarterly revenue of $14.5bn, which was flat year over year, was “above the midpoint of outlook”. The firm attributed this to a focus on the IoT of which its dedicated group showed the most promise this quarter, logging revenue of $581m, up 10 percent year over year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ring Chime: Needy wireless doorbell or $30 bling t’ing?
It works, but do I really want a gadget that emails me begging for a recharge?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/14/ring_chime_review/
Review We were quite taken with the Ring doorbell earlier this year. For $200, and after some very basic DIY, you get a high-tech security device.
It includes an HD camera, an intercom, a motion sensor and, yes, a doorbell.
The Ring links to your phone, gives you alerts, lets you watch video of people through it and lets you have a conversation with the person at the other end. Never miss a delivery again and scare off potential burglars. Perfect.
There were a couple of problems with the Ring, though. One of the biggest was that it required a wired connection to set off a doorbell sound in your house.
Roughly half of all doorbells in the United States use a very simple and very cheap radio system. The button is powered by an AA battery; it sends a quick and simple ping to the doorbell inside, which can you mount pretty much wherever you want.
The Ring, however, does not connect to these devices. Yes, if you have a wired system, it will work.
Enter the Chime. The Chime solves this use case for the company. Simply put, it is a doorbell extender. You plug it into any socket in your house, connect it to your wireless connection, tell it to talk to your Ring doorbell through the Ring app and henceforth, whenever the Ring sets off an alert, the Chime also rings. Problem solved.
The Chime, however, is an imperfect solution for a number of reasons.
One, it costs $30. Which is a lot of money for a doorbell ringer. Second, you have to plug it into a power socket.
As for the Chime: if you love the Ring and you don’t have a wired ringer then it will be a very useful, if slightly expensive, add-on. As with many things in the smart home, it’s a compromise.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lauren Goode / The Verge:
August announces partner app integrations, new $299 smart lock with Siri support, $79 smart keypad, $199 doorbell cam, preorders today, shipping in 4-8 weeks
August announces Siri-enabled smart locks and a doorbell camera
Open sesame, Siri
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/14/9528919/august-smart-lock-maker-ships-siri-enabled-locks-aims-to-be-uber-of
August, the San Francisco-based maker of smart door locks that can be controlled from a mobile phone, said today that it’s expanding its products to include an accessory keypad for its locks and a new doorbell that’s equipped with a video camera.
But going beyond just hardware updates is a plan to offer a platform for managing all kinds of home maintenance and delivery services, from dry cleaning drop-offs to pet sitters to basic shipping. It’s an ambitious goal for startup August, which only launched its first hardware product a year ago, but one that puts it deeper into the software and services industry rather than just hardware.
First, the new hardware. The second-generation August smart lock, which is designed by industrial designer (and August co-founder) Yves Behar, doesn’t look much different from the previous version, with the exception of a metal ridge that indicates whether it’s in a locked or unlocked position. But it has new internals: it’s now Apple HomeKit-enabled through a new Broadcom chip, so if you’re an iOS user, you can command Siri to lock and unlock your door for you
The price of the lock has also dropped $20 from last year’s model to $229
One of the features that August frequently heard users wanted was a way to access the Bluetooth lock without having to download the August app (and without having to use a physical key).
So August is now shipping a $79 accessory keypad that you can stick next to your external door knob, letting you send SMS messages with unique keypad codes directly from the August app.
The third new gadget from August is a Wi-Fi-equipped doorbell camera that wires to an existing doorbell plate and captures HD video clips of people approaching the door.
Speaking of software services, that’s perhaps the most interesting area that August is getting into, through something called August Access. Co-founder and CEO Jason Johnson described this as a “third-party access management system,” which basically means that August is aggregating a bunch of partner apps into its own app to give you one-stop shopping for home services. Services like Postmates, Shyp, Handy, Envoy, Pillow, Rinse, and even Sears (which visits more than 14 million home each year for home installations and repairs) will tap into August’s API, making it possible to schedule appointments directly from the August app and unlock the door for people arriving at your home.
Provided that people actually use it and aren’t creeped out by the idea of remotely letting strangers into their homes, it may be a smart move for August.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Spectrum on WRC-15 Agenda
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328000&
Identifying new 700 MHz spectrum bands for the Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communications is one of the agenda items at the upcoming WRC-15 event.
Every four years more than 190 U.N. member states gather in Geneva, Switzerland, to agree on matters related to the global use of the radio frequency spectrum.
At WRC-15 agenda items 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 are creating a lot of interest, as they are dealing with identification of new spectrum ranges for terrestrial mobile broadband such as LTE. There is a special focus on the spectrum range 698-869 MHz which has a global scope for various flavors of LTE.
Some 48 European countries that are part of Region 1 have identified the 698-791 MHz range for not only commercial mobile broadband services, but also for broadband public safety and disaster relief (PPDR) as well as services for the Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communications.
It is expected that LTE Release 13 or later will form the basic platform in the 700 MHz range for effective police and emergency operations going forward in Europe and the rest of the world.
It is envisioned that IoT/M2M could share the 3×3 MHz spectrum pair, with uplink in 733-736 MHz and downlink in 788-791 MHz using the LTE infrastructure rolled out for PPDR.
Meanwhile, work is underway in the 3GPP standards group to define a band class starting in 698 MHz for PPDR and other professional applications such as M2M. This work is expected to conclude by the end of 2015
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ag3.0: A Field of Opportunities for Tech
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328015&
CEVA sees the challenges fo raising population and climate change to agriculture as a good thing for the semiconductor industry.
For thousands of years, farmers have been looking up to the clouds to try to decipher what’s in store for their crops this season. Today, a new cloud is on the horizon. More and more farmers are turning to big data and precision farming, in order to maximize the potential of their land and resources as well as the quality of their produce, while minimizing the impact on the environment.
Why on earth?
As the human population grows and resources become more and more scarce, specifically water and arable land, innovative solutions are required in order to meet the increasing demand. According to the United Nations’ World Population Prospects report, by the year 2050 the earth’s population will grow to almost ten billion people. In addition to the swelling population, there is very little arable land left on the planet to grow more crops.
Ag3.0: A field of opportunities for semiconductors
http://www.embedded.com/electronics-blogs/say-what-/4440583/Ag3-0–A-field-of-opportunities-for-semiconductors
Enter Precision Agriculture
In an article from 2012, Dr. Jim Budzynzki describes the evolution of farming in the 20th century. Ag1.0, according to this description, was labor intensive, low productivity, traditional farming.
Ag2.0 was the dramatic shift in the industry that mostly took place in the second half of the twentieth century. This shift included the introduction of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, significantly driving up efficiency and reducing differentiation, effectively cutting costs.
Ag3.0, he suggests, is the new paradigm which will bring with it a huge surge in the use of technology to accurately manage farms, while shifting focus from efficiency to profitability. A phrase he suggests will be in use is “No molecule wasted”.
It seems that’s a pretty good description of where the agriculture industry is headed. In today’s technologically pioneering farms, autonomous combines are already harvesting crops using extremely precise Global Positioning Systems (GPS), accurate down to the centimeter, while using special sensors on the ground to perform grid sampling of the fields. Drones fly overhead, mapping the field and collecting millions of different data points, and sending them to the cloud to be processed. Meanwhile, the farmer looks at his tablet, immediately identifying areas that require special attention. The collected information is then fed back into the tractors and choppers which automatically make corrections for amounts of pest control substance. This scenario is still quite rare, but more and more farmers are adapting to this revolution in agriculture brought on by information technology.
In every piece of technology in this futuristic scenario there are many components that require digital signal processing. All the different monitoring functions require sensors that can collect the relevant data, as well as communication processors that can send the data using various wireless communication standards to the cloud. From extremely low-power sensor networks, through proprietary communication for drones, all the way to high-speed LTE networks for tractors and concentrators, communication processors for Ag3.0 must remain flexible. The autonomous farming vehicles, tractors, combines, choppers and drones, all need vision capabilities as well as intensive processing power to derive intelligence from the visual data. They also require extremely accurate GPS capability, so that they can both navigate properly and report information on each and every plant that might need fine tuning in water, nutrient or pesticide application. The farmer, who is in charge of this whole operation, requires a handheld device with LTE and Wi-Fi connectivity and processing capabilities, in order to display the processed information, and make decisions in cases that require intervention.
While Ag3.0 shows a lot of promise, it is clear that a significant capital investment is required to adopt these cutting-edge solutions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Building automation + integration = efficiency
http://www.csemag.com/single-article/building-automation-integration-efficiency/f507f369e51e75f92442af47e30e601b.html
The building automation system (BAS) has become key to ensuring all systems within a building are working effectively and efficiently. Integration of lighting, HVAC, fire/life safety, and all other engineered systems requires the designer to specify an appropriate system.
In the 1970s and ‘80s—due to increased energy prices—the demand for a more cost-effective building sent the BAS industry into a whirl of development to make buildings smarter. Taglines like “smart building solutions” started dotting
Over the next decade, the building automation landscape moved forward with larger leaps as technologies evolved at an almost exponential rate. During this time, energy prices inevitably fell and the larger cost-driven model for energy reduction began to wane as the economy strengthened.
Open protocols became an increasingly common topic of discussion as users realized the power of integration.
Today, the majority of buildings are designed with direct digital BAS. Through the evolution of protocols and technologies, the BAS has become a key component to ensuring the effective function of an entire building. In a perfect world, this would mean all buildings could take advantage of a “plug-and-play” system.
In addition, the ever-expanding cloud and the IoT has opened a whole new world of interconnectivity, allowing smart mobile devices and applications to be applied to these complex systems. Web browsers, software as a service (Internet-based software platforms, also known as SaaS), and mobile applications can be used to create a dynamic system where data-storage capacities are virtually limitless and access and control are just a touch away. With all this, the opportunity for efficiency is greater than ever. However, it is only through successful integration that this efficiency is achieved.
in building-retrofit projects, engineers may be dealing with legacy systems that are not changed out while newer systems are brought in to be “bolted” together with those legacy systems
BACnet: This protocol has gained significant momentum in the past decade to become arguably the most specified and most used open protocol in the market today.
According to http://www.bacnet.org, BACnet currently has 825 vendor IDs (registered manufacturers of BACnet products).
BACnet most popularly comes in two flavors: master slave/token pass (MS/TP) and Internet protocol (IP). Both data communication layers have their merits.
LonWorks: This protocol was developed by Echelon Corp. and is largely considered to be the competitor to BACnet.
LonWorks gives the ability for both twisted, shielded pair communication bus and IP-enabled (Ethernet) technologies through varying methods
Modbus: This open protocol is commonly used in some packaged control applications and sensor topologies. It consists of both a remote terminal unit (RTU, an EIA-485, twisted shielded pair network) and TCP/IP (Ethernet, CAT 5E, etc.) communication options and also is designed to exist in an intranet or Internet environment. Typical Modbus applications are more popular in the industrial market and include energy measurement, motor drives, and automation routines.
Proprietary protocols: A wealth of these protocols exist in buildings today.
Although there are good legacy integration solutions in the market today, this is not to say all of them are created equal.
The Internet of Things
We are all becoming more connected to products, services, devices as the Internet continues to integrate into almost every aspect of our lives. A more connected and accessible building can make for a more efficient building.
HPS
A wealth of newly developed applications are progressing in the building space. Certain companies are leveraging this by taking integration protocols like BACnet, Modbus, and LonWorks and tying them into larger, Internet-enabled services that allow for more streamlined access and analytical tools for a building. These services work on simplifying the interaction of the BAS, so the end user can control the building space without having to understand the complexities of the BAS. This is accomplished through integration with IT services already available to these facilities.
For example, certain BAS can now tie into prominent calendaring tools like Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. This means zones can be scheduled automatically to turn on and off based on a user’s schedule set right from their desktop, tablet, or phone just by booking the space. It reduces the chance of forgotten temperature overrides, or missed chances to change a setting because of a scheduling conflict
In addition to BAS systems taking advantage of our Internet-enabled world, many services are emerging that leverage the cloud to promote energy savings and relay important energy, carbon, and financial data to facility professionals, green teams, consumers, and financial managers. These services offer tools that can track energy usage and automatically convert it to carbon footprint data. They can create historical energy analyses and use degree days or other conditions to normalize information and get accurate representations of performance. These tools also can create targets based on driving factors related to energy consumption and create predictive models that create alarms when something is performing out of range. With these features, and a wealth of others, energy and comfort conditions can be effectively monitored and managed and therefore optimized. With the almost limitless storage capacity of the cloud, this data can be stored securely and redundantly. The stored data can be used over a building’s lifecycle to effectively track and analyze energy performance, maintenance performance, and savings measures—all for a fraction of the cost associated with embedded systems.
Using the cloud
With smartphones and the Internet, BAS and other software/IT companies are launching smart-building management platforms and marketing SaaS. SaaS is any software application that you run that is not located on the premise being managed. It is a full-blown application, not a component part of something else. It is not a way to build applications. It is not a plug-in to other applications. Instead of having the application running on servers and data storage on building servers, it is running in the vendor’s data center.
The way SaaS applications are licensed is different from on-premise applications. Instead of buying the license to use the application, and then paying for software maintenance to support it and keep it current, you “rent” the software over a period of time—usually monthly or yearly. Instead of buying and installing infrastructure and then paying ongoing operating and maintenance costs, the vendor runs the application on their infrastructure. The cost of the SaaS application covers the costs of the software itself and the ongoing operations and infrastructure costs.
When you run an SaaS application, you generally log into your vendor’s website and you are on. You can say that SaaS applications are running “in the cloud,” and you would be correct. But SaaS applications are not the cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
bioloop
Biofeedback: Measurement and visualization
Measurement and visualization of biometric data is the main concern of biofeedback and neurofeedback processes.
Most products covering these use cases are too expensive to be used in non-professional environment. Project bioloop is an example for a low-cost platform providing biometric data.
The GUI is based on responsive HTML5, so that you can use your smartphone or tablet, too.
Proof-of-concept that biofeedback and neurofeedback can be achieved with COTS products
The software architecture is structured in 3 layers:
Device Layer
This software layer is running on the Seeeduino Lotus and it’s quite simple: periodically measure values, record event timestamps (heartbeat), and send these data via serial port.
Server Layer
The server-side software component is a bit more complex, as it involves web technology. This is in order to be able to display the visualizations on multiple devices and through a network.
Used Server Software Components:
Jetty Web Server
Java, Maven
Servlet 3.1 for HTML Rendering
WebSockets for periodic diagram updates (10Hz)
JSON as protocol format to update the client
Client Layer (GUI)
The client layer uses HTML for rendering the UI in a web browser. Thus the GUI can be used on every platform – from Windows PC to Android mobiles.
Used Frameworks and technologies:
HTML5, CSS3
Bootstrap as UI library
JavaScript, jQuery
Flot Charts for diagram plotting
WebSockets
The project’s source code is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/whatis777/bioloop
Tomi Engdahl says:
EasyIoT Cloud
Build your IoT in couple of minutes
https://hackaday.io/project/8079-easyiot-cloud
We want to build Easy Internet of Things framework. With EasyIoT Cloud framework you are able to build your most simple IoT in couple of minutes.
Components
1 × ESP8266
1 × sensor modules
ESP8266 WiFi DS18B20 temperature sensor (EasyIoT Cloud REST API)
http://iot-playground.com/2-uncategorised/68-esp8266-wifi-ds18b20-temperature-sensor-easyiot-cloud-rest-api
In this tutorial we will show how to build WiFi temperature sensor connected in EasyIoT Cloud. We will use ESP8266, DS18B20 and Arduino IDE.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smart Sensor Wireless Platform
Posted Oct 13th 2015
http://www.eeweb.com/news/smart-sensor-wireless-platform
Dialog Semiconductor plc announces a collaboration with Bosch Sensortec to create an extremely low power smart sensor platform that combines Bosch Sensortec’s sensors with Dialog’s Bluetooth Smart technology.
The product resulting from the collaboration is the world’s lowest power 12-DOF smart sensor reference platform for gesture recognition in wearable computing devices and immersive gaming, including augmented reality, and 3D indoor mapping and navigation.
The platform combines Dialog’s DA14580 Bluetooth Smart System-on-Chip (SoC) with three low power sensors from Bosch Sensortec: the BMM150 for 3-axis geo-magnetic field measurement, the BME280 pressure, humidity and temperature sensor, and the 6-axis BMI160 (a combination of a 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope in one chip). The resulting unit, built onto a 14 × 14 mm2 printed circuit board, consumes less than 500 µA from a 3V coin cell when updating and transferring all 12 × 16 bits of data wirelessly to a smartphone.
The DA14580 SmartBond™ SoC, which has already been adopted by numerous leading manufacturers of wearables, integrates a Bluetooth Smart radio with an ARM® Cortex™-M0 application processor and intelligent power management. It more than doubles the battery life of an application-enabled smartphone accessory, wearable device or computer peripheral in comparison with competing solutions. The DA14580 includes a variety of analogue and digital interfaces and features less than 15 mW power consumption in active mode and 600 nA standby current. It is half the size of rivals, measuring 2.5 × 2.5 × 0.5 mm.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vinduino, a wine grower’s water saving project
Monitoring soil moisture at different depths to determine when to irrigate,
and – more importantly – how much water is needed. Save 25%!
https://hackaday.io/project/6444-vinduino-a-wine-growers-water-saving-project
The Vinduino project’s (Vineyard + Arduino) scope has broadened to sharing this project with a wider audience. This includes making it open source, affordable, and easy to build.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Privacy Debate Flares in Smart City
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328011&
Mia Nyegaard wants her privacy. It’s both a reasonable request and a tall order in this digital age of information.
“I’d like to see a privacy-by-design plan,” she told a recent gathering on smart cities. “Only take the data needed, only keep it for the time needed. I want privacy to be a default rather than something I need to think about,” she said.
Like many urban centers, Copenhagen wants to be a smart city. It’s developing a big data platform with partners and recently launched an investment fund with 500 million Danish kroner for companies testing applications in a new solutions lab there.
Among other projects it has smart bus and cycling programs in the works – more than half of Copenhagen’s working population commute to work via bicycle. The town is also part of Almanac, a smart city research project managed by the European Commission that also involves Turin and Stockholm.
It’s all good, but it can easily go all wrong from Nyegaard’s perspective. “We get Christmas lights in our eyes when we see these new technologies, and don’t think about people misusing data,” she said.
She cites Edward Snowden who leaked details about the U.S. government’s extensive computer surveillance program. “Saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like arguing against free speech because you have nothing to say,” she said.
“We can’t live in a zero-risk society, but we can live in one that quantifies the risks,”
“This is a data management problem,” said Thestrup vowing to help draft a data privacy charter for Copenhagen. “We already have an EU directive on the right to be forgotten and minimal data collection…I’d like to see a data management brand in the form of a CE mark for privacy,” he said referring to Europe’s safety logo for electronic devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Track Your Stuff Anywhere in the World, Without GPS
http://www.ozy.com/good-sht/track-your-stuff-anywhere-in-the-world-without-gps/40805?utm_source=Outbrain&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=INTL%20-%20All%20Clicks%20ALL%20Devices
Losing things sucks. Especially when you aren’t the one who lost them. Suitcases. Keys. Kids. Yes, if you thought the anxiety you feel upon misplacing your car keys was hard to take, try not knowing where your kids are.
This feeling of anxiety isn’t lost on Roman Isakov, founder of iTraq Inc. His company is putting the final touches on its eponymous iTraq — a slender, credit card-shaped tracking device that you can attach to (or conceal within) almost anything or anyone. Which allows you to do things like find your car keys or AWOL luggage and check that your child made it to school. The iTraq uses GSM cellular towers to both triangulate its location and communicate that location back to its owner. “Cell ID triangulation is not new,” Isakov notes, “but we are the first ones to use it [in a tracker].”
There’s been an explosion of trackers on the market. Most of them, like the Tile and the Trackr, use Bluetooth technology and a community of users armed with smartphones and proprietary apps — but you need to be within the maximum 100-foot range or you won’t find your precious belongings. Others use GPS plus cellular, which gives them impressive accuracy but drains batteries and ups data charges.
Here’s what makes iTraq different. It comes with its own preinstalled SIM card and uses cellular, not GPS or Bluetooth, and no carrier accounts or nearby iTraq users are required. And the battery lasts for about three years, or around 1,500 connections.
Set an alarm that will go off if the iTraq leaves a specified perimeter — say, if your bike starts moving without you on it.
But cellular is not as accurate as GPS; some are skeptical of its use as a location technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LTE mobile networks to become number one IoT technique
The market is running quite a race about how radio technology will IoT IoT billions of devices connected to a network. Research Berg insigth firmly believes that LTE will rise in this race the top of the mobile networks in the race.
Berg Insight, the attached via mobiiliverkkoejn was IoT devices sold in 2020 to about 240 million. Currently, GPRS is still the most common way to connect, for example, M2M modules were. However, LTE technology has already begun to become more common as the most popular connection for already this year.
Machine-up service with 3G technology remains so to force some kind of transition technique. 3G modem sales will reach its peak in 2018, followed by their sales begin to decline.
LTE’s popularity to increase not only the new 0-class technology configuration data, including the recently adopted proposal for a new Internet of Things technology for LTE. NB-IoT a narrow band of IoT supports a very large number of small amounts of data transmitting devices.
NB-IoT devices can transfer data to the normal operator’s LTE traffic inside
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3462:lte-sta-mobiiliverkkojen-iot-ykkostekniikka&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Standards body wants standards for IoT. Vendors don’t care
Good luck, ISOC, you’ll need it given some thing-makers still haven’t discovered IPv6
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/19/net_boffins_call_for_standards_in_the_iot_apphappy_vendors_yawn/
The Internet Society (ISOC) has added its name to the growing list of groups concerned that insecurity and a cavalier attitude to privacy pose a risk to the Internet of Things (IoT).
In a paper published last Friday, ISOC notes that individual threats and vulnerabilities are, in aggregate, what’s going to make-or-break the IoT as a whole.
While users are identified as part of the problem, ISOC notes that they can’t choose the amount of security they want on a refrigerator (for example) if they don’t understand the issue.
In other words, at least one reason cheap broadband routers (for example) are hopelessly insecure is because vendors don’t bear the cost of insecurity. That falls on the Internet as a whole.
There are, ISOC notes, challenges specific to the IoT – the huge scale anticipated by IoT-boosters is far beyond that of computers or even the huge smartphone market; and vast numbers of identical devices is going to massively amplify the reach of any security vulnerability that’s discovered.
Similar considerations apply to privacy – particularly since the coolest of IoT companies are and proudly building their business case on the mass collection of end user data.
Internet Society Releases Internet of Things (IoT) Overview Whitepaper: Understanding the Issues and Challenges of a More Connected World
http://www.internetsociety.org/blog/public-policy/2015/10/internet-society-releases-internet-things-iot-overview-whitepaper
To understand the opportunities and challenges associated with the Internet of Things, the Internet Society has released “The Internet of Things: An Overview – Understanding the Issues and Challenges of a More Connected World”, a whitepaper that examines many important aspects of the Internet of Things. This paper aims to serve as an informational resource about the Internet of Things and a launching off point for further discussions.
The paper begins with an overview of the technologies that enable the IoT and then explores the challenge of defining what the “Internet of Things” is.
The largest portion of the paper presents five primary challenge areas:
security;
privacy;
interoperability and standards;
legal, regulatory, and rights; and
emerging economies and development.
Each issue area is highlighted overview of existing challenges and questions raised in order to advance dialog on developing solutions to current and future challenges.
The Internet of Things (IoT): An Overview
Understanding the Issues and Challenges of a More Connected World
http://www.internetsociety.org/doc/iot-overview
Tomi Engdahl says:
Home> Systems-design Design Center > How To Article
IoT engineering challenges drive new trade offs
http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4440607/IoT-engineering-challenges-drive-new-trade-offs?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20151019&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20151019&elq=9ed1adfa1e944a5a86cf602e6ed60347&elqCampaignId=25283&elqaid=28749&elqat=1&elqTrackId=d10c04525c6d4318b8bab81a1e48888b
Moving beyond the hype of the potential for the IoT, there are some real engineering challenges that must be overcome in order to satisfy the intoxicating market predictions of IoT uptake across industrial and commercial markets. ABI Research estimates that the volume of data captured by IoT-connected devices exceeded 200 exabytes in 2014, and its annual total is forecast to grow seven-fold by the decade’s end, surpassing 1,600 exabytes—or 1.6 zettabytes—in 2020. So, how do we successfully create the devices that will handle all of this data?
Besides the obvious challenges of keeping costs low for IoT devices, there area a number of design and verification challenges that are primarily driven by finding the balance between functionality and the limitations of the hardware and software.
Qian Yu, technical marketing manager at ARM says that from the physical implementation perspective, the design and production challenges come about due to functionality requirements, the limitations of flash technology, and economics.
In terms of functionality, one of the things that makes IoT SoC designs unique is their low power requirements, even as compared to mobile devices. And, their sleep-to-wake ratio is much higher. They still have similar frequency requirements, though, in order to ensure functionality. “As a result,” Yu says, designers need to focus on peak power and sleep leakage power optimization without sacrificing too much performance.”
Obviously, small, single purpose, low-power IoT devices cannot handle all of these power management, connectivity, and security requirements, so what is the way forward? Légaré suggests an overall IoT approach that incorporates edge nodes (hubs or gateways). He says in this type of deployment, designers must answer questions like: Where do you put the required computing resources in the system? How do you design the system so that it is future-proof? To be successful here, Légaré believes that embedded engineers need to work more closely with their colleagues further down the line, in IT. “This is not simple,” he says, “because both fields have their own set of technologies and vocabulary. However, for the IoT to be successful, embedded and IT engineers must come to understand each other.”
Moving into the realm of performance, Yu notes that some of the implementation and verification challenges include noise isolation, analog to digital timing closure, and mixed-signal modeling. Also, he points out that the existing embedded flash technologies do not scale well below the 40 nm process.
Perhaps one of the biggest early challenges in IoT design is to pick an implementation platform. Mike Anderson, CTO and Chief Scientist for The PTR Group, Inc., notes that the choices between the ARM Cortex M0/M0+/M3/M4 (and soon M7) are plentiful.
But, more frequently, they tend to make their selections based on the availability of the prototyping platform. Anderson points to the TI MSP432, Freescale Kinetis series, and the ST Micro ST32 as some examples. He also suggests that compatibility with the Arduino platform offers advantages of inexpensive sensor modules, numerous communications options, and an easy to use, open-source development environment.
“The commercial development platforms like Keil and IAR do a great job at integrating the development/debug features into a common IDE — for a price. If you’re a start-up or one of the DIY/maker crowd, then there are open-source tools that, with a little bit of integration on your part, can serve yeoman’s duty without the initial sticker shock of the commercial products. Additionally, many of the FPGA vendors have embeddable Cortex-M cores with verification tools included if you feel the need for some custom hardware.”
First, define the system architecture and put the computing resources where they make the most sense, advises Légaré. So, that’s the reasonably simple part, then what?
The next step varies.
There are a number of other new products, tools, and techniques to help with the balance of power.
In terms of new products, Anderson believes that the ARM Cortex-M has significantly changed the playing field. “We no longer have to use ancient tools to produce the code, and the development platforms are plentiful.”
Arguably, the potential for IoT devices is enormous, and many use cases have yet to be imagined. And, each of those use cases will have different requirements, resulting in a spectrum of IoT devices and deployment types. But, at the heart of it all, we need to find ways to maximize functionality while minimizing power like never before.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HUS buy Location System
The Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa HUS acquires positioning system for hospitals and other joint municipal facilities and their maintenance.
The system aims to facilitate medical equipment, beds and other mobile devices, respectively, finding hospitals. Tracking system enables you want to speed up your search for medical devices, to reduce their losses and increase utilization.
In addition, the positioning system is used for the benefit of the management of medical equipment or other similar equipment inventory. The system should take advantage of HUS built by functional positioning the principle of a wireless base station network.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/hus-ostaa-paikannusjarjestelman-6059211
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM floats power-sipping Mali-470 GPU for Internet of Things things
50% reduced energy claim
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/20/arm_launches_new_mali470_gpu_claiming_50_energy_efficiency/
ARM has launched the Mali-470 GPU for Internet of Things (IoT) with – the firm claims – half the power consumption of the Mali-400.
The Mali-470 targets wearables but could be used in lower-end smartphones as it supports OpenGL ES 2.0 – necessary for Android Wear.
Mali is best paired with the Cortex-A7s and A53s for optimal performance with ‘leccy-dieting System on Chip (SoC) devices, according to ARM.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Another go with MIPS IoT: Imagination unveils new Creator board
Ci40 will feature hardware multithreading
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/20/imagination_technologies_creator_ci40/
Imagination Technologies has announced the Creator Ci40, a development board for Internet of Things (IoT) projects, based on the MIPS interAptiv CPU.
Imagination Technologies is best known for its PowerVR GPUs, which are licensed to mobile and SoC (System on a Chip) vendors including Apple.
In late 2012, the company acquired MIPS, giving it a strong CPU offering alongside its GPU designs, though marketing MIPS in a mobile market dominated by ARM and Intel is challenging.
Last year Imagination released the Creator Ci20 development board, to stimulate interest in MIPS development. Unlike the ARM-based Raspberry Pi, the Creator board has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in. The Ci20 has a 1.2GHz dual-core MIPS32 CPU and a PowerVR SGX540 GPU.
Operating system support is set to be revealed on 27th October, and boards will be available from 10th November, according to Imagination’s teaser site. This is likely to include Debian Linux as well as Android.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Orange juices internet of things
Ohh, LoRa!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/22/orange_juices_iot/
French cellular operator Orange has settled on LoRa (Long Range) technology to build a dedicated machine-to-machine network covering all of metropolitan France. It says the network will supplement the company’s existing cellular network and will roll out progressively starting early in 2016.
According the company’s announcement, its low-power, wide-area (LPWA) network runs on the smell of an oily rag and costs mere pennies to run. Another cost advantage is that LPWA uses unlicensed spectrum.
The technology is optimised for sporadic, non-critical communications. This makes it ideal for the internet of things, which is the new holy grail for cellular operators coming to terms with the otherwise shaky economics of running mobile phone networks.
LPWA transmits small packets of data between devices that don’t need to be plugged into the power grid. Orange says this approach is “especially useful for connecting sensors in Smart Cities.”
In addition to the new network, Orange plans to continue developing existing cellular technologies for the internet of things. This includes 2G EC-GSM (extended coverage GSM) standard and 4G cat 0 LTE, PSM (Power Saving Mode) projects
Tomi Engdahl says:
Was founded in Finland: first IoT radio network
Finland has set up the first dedicated radio network the Internet of Things IoT devices. It is a common project for the Espoo-based embedded system design house Espotel and network operator Digita.
The network first step is started in Espoo using Lora based technology (15-20 kilometers range between node and base station outdoors). During October Digita complement the network with new base stations in the metropolitan area. The network allows devices and sensors can advantageously be connected to back-end systems. Digita to build and operate the built its radio network, and Espotel provides network using pilot customers product and service.
Espotel is a development of the IoT-enabled access points, as well as the same network management solution which Digita will be used on its own network. Lower Paavola, according Espotel takes Lora technology to other parts of Europe. The company has delivered Lora platform for, inter alia, Sweden, England and Switzerland.
Semtech presented Lora network a year ago at electronica in Munich.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3484:suomeen-perustettiin-ensimmainen-iot-radioverkko&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
LTE to mobile networks IoT-first technique
The market is running quite a race about how radio technology will IoT IoT billions of devices connected to a network. Research Berg insigth firmly believes that LTE will rise in this race the top of the mobile networks in the race.
Berg Insight, the attached via mobiiliverkkoejn was IoT devices sold in 2020 to about 240 million. Currently, GPRS is still the most common way to connect, for example, M2M modules were. However, LTE technology has already begun to become more common as the most popular connection for already this year.
LTE’s popularity to increase not only the new 0-class technology configuration data, including the recently adopted proposal for a new Internet of Things technology for LTE. NB-IoT a narrow band of IoT supports a very large number of small amounts of data transmitting devices. It tolerates delays very well, enabling a very low-cost drive solutions – therefore IoT nodes – the development of which power consumption is very low.
NB-IoT devices can transfer data inside the normal operator’s LTE traffic. IoT data can also be transferred to the intermediate frequencies between the operator frequency bands (guard band). Moreover, the operator can build a dedicated NB-LTE network, if it has frequencies at their disposal.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3462:lte-sta-mobiiliverkkojen-iot-ykkostekniikka&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
ARM Cortex-M4F based MCU TM4C129E Crypto Connected LaunchPad for IoT applications
(ACTIVE) EK-TM4C129EXL
http://www.ti.com/tool/ek-tm4c129exl
The TM4C129E Crypto Connected LaunchPad evaluation kit is a low-cost platform for ARM® Cortex-M4-based microcontrollers. The kit design highlights the TM4C129ENCPDT MCU with on-chip Crypto acceleration hardware, 10/100 Ethernet MAC and PHY, USB 2.0, hibernation module, motion control pulse-width modulation and a multitude of simultaneous serial connectivity.
The out-of-box demo for the Crypto Connected LaunchPad demonstrates the use of Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer (TLS/SSL) protocol to connect an IoT product to a cloud server securely. The TLS/SSL support is provided by WolfSSL library that uses the TM4C129E MCU’s hardware crypto accelerators
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digital Health of Body, Mind and Community
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328066&
Words, data, sounds and images can be digitized easily, but can medicine be digitized; can health care be transmitted by ones and zeroes?
I recently attended the Health 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley (www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/health-20-presents-the-final-agenda-for-the-9th-annual-fall-conference-2015-300133997.html) where leaders in health care met with innovators and entrepreneurs in the digital realm to find common ground and a common path forward.
Certainly, the digital revolution is coming to health care. And the impact will be as beneficial, and as disruptive, as it has been in music, publishing, the auto industry, and so many other fields.
Everyone involved in heath care in any way—from parents struggling to insure their children, to hospital executives facing closure of their facilities—knows the current system is broken beyond repair. We cannot bend the cost curve, health industry leaders say; we have to break it.
‘Analog’ health care that we’ve known since childhood—of physicals and workups done with needles and stethoscopes—is going digital, even as the need for health care increases due to longer life expectancies.
Numerous issues delayed the transition to digital health, doctor-patient confidentiality, and FDA regulations among others, but it’s happening now and accelerating rapidly.
Physicians must now learn about big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), open source, and analytics. And at the same time, digital engineers have to become familiar with ACA, ACO, EHR, HIPPA and HIMSS.
And looking out only 5-10 years, Artificial Intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and the merging of human and machine intelligence will force us to rethink the very notion of what it means to be alive; to be human; to be conscious. To have a soul?
And in spite of HIPPA’s tight security, what if the data is breached, destroying doctor-patient confidentiality? The entire practice of medicine is based on Trust: only a physician can ask a stranger to disrobe; only surgeons are allowed to cut open another’s body.
There are many issues before us as we begin this epoch-making transition to digital health care. And for everyone involved, whether MD, EE, VC or retiree, it’s the first day of school.
But to fulfill the promise of digital health care fully, it is necessary to go beyond re-active cures and prevention practices, to the pro-active practice of wellness.
And it is here that the traditional notion of ‘health care’ opens up to a much wider vista.
The ultimate success of the merging of digital technology and health care depends on the creation of a truly holistic approach to medicine; one that goes beyond curing and preventing, to living a healthy life in a healthy society.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Network Enabled Servo Dead Bolt
Using an Arduino Yun to monitor WiFi for my cellphone and unlock my dead bolt with
https://hackaday.io/project/8112-network-enabled-servo-dead-bolt
The basic idea is to have an Arduino Yun ping the local IP addresses of my phone to see if I’m home. With this, I can establish a set of events or settings based on my presence. Step one is having a door that can unlock itself based on certain criteria. (i.e. I’m home, I email it, it’s a certain time of day, RFID, etc.)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bluetooth Thermometer Minds Your Meats
http://hackaday.com/2015/10/21/bluetooth-thermometer-minds-your-meats/
The summer may have come to a close here in the USA, but any time of the year is a good time for grilling. In the colder weather, it’s a drag to have to stay near the hot grill to keep an eye on your burgers and franks. [Eric Ely] thought it would be smarter to have a meat thermometer that sent his phone the current reading via Bluetooth.
Instead of starting from scratch, [Eric] took an off the shelf electronic thermometer and removed its temperature probe (which was a thermistor). The hardware used an off the shelf Bluetooth board with a companion battery board and prototype board
The software (using Node.js and C) is available on Github. The C program reads the temperature and pushes it out using JSON. Node.js provides a server that [Eric] can hit with his phone’s Web browser.
Bluz Grill Thermometer © GPL3+
https://www.hackster.io/eely22/bluz-grill-thermometer-40885a
Bluz powered probe thermometer to stream temperature data to your smartphone. Never dry out your steaks or chicken again!
Tomi Engdahl says:
EMW3165 WiFiMCU Wireless WiFi Development Board Using Lua
http://www.banggood.com/EMW3165-WiFiMCU-Wireless-WiFi-Development-Board-Using-Lua-p-1007187.html?p=27131452996820140438
WiFiMCU is developed based on EMW3165 by Headquarters EMW3165. Run the Lua script directly; operate hardware resource; achieve product prototypes. EMW3165 is a low-power embedded WiFi module, which is developed by the Shanghai MXCHIP Technology Co., Ltd. It incorporates a WiFi RF-Chip and a microcontroller based on STM Cortex-M4. The WiFi module includes a “self-hosted” WiFi network library and application components. In addition, it also provides 2M bytes of out-chip flash, 512K bytes of on-chip flash, 128K bytes of RAM, and a rich peripheral resources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Loud About IoT: LoRa Takes Over Sigfox’ Noise says Bouygues
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328086&
Early October, Sigfox was announcing its planned expansion in the Middle East and Africa (MEA), opening an office in Dubai to manage its network rollout in the region. This was following up on a partnership announcement, a week before, with EI Towers and Nettotter to claim the Italian territory. Prior to that, several Sigfox-based IoT network roll outs had been announced in major European countries but also in the US and Russia, securing high points for its gateways and business partnerships to promote its connectivity services.
The French startup boasts its IoT connectivity solution is currently deployed in nine countries (Italy will be the tenth) and registering 5 million devices for which it manages the data through a dedicated cloud service.
It has announced that its network will be installed in 10 major U.S. cities by Q1 2016
Meanwhile, issuing LoRa Technology land grab statements at pretty much the same frequency, Camarillo headquartered Californian company Semtech (which acquired LoRa Technology through its acquisition of French startup Cycleo SAS) is rallying telecom operators around the Lora Alliance, officially announced at Mobile World Congress early this year.
Lately, Semtech boasted that international telecom operator Orange will use its LoRa RF technology for a low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN) scheduled to deploy in the first quarter of 2016 for “smart city” applications across France. This was after a pilot testing with more than 30 partners in Grenoble, France.
The company also struck a partnership with Russian network operator The Lace Company to deploy a LoRa RF technology-enabled IoT network covering more than a dozen major cities in Russia
Earlier, Semtech had struck a deal with network as a service (NaaS) provider Senet to cover the USA, with aggressive deployment goals.
Discarding all technical and marketing claims, and assuming the company had tested both, EETimes Europe asked Bouygues Telecom what made it tick for LoRa versus Sigfox.
“Very early on, we got interested in these low data rate IoT networks” admitted Franck Moine, IoT Marketing Services Manager at Bouygues Telecom. “We’ve been offering M2M connectivity to our customers for a long time, based on SIM card-enabled GSM modules. But for many of our customers, the form factor and power consumption of GSM modules were limiting factors or would simply not match their market needs for very low power very low data rates IoT communications. Hence, many applications were simply not addressable with our GSM solutions. So back in 2012/2013, we set out to map alternative technologies and evaluate them”, he recalls.
“We’ve looked at contenders such as LoRa, Sigfox, Neul, all from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. LoRa and Sigfox looked the most market-ready”
“we noticed a better service continuity using LoRa”
“Outdoor, penetration would be pretty much equal for both technologies, but indoor, LoRa really made the difference”
“Another important feature for us was bidirectional data communication and geolocation, Sigfox doesn’t support it”,
“On the other hand, Semtech is like the Qualcomm of IoT, with several foundries offering LoRa chips under license, this makes our customers more serene. They can choose a thrusted third party to manage AES128-level encryption keys for their devices and enable different accesses. There can be a key for the network operator to transmit the data, but also a separate key to decipher the payload at the application level, only for the company running the application” explained Moine.