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:
Be afraid, Apple and Samsung: Huawei’s IoT home looks cheaper and better
At least on paper – and that’s assuming it gets here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/16/huawei_iot_home_is_pretty_neat/
Apple and Samsung can start worrying now. Huawei has unveiled its IoT strategy and the extent of its ambitions. Amongst the highlights are a TV kit that provides latest-generation Apple TV functionality, with Siri-like voice navigation through content.
That will be available for around £30 (Y226), or one fifth of the price of Apple’s offering. However, Huawei’s version supports 4K video out, and a memory card slot, unlike Apple’s, and is much smaller: – the “set top box” part is around the size of a wallplug.
The strategy is based on a stack of open source code and protocols, silicon and cloud support, and all that on its own might not sound much.
Yet in China, as CCS Insight’s Ben Wood pointed out here recently, a working consumer IoT ecosystem can rapidly scale to hundreds of millions of real users, while the manufacturer refines it, and decides how to unleash it on mature Western markets.
And apparently that’s exactly what Huawei plans to do.
An engineering-led IoT
As you’d expect from Huawei, the IoT strategy is engineering-based, rather than marketing-based, taking standard products, stuffing an http server inside, and rebadging them.
The Huawei stack includes the tiny, 10kb microkernel that Huawei announced in May.
“LiteOS can be simultaneously activated (across all devices) in about 700ms, it consumes little power and only needs micro amperage,” said Honor’s George Zhou. Rival embedded systems take longer to wake up, which is useless for a CCTV monitoring example: “We cannot even capture the backside of the passer by”.
There’s also a protocol, with an SDK coming next year, called HiLink: described as a “unified language for the home appliance.” You’ll be able to work with an SDK later in 2016. Examples include smart configuration, so if you need to change the password on a “HiLink Inside” network, all the devices on the network will be updated. Network will devices will have “five layers of security”, Zhou said, such as Account ID, “transmission on the access, and on the chipset.” Which is much needed – although Huawei/Honor needs to make a commitment to keep them updated.
The HiLink-capable products unveiled include a fast new router, with “Nordic design”, for around £30, and a powerline Ethernet setup for around £15, around the size of a travel AC adapter, or matchbox. But the most eye-catching was the China-only smart TV box
Huawei/Honor would give no timeframe on when the setup would reach the West – it needs both Western partners for the content, and for the voice recognition.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smart Sensor Technology Monitors Bee Health and Global Pollination
http://www.eeweb.com/blog/eeweb/smart-sensor-technology-monitors-bee-health-and-global-pollination
Honey bees have throughout history been a keystone species, pollinating an estimated 70 percent of all plants and underpinning some 30 percent of the global food supply. Because the viability of beehives is a critical predictor of the planet’s future health and agricultural sustainability, reports of a precipitous decline in the number of colonies around the world have stirred considerable alarm.
Reading Beehives
Researchers understand that any meaningful response to these environmental changes and potentially related threats will first require analyzing conditions within bee colonies. The challenge is, of course, that honey bees are extremely protective of their hives and virtually impossible to monitor at night or during inclement weather.
The Solution
The students used as their starting point Waspmote, a modular hardware sensor platform developed by Libelium that can connect any sensor network and wireless technology to any cloud platform. The UCC team integrated gas and hive condition sensors, ZigBee radios, 3G and GSM communications to look at the impact of carbon dioxide, oxygen, temperature, humidity, chemical pollutants and airborne dust levels on the honey bees.
“If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left,” a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein once warned. “No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
What neither Einstein nor anyone else could not predict was the use of smart technology to integrate beehive sensors and digest the data they collect. Such platforms have a critical role to play not only in ensuring pollination but, ultimately, in monitoring, understanding and managing precious global resources of all kinds.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ZWIR4512
http://www.zmdi.com/zwir4512
The ZWIR4512 enables secure low-power wireless IPv6 communication for sensors and small devices. ZMDI provides a user-programmable, royalty-free 6LoWPAN stack with mesh routing capability with the ZWIR4512. 6LoWPAN is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard to build wireless, low-power IP-based sensor and device networks. These networks can easily be integrated into existing information technology infrastructure or can operate autonomously.
Secure communication is provided by standard-compliant implementations of the Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) protocol suite and the Internet Key Exchange Protocol version 2 (IKEv2), which enable highly secure end-to-end communication, including over unsecure network nodes.
The module is powered by an ARM(R) Cortex™ M3 (trademark of ARM, Ltd.) microcontroller and provides a rich set of GPIO and peripheral interfaces. Up to 192kB of flash memory and 32kB of RAM are available for the user application. Different low-power modes are provided to save energy in battery-operated devices. The modules provide superior radio properties without the need for complicated external RF design.
Two modulation schemes
BPSK (20kBps EU, 40kBps US)
O-QPSK (100kBps EU, 250kBps US)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Medical, Mining, Mousetraps, and More at Designers of Things
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328494&
UBM’s recent Designers of Things (DoT) Conference in San Jose highlighted the work, not only of materials and components suppliers, but of the makers of innovative products from around the world.
Dedicated to the potential of wearable technology, 3D printing, and the Internet of Things, the show featured some of the brightest ideas in the arena of Internet-enabled products.
More: http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=279373&dfpPParams=ind_184,industry_consumer,industry_medical,kw_cloud-computing,kw_42,aid_279373&dfpLayout=article
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microchip unleashes Bluetooth Low Energy lineup
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4441015/Microchip-unleashes-Bluetooth-Low-Energy-lineup?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20151216&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20151216&elq=a47d10684b0649cf95da537367395602&elqCampaignId=26180&elqaid=29934&elqat=1&elqTrackId=d8d83d54224f4c31a48e09e633d3669e
Qualified to the Bluetooth 4.2 standard, the IS1870 and IS1871 RF ICs, along with the BM70 module, expand Microchip’s Bluetooth LE portfolio. All three products carry both worldwide regulatory and Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) certifications, allowing designers to leverage the low power consumption and simplicity of Bluetooth LE connectivity in a diverse range of IoT and Bluetooth beacon applications.
These devices include an integrated, certified Bluetooth 4.2 firmware stack and achieve up to 2.5 times faster data-transfer speeds and greater connection security with government-grade (FIPS-based) secure connection support. Data is sent and received over the Bluetooth link using transparent UART mode, allowing the parts to work with any processor or microcontroller that has a UART interface. The BM70 module also supports standalone host-less operation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
End-to-end IoT kits emerging
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/eye-on-iot-/4441042/End-to-end-IoT-kits-emerging?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20151216&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20151216&elq=a47d10684b0649cf95da537367395602&elqCampaignId=26180&elqaid=29934&elqat=1&elqTrackId=dd5aa0759f644feeacfba017195e1c95
As the IoT emerges, vendors supplying products and services to assist design teams have been going at it piecemeal. Chip vendors highlight how their chip can solve endpoint device design and/or gateway design issues while cloud service vendors talk about their computing capabilities. Now, however, full end-to-end design support is emerging.
An Internet of Things product or service ultimately consists of multiple parts. One is the end device that gathers data and/or executes control functions on the basis of its communications over the Internet. Another is the gateway or network interface device. Sometimes that is as simple as an off-the-shelf WiFi router when the end device has WiFi connectivity. In other applications the gateway acts as a bridge between the IP-based Internet and another, completely different, networking approach.
Once on the Internet, the IoT system needs a cloud service to interact with. This interaction can be as simple as storing information in a database for other programs to work with, or as complex as a control system that analyzes the incoming data and in response issues commands for the end device to execute. Then, there is the human-machine interface (HMI) that allows users to interact with the system. This HMI can be part of the cloud service’s internal network, be available as an external web browser interface, and/or a mobile app that interacts with a cloud service’s application server.
Sponsor video, mouseover for sound
So far, most of the vendors selling into the IoT development network are offering only one or two of these parts directly, although they may also have developed an ecosystem of third-party partners to supply one or more of the remaining pieces. This arrangement leaves either the development team or the end user with the job of gathering all the parts together and ensuring their interoperability as well as the security of each link in the chain. It also leaves IoT systems dependent upon multiple vendors for their continued operation, forcing development teams designing an IoT device to trust that their component vendors have chosen their third-party partners wisely.
Alternatives to this disjointed design are arising, however.
Mentor does not offer MCUs, but it does offer the software and tools needed to turn that MCU into a secure IoT end device.
Other companies are also getting into the end-to-end IoT design support business, although to different degrees. Intel’s IoT platform, for instance, includes the MCUs and, in conjunction with its Wind River subsidiary, the development tools and software for the end device design. Intel’s McAfee subsidiary provides the network security, and Wind River the network software. Some other components come from third-party providers, however.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Went wrong – Philips withdrew its boycott decision because of criticism
Supports the protest, at least sometimes. Philips eliminated Wisdom Light referred Hubs support of other manufacturers to cheaper lamps. Now the company has withdrawn its decision to fuss with amazement.
Lights from other manufacturers are significantly cheaper than the original Philips Hue lights. The company justified the change compatibility problems.
Philips has now withdrawn its decision and published an opinion. “We made a change in good faith, but underestimate its impact,” the company says.
Underestimated effect refers to other manufacturers cheaper bulbs obtained from customers who use feedback.
“We have decided to cancel the software update, so the rest of the lamps operate as usual Hue-system,” the company explains.
Loss of support was a nasty surprise to those who had obtained the Hue-start package to expand the system with less-expensive extra lights.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/pieleen-meni-philips-perui-kritiikkia-saaneen-boikottipaatoksen-6240106
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix has created ‘smart’ socks that sense when you fall asleep and pause the show you’re watching
http://uk.businessinsider.com/netflix-socks-turn-off-the-show-when-you-fall-asleep-2015-12?r=US&IR=T
Falling asleep during a Netflix binge can be annoying.
Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you are, when you wake up, you might have no idea where you fell asleep in the episode. You might not even remember which episode you were in altogether.
Fortunately Netflix has a cheeky solution to your problems: “Netflix socks.” Netflix has built socks that read your body to understand when you fall asleep, and then automatically pause your Netflix show.
Netflix not only built the prototype of these socks, but it also actually put some totally do-able DIY plans online so you can make your own.
Netflix based the sleep-detection system in the socks off of “actigraphy,” which uses an accelerometer to tell when you’ve stopped moving for a while (presumably when you’ve fallen asleep).
Go ahead.
Watch yourself to sleep.
Netflix socks pause your show automatically, so you never miss a moment.
http://makeit.netflix.com/netflix-socks
Tomi Engdahl says:
Z-Wave, Zigbee Upgrade IoT Efforts
Partnerships to tap as BLE, Wi-Fi expand
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328499&
Amid a daily flow of smart home products riding Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, two pioneers of the Internet of Things are expanding their platforms and partnerships. Sigma Designs will upgrade security of its Z-Wave home network in February, about the time the rival Zigbee Alliance starts certification for its unified version 3.0 specification.
The Z-Wave Security 2 framework will start a beta test in February of version 6.7 if its software development kit. It adds support for Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman keys and TLS 1.1 for secure tunneling of its hybrid Z-Wave/IP (ZIP) traffic.
The capabilities plug holes for man-in-the-middle and other attacks. They also enable secure multicasting and support for multiple security domains.
For its part, the Zigbee Alliance ratified its 3.0 spec and aims to start certifying products for it in February, about a quarter later than originally planned when the spec was announced a year ago.
Version 3.0 rolls six Zigbee specs into a common applications platform, including profiles for home and building automation, LED lighting, healthcare, retail and smart energy. It does not include Smart Energy 2, a smart meter profile based on IP and RF4CE, a version of Zigbee geared for remote controls.
The various Zigbee specs were developed “when the market looked like it wanted silo-ed applications, but we may have been wrong or the market may have changed, so now we are bringing all that into a single interoperable ecosystem,”
Separately, the EnOcean Alliance will bring its library of about 200 application profiles for 900 MHz energy harvesting devices to Zigbee networks.
More partnerships are ahead for both Zigbee and rival Z-Wave, driven both by a desire to simplify a fragmented IoT space and to remain competitive. Although ZWave and Zigbee helped pioneer the smart home and building space more than a decade ago, but efforts based on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 6LoWPAN are poised to surpass them.
The rival Bluetooth Special Interest group, for example, is expected to release next year support for mesh networks as well as higher data rates in an effort one proponent described as “taking a bigger bite out of the IoT.”
Z-Wave supports lower latencies and power consumption than Bluetooth and WiFi, said Raoul Wijgergangs, vice president of the Z-Wave group at Sigma Designs.
“I see Bluetooth Smart mesh being a separate ecosystem from the traditional point-to-point Bluetooth of earbuds,” said Walters of the Zigbee Alliance. “There will be more competition, but the market is growing faster than the number of technology solutions, and success floats all boats,” he said.
For its part, Z-Wave aims to strike a collaboration with one of the leading IoT application framework platforms by next summer and another before the end of 2016, said Wijgergangs. An upgrade to Z-Wave’s core technology is also in the works, but he declined to provide specifics.
Zigbee struck a deal in April to support Thread, but Zigbee members are still evaluating Thread and the alliance has no time line for an integrated offering.
Separately, Zigbee will roll out a new spec for smart cities in February based on the 802.15.4g standard for metro networks. It will compete with an already crowded field of 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz networks from Sigfox, the LoRa Alliance, Ingenu and others
Z-Wave is smaller but still substantial with as many as 50 million nodes deployed and about 11 million gateways
Meanwhile crowdfunding sites and hardware accelerators are kicking out startups at a regular clip, typically companies building IoT devices that ride Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Yet another candidate for IoT communications: Weightless-P
f you develop products for the future of the Internet of Things, there is beginning to be so much potential radio techniques, that the head goes dizzy. The latest addition is an open standard Weightless-P. It promises to revolutionize the course of power consumption and range of IoT devices.
Weightless-P is Weightless SIG announced by an open standard, which operates at frequencies below one gigahertz. They include a 12.5 kilohertz narrow channels in either time or frequency division. The data rate can be anything up to 200 bits hundred kilobits per second.
According to the organization protocol is far simpler than, for example, 3GPP approved by NB-IoT.
Nodes and development cards will be expected to be in the market already during the first quarter of 2016.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3766:taas-uusi-ehdokas-iot-linkiksi&catid=13&Itemid=101
More information: http://www.weightless.org/about/weightlessp
Tomi Engdahl says:
Isolated switch targets low-voltage IoT designs
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4441041/Isolated-switch-targets-low-voltage-IoT-designs?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20151217&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20151217&elq=d12dd8e834824a76b07718f8c0c94273&elqCampaignId=26204&elqaid=29946&elqat=1&elqTrackId=c0afb44b693d40db84bb57facbc0ede2
Housed in a low-profile QFN package, the TS13101 from Semtech is a galvanically isolated, latching 60-V power switch with bidirectional blocking. Its dimensions of 4×4×0.8 mm enable the switch to be used in compact IoT applications, such as smart thermostats, security, and home automation systems.
he TS13101 is part of the Neo-Iso family of power switches for controlling resistive and inductive loads, while protecting sensitive system circuitry from voltage surges and transients. Neo-Iso devices serve as intelligent replacements for electromechanical relays, providing fault and diagnostic data to the microcontroller. Not only do they deliver a faster turn-on/turn-off time of 25 µs, but also a field-tested life cycle that is orders of magnitude higher than electromechanical technologies. In addition, they are much smaller than bulky electromechanical relays.
The TS13101 isolates the microcontroller from the load that is being switched with scalable isolation voltage between 100 V and 10 kV.
http://www.semtech.com/power-management/neo-iso-isolated-power-switches/ts13101/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Arduino 32-bit board offers WiFi connectivity
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4441038/Arduino-32-bit-board-offers-WiFi-connectivity?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20151217&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_analog_20151217&elq=d12dd8e834824a76b07718f8c0c94273&elqCampaignId=26204&elqaid=29946&elqat=1&elqTrackId=d8ce4ae2c54d4fcfbaa83da8fbbe586c
inShare
Save Follow
PRINT
PDF
EMAIL
With built-in WiFi capability, the MKR1000 development board from Arduino provides a simple way to add wireless connectivity to IoT battery-powered projects. The Arduino MKR1000, also known as the Genuino MKR1000 outside the U.S., combines the functionality of the Arduino Zero and the Arduino WiFi Shield in a tiny form factor.
The new board is powered by an Atmel ATSAMW25 SmartConnect module, which comprises a SAMD21 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0+ MCU, an ATWINC1500 2.4-GHz IEEE 802.11 b/g/n WiFi system-on-chip, and an ATECC508 CryptoAuthentication IC. It also furnishes a single 1×1 stream PCB antenna.
The Arduino MKR1000 runs on a 3.7-V, 700-mAh (minimum) lithium polymer battery or an external 5-V power supply. An onboard charging circuit will charge the LiPo battery while the board is running on external power, switching from one source to the other automatically.
The MKR1000 will be available for purchase in February 2016.
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoMKR1000
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gooee announces worlds first Enterprise IoT Gateway for Lighting & Sensing
https://gooee.com/gooee-announces-worlds-first-enterprise-iot-gateway-for-lighting-sensing
Gooee, the original ‘Full-Stack’, smart lighting ecosystem provider, is today announcing it’s multi-protocol Enterprise IoT Gateway, designed specifically for Lighting and Sensing devices and connect them to Gooee’s cloud platform.
“In the early stages of the eco-system development, we initially planned to work with existing gateway devices but were unable to find anything that not only offered us the interoperability the market needs through multi-protocol support, but also had key features that we felt were essential for our platform to run efficiently and reliably” commented Simon Coombes, CTO at Gooee.
“Ensuring we can handle the wide range of environments and use cases is critical, so features such as having offline capabilities with a local secure API, a distributed multi-gateway environment and a localized app-container means we offer our customers the performance and functionality typically found in costly on-premise hardware” he added.
In addition to the cloud integrated OS features, the gateway will support multiple communication protocols; Bluetooth, Zigbee and WiFi (for commissioning) chips for wireless communication, along with both an Ethernet and Serial port, enabling the device to provide maximum interoperability options with other on-premise or cloud-based services. The gateway will also be running Gooee’s Bluetooth Mesh, due for release in 2016 that is specifically engineered for it’s lighting and sensing end-points and capable of handling the bandwidth needed for the volume of sensing data created through Gooee’s recently announced Sensing ASIC.
Smallest LED lighting sensor includes world’s first IoT Artificial Eye technology
http://gooee.staging.wpengine.com/smallest-led-lighting-sensor-includes-worlds-first-iot-artificial-eye-technology
Tomi Engdahl says:
Z-Wave, ZigBee Upgrade IoT Efforts
Partnerships to tap as BLE, Wi-Fi expand
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328499&
Amid a daily flow of smart home products riding Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, two pioneers of the Internet of Things are expanding their platforms and partnerships. Sigma Designs will upgrade security of its Z-Wave home network in February, about the time the rival ZigBee Alliance starts certification for its unified version 3.0 specification.
The Z-Wave Security 2 framework will start a beta test in February of version 6.7 if its software development kit. It adds support for Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman keys and TLS 1.1 for secure tunneling of its hybrid Z-Wave/IP (ZIP) traffic.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish company connected microscope to cloud
Centuries of medicine utilized in the analysis microscope pictures is entering a new phase. Finnish company Fimmic using microscopic sections may be digitized and analyzed automatically using machine vision.
The company develops WebMicroscope called virtual microscope, cloud-based software solution for storing, sharing, and analyzing large microscope.
Gigabyte Microscopic images are transferred over the network just about anywhere you want and can be viewed with a suitable situation of the terminal, from smartphones to large interactive touch screens.
“We are the world’s first completely cloud-based microscopy diagnostics approaching the company. Another distinguishing feature is the fact that we support all major file formats from microscope manufacturers, says Fimmicin Kaisa Helminen.
Traditionally manufacturers have sought to protect its position in its own image format.
“Teaching in addition to medical research and drug development are accelerating pace advantage of digital microscopy and the opportunities provided by it. Also, the clinical hospital world is gradually gaining momentum change, ”
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2015/12/17/suomalaisyritys-siirsi-mikroskooppikuvat-pilveen/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zigbee learn how to gather energy
Zigbee Alliance has just ratified the prior 3.0 version. Above all, it is the combination of various application-specific zigbee links to the same standard, but zigbee are also new features. Link learns to collect energy for power IoT devices.
Energy collection in respect of the Zigbee Alliance collaborates with EnOceanin, which has developed a long-term energy survey methods below one gigahertz frequencies. Now EnOcean is working laiteprofilleja 2.4 gigahertz region.
The aim is that the profiles are joined by a new Zigbee 3.0 standard. Technically ready configuration are coming by next summer.
The main objective of the new ZigBee standard is to facilitate the development of IoT devices. The market there are already hundreds of millions of zigbee devices. The technique has been used particularly in the construction and home automation wireless access devices.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3774:zigbee-oppii-keraamaan-energiaa&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
The first IoT message was transferred in the new 4G network
Vodafone, Huawei and u-blox tell succeeded for the first time to transfer data IoT devices in commercial 4G network. This happened NB-IoT technology, which is still in its development phase.
3GPP decided in September that the transmission technology for future IoT networks will NB-IoT (Narrow Band IoT). NB-IoT devices can transfer data to the normal operator’s LTE traffic inside. 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=3771:ensimmainen-iot-viesti-siirtyi-4g-verkossa&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
An ATTiny Bluetooth Board
http://hackaday.com/2015/02/09/an-attiny-bluetooth-board/
Since just about everyone who would be interested in electronics has a decent cellphone now, there’s an idea that we don’t need USB or weird serial adapters anymore. Bluetooth LE is good enough for short-range communication, and there are a ton of boards and Kickstarter projects out there that are ready to fill the need.
[Michah] has built what is probably the lowest-spec and cheapest BTLE board we’ve ever seen. It’s really just an ATTiny85 – a favorite of the crowd that’s just slightly above Arduino level – and an HM-10 Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy module.
The Zero Tiny BLE is a small low cost and low powered embeddable device with an AVR ATTiny85 microcontroller and a Bluetooth 4.0 (Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE) radio.
https://github.com/micahpearlman/zero-tiny-ble
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open Sesame Raspberry Pi Style
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/17/open-sesame-raspberry-pi-style/
[Don] installed an Android tablet into his wife’s vehicle and realized he wanted to allow it to operate and monitor the garage door. His biggest challenge? Meeting the (what he refers to) as the WAF or Wife Acceptance Factor. He decided to use a Web app on a Raspberry Pi, along with a handful of switches and a relay.
The Pi uses two switches to determine the position of the door and relay to trigger the existing garage door opener’s operation button. This simple circuit could serve many different purposes, not just opening a garage door.
The Web app is available on GitHub.
Opening a garage door from the Internet
http://dhowdy.blogspot.fi/2015/10/opening-garage-door-from-internet.html
The code can be found on my GitHub account here: https://github.com/dhowdy/GarageDoor.
Security is accomplished via Apache with ModSSL and basic authentication. The guys at DuckDNS and PortForward have everything that you need to access your Raspberry Pi from the Internet.
Software for the web app to control a garage door
https://github.com/dhowdy/GarageDoor
Tomi Engdahl says:
EDN Hot 100 products of 2015: Wireless & Networking
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4440956/EDN-Hot-100-products-of-2015–Wireless—Networking
Tomi Engdahl says:
Remote PC Power Control Thwarts Button Pushers
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/19/remote-pc-power-control-thwarts-button-pushers/
Pervasive connectivity is a mixed blessing at best, especially when it creates the expectation that we’ll always have access to everything we need. When what you need is on your work or home PC, there are plenty of options for remotely accessing files using your phone. But if your roomie or the cleaning crew powers the machine down, you’ve got a problem – unless you’ve got a way to remotely power the machine back up.
As [Ahmad] admits, there are plenty of ways to attack this problem, including Wake-on-LAN. But there’s something to be said for the hardware approach, especially when a Photon can be had for $20.
How to turn on your computer from anywhere in the world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDycxqRi47A
This works over the internet, so can work anywhere in the world. This is using the Particle Photon inside the PC switching the pin low in order to turn on the PC and off again. Useful when wanting to access PC remotely. I prefer this over magic packet as it can work over WiFi and you don’t need to forward ports in the router. It is still connected to WiFi even when the case is closed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The IoT and home automation undoubtedly go hand in hand and while there are kits (SmartThings, Insteon, Nexia, etc.) available that can automate homes, they tend to be limited in function and costly. Team IoT’s relay solution isn’t limited to home automation as it makes use of an Arduino (or other dev boards), allowing users to create any number of IoT projects such as an automated feeder for fish tanks. The IoT Relay features four outlets to connect any number of devices and has a universal voltage control (3.3V to 60VDC or 12-120VAC) with a thermal circuit breaker, allowing users to control power safely without damaging their devices. The best part is that it only costs $20, however it doesn’t come with an Arduino so users will have to supply their own.
Source: http://www.edn.com/design/diy/4439431/10-Arduino-based-crowd-funded-projects-that-deserve-a-look?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20151218&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_funfriday_20151218&elq=352c0cbb57664392b0337bf6b93a085e&elqCampaignId=26252&elqaid=29993&elqat=1&elqTrackId=4a74ded1fa10416ea28ec8739e078ff1
Product page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/323002773/revenge-of-the-iot-relay/description
Tomi Engdahl says:
If home energy monitoring is something users are interested in, then they should check out OpenEnergyMonitor’s emonPi, a Raspberry Pi and Arduino open-source home energy and environment monitor. The device uses the RPi (any model) with an Arduino compatible ATmega328 shield to process data collected from various sensors that monitor everything from electrical current use to temperature levels in various areas of the home.
Source: http://www.edn.com/design/diy/4439431/5/10-Arduino-based-crowd-funded-projects-that-deserve-a-look
More:
emonPi: Open-Hardware Raspberry Pi-Based Energy Monitor
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openenergymonitor/emonpi-open-hardware-raspberry-pi-based-energy-mon
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT in Healthcare: Facing the Biggest Hurdles
http://www.techonline.com/electrical-engineers/education-training/tech-papers/4440181/IoT-in-Healthcare—Facing-the-Biggest-Hurdles?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_review_20151218&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_review_20151218&elq=079ed4e9f98c4e76838075b06185fc39&elqCampaignId=26249&elqaid=29991&elqat=1&elqTrackId=dccae861cb2841c49239e2dee6f499ca
As the medical industry evolves with more sophisticated and advanced techniques to cater to the human life span and ailments associated with it, concepts like IoT are having a profound impact on its comprehensive evolution. However, with the deepening impact of IoT coming forth, daunting challenges arise in implementing and integrating it with the core medical ecosystem. Medicine and healthcare is a big scattered puzzle and IoT finds effective usage in each block of the larger puzzle. The challenge is to bring each piece together in a functionally constructive form. This white paper talks about all such challenges in greater detail and suggestive ways in which these challenges can be dissolved by the IoT tech community at large.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Arduino and Genuino 101 Available in the Arduino Stores
https://blog.arduino.cc/2015/12/17/arduino-and-genuino-101-available-in-the-arduino-stores/
We’re very excited to announce that starting today Arduino 101* (USA only) and Genuino 101 (Outside USA) made in collaboration with Intel, are available for purchase exclusively on the Arduino Stores at the price of $30/€28,65 (+ tax).
Arduino 101 and Genuino 101 are the ideal successor of the Uno featuring a 32-bit Intel® Quark™ microcontroller for minimal power consumption, 384 kB of flash memory, 80 kB of SRAM (24 kB available for sketches), an integrated DSP sensor hub, Bluetooth Low Energy radio, and 6-axis combo sensor with accelerometer and gyroscope. You’ll be able to create projects with great features like recognising gestures and controlling your phone over Bluetooth connectivity — all without needing additional hardware.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Next Generation Wireles LED Lighting Solution
http://www.eeweb.com/news/next-generation-wireles-led-lighting-solution
GreenPeak Technologies announced the launching of its wireless LED Lighting solution, a low-cost ambient lighting application based on the new GreenPeak GP651 communication chip that can support various ZigBee and IEEE 802.15.4 communication protocols.
GreenPeak’s wireless lighting solution can combine LED lights with smart ambient applications, giving residents the creative freedom to create lighting scenes that match mood and function. The solution supports 1- , 2- or 4-channel LED bulbs, allowing bulb manufacturers to build products which will give residents the ability to dim a bright LED bulb into warm white or to create a more vivid colorful scene. Settings and time schedules can be controlled by a Smart Home system, a smart phone or even a basic wireless switch.
Controlling your home with a wireless LED Lighting solution makes it smarter, more secure, more comfortable and even more fun. Lights can intensify gradually when waking up or can gracefully dim in the evenings.
GreenPeak’s wireless LED Lighting solution is built on the GP651 chip, supporting the IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee wireless communication standards. “The GP651 chip enables the support of multiple protocols making it a future-proof and protocol-agnostic solution,” says Cees Links, founder and CEO of GreenPeak Technologies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Thread’s Killer App?
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328525&
These Thread devices to be demonstrated at CES can’t actually send commands to each other, unless they speak the same language. So, which application layer will each of those Thread products be using?
Every time the electronics industry rolls out new technologies, the inevitable question is: “What’s the killer app?”
The killer app question is what many vendors, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT) market, have struggled to answer. This is largely because on the home front alone, IoT covers such a broad spectrum — ranging from door locks, thermostats, light bulbs and tablets to set-tops and smart TVs.
In a recent interview with EE Times, Skip Ashton, vice president of software at Silicon Labs, said, “Yeah, I get that question a lot.”
Quizzed about the killer app for Thread (an IP-based networking protocol for smart household devices) earlier this week, Chris Boross, president of the Thread Group, paused for a moment and answered, “It’s a bit broad.”
What makes Thread a killer is, he explained, “we can bring together a lot of different devices, put them together on the same network and have them talk one another.”
Can you be more specific?
When pressed, Boross said, “You’ll see the demonstration of many Thread devices — such as ceiling fans, thermostats and smoke detectors — connected on the same network, communicating on a show floor” at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month.
OK. Fair enough. See you at CES.
But wait.
These Thread devices you’re showing at CES, although connected on the same mesh network using the same Thread networking protocols, can’t actually send commands (to perform certain functions) to each other, unless they speak the same language — on the same application layer. Is that right?
So, which application layer will each of those Thread products — scheduled for unveiling at the CES — be using? Is each device deploying its own proprietary application layer?
“No, actually we’ve developed a simple, ‘one-off’ application layer for quick demonstration purposes,” said Boross.
Half truth?
Tomi Engdahl says:
World’s Smallest Bat Detector
There are more bats around than you think!
https://hackaday.io/project/8353-worlds-smallest-bat-detector
Most bats navigate at night by echolocation, sending out ultrasonic pings to get a picture of the world around them. This device detects those pings.
The bat calls are received by the microphone and are amplified with a voltage gain of about 10,000 times. Since the reference voltage is about 1.2 volts the LEDs will not light when there are no calls, but when the bat calls the voltage will exceed the forward voltage of the LEDs and light them.
For this project I chose the Knowles SPU0410HR5H MEMS microphone. The response is a bit lumpy and likely drops off somewhat above 80kHz but it is cheap, durable and will work well for this project.
Raspberry Pi Bat Recorder
http://www.afraidofsunlight.co.uk/weather/index.php?page=bat
This project uses a Raspberry Pi and Wolfson Audio Card, with a simple LED and Push Button wired to the GPIO. A home-made ultrasound microphone is plugged into the headphone socket of the Wolfson card.
Update (March 2015): A new Bat Call Recorder is shown below using a Raspberry Pi B+ and Cirrus Logic audio card. This new recorder also contains a GPS module and Temperature / Humidity Sensor, to allow location, temperature and humidity to be logged when each new recording is started. This version integrates the recording button and microphone into a single case, making it much more portable than my previous version. A second LED has been added to show when the GPS has a fix.
Sonograms for bat call analysis are created using Python and Matplotlib.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi : LiV Pi Indoor – Air Quality Monitor
https://hackaday.io/project/2636-raspberry-pi-liv-pi-indoor-air-quality-monitor
LiV Pi is an indoor air quality monitor based on Raspberry Pi. LiV is open source. LiV reports measurements using IM (XMPP/Jabber).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi: Jabber/XMPP client
https://hackaday.io/project/4849-raspberry-pi-jabberxmpp-client
This is about using an Instant Messaging client (Pidgin, ChatSecure, etc…) to send and receive messages to/from your Raspberry Pi.
Currently LiV Pi implements the following commands: report, website, alarms, set, reset.
You can find detailed info on LiV Pi here:
http://www.livpi.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Isolated switch targets low-voltage IoT designs
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4441041/Isolated-switch-targets-low-voltage-IoT-designs?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20151221&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20151221&elq=2fda10a4941644a88432da2492174a11&elqCampaignId=26260&elqaid=30003&elqat=1&elqTrackId=796d2d65413e4294ab05d0f931544d01
Housed in a low-profile QFN package, the TS13101 from Semtech is a galvanically isolated, latching 60-V power switch with bidirectional blocking. Its dimensions of 4×4×0.8 mm enable the switch to be used in compact IoT applications, such as smart thermostats, security, and home automation systems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LoRa sensor network collects volcanic data
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4440998/LoRa-sensor-network-collects-volcanic-data?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20151221&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20151221&elq=2fda10a4941644a88432da2492174a11&elqCampaignId=26260&elqaid=30003&elqat=1&elqTrackId=6b9306ff146c4d05bd2aed37a257ec31
Semtech announced that its LoRa-based long-range wireless sensor network will be used to monitor active volcanoes 24/7 in Japan. The data collected by the network is used to provide volcanic forecasts, ranging from alerts of recent volcanic activity to early warnings of potential eruptions and even immediate evacuations of threatened areas. This application of LoRaWAN technology demonstrates the features and flexibility of the open-source platform and the power of the LoRa Alliance to bring together initiatives across the world.
Semtech’s LoRa RF platform teams the company’s SX1272 transceivers with its LoRa concentrator gateway to create networks with longer ranges and the capacity to handle millions of devices.
http://semtech.com/wireless-rf/lora.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microchip unleashes Bluetooth Low Energy lineup
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/other/4441015/Microchip-unleashes-Bluetooth-Low-Energy-lineup?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20151221&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_productsandtools_20151221&elq=2fda10a4941644a88432da2492174a11&elqCampaignId=26260&elqaid=30003&elqat=1&elqTrackId=880273c9bfec4a24aa30290fb70b57c1
Qualified to the Bluetooth 4.2 standard, the IS1870 and IS1871 RF ICs, along with the BM70 module, expand Microchip’s Bluetooth LE portfolio. All three products carry both worldwide regulatory and Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) certifications, allowing designers to leverage the low power consumption and simplicity of Bluetooth LE connectivity in a diverse range of IoT and Bluetooth beacon applications.
BM70 Bluetooth PICtail/PICtail Plus Board
http://www.microchip.com/DevelopmentTools/ProductDetails.aspx?PartNO=BM-70-pictail
The BM-70-PICtail/PICtail Plus Board is designed to emulate the function of Microchip’s BM70 BLE module. It also enables the customer to evaluate and demonstrate the capabilities of the BM70 BLE module. The board includes an integrated configuration and programming interface for plug-and-play capability. It also provides an integrated test environment for all functions supported in the BM70 BLE module. The development kit includes the BM70BLES1FC2 module and the BM70BLES1FC2 carrier board.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ZigBee 3.0 to Include Energy Harvesting
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328537&
The ZigBee Alliance industry association has said that it will work to combine EnOcean energy harvesting with ZigBee 3.0 to help address a breadth of IoT applications in smart home, smart city and industry 4.0.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet-of-Things Power Meter
https://hackaday.io/project/6938-internet-of-things-power-meter
The second version of the Electricity Usage Monitor, with an ESP8266, OLED screen, SD card for local storage and down-to-minute resolution.
The Internet-of-Things Power Meter (IPM) is a device fixed on top of the regular household power meter that provides detailed information about the electricity usage. Modern power meters have a LED blinking every time a Watt is used, the IPM detects these flashes using a light sensor, counts them, saves the values to an SD card. Later the data is stored to the cloud.
Usually power companies provide very rough electricity usage data, the IPM provides data with a minute resolution. Knowing the household electricity usage allows to extrapolate statistics and can give precise numbers about the costs.
The IPM was made with simplicity of assembly and cost in mind. The device is easy to build, program and cheap to deploy and use. One can basically buy the parts, assemble, program and deploy it without any knowledge about the inner workings, however contribution to the development of this open-source project is welcome and encouraged.
The project is progressing well, it has most of the functionality I wanted:
Counting LED blinks via an interrupt
Internal time keeping
Synchronising date and time with an NTP server
Saving data to an SD card
Outputting data onto a display
Serving HTML pages from the SD card
I want to send the data to Google Spreadsheets, but doing SSL requests is a real pain with the ESP. Apparently it’s possible, but convoluted and needs way too much overhead for my taste. I decided to do things differently: instead of the ESP sending the data to Google Spreadsheets a Google Script fetches the data hourly from the device and updates the spreadsheet itself, no SSL needed, only an additional routing rule on my router.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Electricity usage monitor
https://hackaday.io/project/6193-electricity-usage-monitor
KWh counter that logs and uploads data to the could, based on the TI CC3200 development board.
To measure my electricity usage I decided to build a small system that would count LED blinks on my power meter which indicate the used Wh. It was pretty straight forward system requiring an Internet connected microcontroller to log the data and some sort of sensor that would detect LED blinks on the power meter which is not my property and thus not accessible or modifiable.
The main reason to do this project is to get a better overview of the electricity usage as the house is heated by a heat pump so basically everything works on electricity or other free (thermal solar collector) and renewable sources (stove).
Tomi Engdahl says:
ICCE Presents ‘Internet of Me’
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1328535&
ICCE offers a variety of sessions including security, The Internet of Me, Health & Wellness, AR and Digital Senses.
The ICCE CES International Conference on Consumer Electronics, scheduled right after the International CES trade show in Las Vegas, is the flagship technical meeting and key idea exchange of the I.E.E.E.’s Consumer Electronics Society. Keynotes and tutorials bridge a packed three days of technical sessions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Another Internet Griswold’s Controllable Christmas Lights
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/15/12/22/1455214/another-internet-griswolds-controllable-christmas-lights
For over a decade, Alek’s Controllable Christmas Lights have been a festive online holiday tradition for millions of Internet users world-wide, so it was sadly the end of an era last year, when the Griswold wanna-be hung up his Santa Hat in 2014. But with the “Internet of Things” being the rage these days, it didn’t take long for another Griswold to emerge from the North Pole, or at least pretty darn close to it.
Alek’s Controllable Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease
http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/christmas_webcam
http://www.komar.org/christmas/hoax/
Ken Woods from Fairbanks, Alaska has his house online 24 hours a day with a dozen ON/OFF buttons that Internet users can use to toggle his lights with a click of a mouse.
he uses Amazon EC2 to power it online
Ken & R-E’s Internet Controlled Christmas Lights
http://christmasinfairbanks.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WStiKgiYrnQ
Tomi Engdahl says:
Immersive Theatre via iBeacons with Dustin Freeman
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/18/immersive-theatre-via-ibeacons-with-dustin-freeman/
Combining backgrounds in math and theater, [Dustin Freeman] works on immersive, interactive theatrical experiences. During the day [Dustin] is a Spatial Interaction Engineer at Occipital, who makes the Structure Sensor.
The concept of immersive theatre is similar to ‘escape the room’ challenges and choose your own adventure experiences, in that the participants control the outcome of the experience by making decisions from the information supplied to them.
An immersive, interactive theatre experience requires a physical space for the participants to interact with the environment. To meet this requirement [Dustin] was able to gain access to a bar that is closed during the day. Having periodic access required the immersive theatre setup be done quickly. [Dustin] and [Josh] were able to get this done in under 3o minutes.
Props throughout the set include iBeacons. When an iBeacon is detected by the smartphone there are two pieces of information received: the iBeacons ID and the distance from the smartphone to the iBeacon. These parameters require some creative code, not only to move the story along but to decode information received. The data from a sensed iBeacon is a scalar quantity rather than a vector
This is an interesting use of Bluetooth technology and [Dustin] gave an informative talk that included not only what worked but what failed and how/why it failed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wi-Fi equipped 32-bit Arduino board streamlines cloud-powered embedded app development
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/reader-s-choice-2015/4438571/Wi-Fi-equipped-32-bit-Arduino-Board-streamlines-cloud-powered-embedded-app-development?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20151222&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20151222&elq=4a999721423f4c698e056540336dbe94&elqCampaignId=26239&elqaid=29981&elqat=1&elqTrackId=738c177c4208482db11210b4ff869a7e
Digilent’s chipKIT WiFire board is an awesome little beastie. Powered by Microchip’s latest 32-bit 200 MHz MCU, the Wi-Fi equipped Arduino-compatible platform has been paired with Imagination Technologies’ Flow Cloud service development tools in an effort to make creating cloud-powered embedded applications practical for the average developer. They may well succeed at this not-so-simple task which has eluded several other player in the IoT market.
A smoother on-ramp to the IoT
Although a lot of “experts” have promised that the IoT’s ability to connect low-cost embedded systems to powerful cloud-based services is a “game-changer”, or “(insert today’s hot buzzword)” for smart lighting and other distributed systems, I’ve found there’s usually a wide gap between those promises and a working system. That gap is strewn with obstacles that can be as simple as hardware isn’t up to the task, as frustrating as poorly-integrated design tools, or as confusing as a complex, poorly-documented set of digital rituals an embedded system must follow to access a cloud-based service. My brief road test of the WiFire board and the cloud-app developer resources from Imagination Technologies suggests that it’s well-equipped to avoid the hazards lurking on beside the on-ramp to the IoT which can overtake an unwary embedded system.
Sponsor video, mouseover for sound
WiFire is a pin-compatible variant of an Arduino board which replaces the standard 8-bit AVR MCU with Microchip’s 200 MHz, 32-bit PIC32MZ MCU, and adds an on-board 802.11b/g Wi-Fi module (also from Microchip).
Onward, into the cloud!
WiFire’s primary mission is to serve as a development platform for embedded IoT applications. Microchip-powered chipKITs have been used as a remote node development platform by several cloud services including Exocite, OctoBlue, UbiDots, and Imagination Technologies’ Flow Cloud service. Microchip and ChipKit have made things even easier by partnering with Imagination Tech to make its FlowCloud services and IoT application development technology available on the WiFire platform.
Getting started is pretty straightforward, you can point the PC, Mac or Linux box you’re using to write your code to the FlowCloud Developer site http://flow.imgtec.com/developers or directly download the FlowCloud “Getting Started” app for either an iOS or Android platform. The app enables a mobile device to use its Wi-Fi radio to connect with the WiFire development board and set up the remainder of its configuration parameters.
From there, you use the FlowCloud SDK to create your cloud application from FlowCloud’s modular infrastructure capabilities and underlying services. At present, the available services include:
• Device and user management
• Asynchronous messaging
• Data storage
• Event logging
• International E-wallet payments
• Optional FlowRadio and music services
• A customizable website
The cloud services infrastructure also provides secure asynchronous messaging and end-to-end connection establishment.
The chipKIT WiFire is priced at $79 (U.S.), and can be ordered today from Digilent at http://www.digilentinc.com/wifire.
Users can get started with FlowCloud for the chipKIT WiFire at http://flow.imgtec.com/wifire
Tomi Engdahl says:
Let Alexa Control Your Life; Guide to Voice-Enable Everything
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/26/let-alexa-control-your-life-guide-to-voice-enable-everything/
Let’s face it, automation doesn’t feel quite as futuristic unless you can just say what you want out loud and have the machines flawlessly obey. That is totally possible now — and on the cheap. Well, cheap as far as money goes. It can be an expensive learning curve to get it all working. This will help. [Lindo St. Angel] has put together a guide to navigate voice control of hardware using Amazon’s Alexa SDK.
[Lindo] has broken down the problem into a very manageable example. The Amazon Voice Service (part of ASK) is used for voice recognition and control. Amazon’s Lambda service connects the ASK to your piece of hardware; in this case he’s using a Raspberry Pi as the server. The final step is to connect your hardware to the Pi. [Lindo] is interfacing a keypad-based home automation system with the Pi but the sky’s the limit at this point.
With all the authentication and connectivity laid bare, this is a lot more approachable. The question is no longer can you connect everything to voice control. The question becomes should you give control of everything over to one single online service?
Alexa Lambda Linux (ALL) Reference Design
https://github.com/goruck/all
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet of Things in 5 minutes
Playing with ESP8266, Adafruit.io, and Amazon Echo
https://hackaday.io/project/8958-internet-of-things-in-5-minutes
Turns LED on/off based on “light” feed downloaded from Adafruit.io
Sends Temperature and Humidity to Adafruit.io
HariFun #125 – Internet of Things in 5 minutes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWebdJwr6ks
The ESP8266 has really come a long way since AT-commands.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Home security
Home security project based on atmega and ardunio. MQTT gateway for data gathering.
https://hackaday.io/project/587-home-security
This project should replace standard home security alarms, and in future gather statistics from various sensors.
It consists from one main alarm board with atmega 1284P that has inputs for sensors and outputs to relays. Main board also hosts wiz820io Ethernet for configuration and overview, RFM12B for radio remote nodes, communication module to wired nodes (RS485 protocol), UART for GSM modem, Battery backed up RTC, EEPROM for log, I2C expansion connector, and AC supply and battery monitoring.
Main board has 7 analogue inputs that can recognize different events on sensors. And 5 digital inputs. Inputs can be further expended.
Remote nodes act as authentication units and currently they are set to receive iButtons as keys to arm/disarm the system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi Win10 IoT Intercom
Utilizing the Raspberry Pi to be a video intercom using a USB webcam and IO board
https://hackaday.io/project/8959-raspberry-pi-win10-iot-intercom
My cheap China video intercom failed after only 5 years so instead of buying another I thought I’d make one myself to integrate into my home automation system.
A standard video intercom isn’t connected to anything else and integrating it into a HA system opens up a number of possibilities, as follows:
- Real time video of who is at the gate (or front door)
- See who is at the door on your mobile phone over the internet.
- Two way audio communication
- Video recording & recording time/date of when the bell is pressed
- WhatsApp message when the doorbell is pressed
- Open the gate remotely via the home automation system
- As the letter box is next to the gate, I have a sensor on the flap so when a letter is delivered a WhatsApp message is sent.
- Alert when the letter box is opened.
- Motion detection and video recording for anyone who comes to the gate (even if the bell isn’t pressed)
- Light sensor with IR LEDs so video still works at night
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microchip is first in the world to achieve LoRa Certification
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/other/4441087/Microchip-is-first-to-achieve-LoRa-Certification?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_weekly_20151224&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_weekly_20151224&&elq=ef3d0223d1e44603a871642eccb57fe3&elqCampaignId=26286&elqaid=30037&elqat=1&elqTrackId=34291b553a4b4defb15841922f18ee39
We keep hearing that the IoT is coming with untold billions, maybe trillions of sensors all around, on and in us. A critical component for the IoT system to be a success will be secure bi-directional communication, mobility and localization services. That’s what LoRaWAN™, a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification, will bring. This spec is intended for wireless battery operated Things in a regional, national or global network. This is LoRa Technology. The LoRaWAN standard enables low-data-rate Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) wireless communication with a range of up to 10 miles, a battery life of 10 years, and the ability to connect millions of wireless sensor nodes to LoRaWAN gateways.
The LoRa Alliance exists as an open group of members whose goal is to standardize Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) as they are deployed worldwide to enable the IoT, M2M, smart city and industrial applications.
Microchip Technology Inc., the first in the world to achieve certification for its, announced that its RN2483 LoRa® wireless module indeed passed the LoRa Alliance’s LoRaWAN™ Certification Program. This module was tested independently by Espotel’s accredited test laboratory to meet the functional requirements of the latest LoRaWAN 1.0 protocol specification, for operation in the 868 MHz license-free band. This now enables designers to integrate their end devices into any LoRaWAN network.
Microchip has a beginning portfolio of LoRa products as well as MiWi and Zigbee solutions and is now the “Golden standard” within the LoRaWAN ecosystem.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dream, build, win: Arduino Maker Challenge offers thousands of prizes
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/diy-zone/4441077/Dream–build–win–Arduino-Maker-Challenge-offers-thousands-of-prizes?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_weekly_20151224&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_weekly_20151224&elq=ef3d0223d1e44603a871642eccb57fe3&elqCampaignId=26286&elqaid=30037&elqat=1&elqTrackId=9aa22947d5084b98bab05e1cc0d3cd38
The Maker Challenge will happen in two phases. All it takes to enter Phase I and win a new Arduino board is to pitch your idea. Just show the world an innovative and original IoT application you would like to create using Microsoft Windows 10, Microsoft Azure, and the new Arduino MKR1000 or the Arduino UNO. You can earn bonus points by tapping into the power of Microsoft Azure cloud to capture, analyze, and visualize your data with Azure IoT Suite, Azure IoT Hub, Stream Analytics, and Machine Learning.
Dream big and be original about an application ranging from environmental sensors to gaming, to augmented reality and robotics or drones, and submit your project idea before January 15th, 2016 at 11:59 PM (PT). Arduino will notify the 1000 lucky winners of the MKR1000 by January 22nd, 2016 at 8:00 AM (PT).
The 1,000 winners of Phase I will have the opportunity to complete their project and enter it in the Phase II competition which will award three grand prizes.
All submissions must include Windows 10 and Arduino.cc boards (only).
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Power Strip Lets you Control All Your Holiday Lights
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/27/iot-power-strip-lets-you-control-all-your-holiday-lights/
As IoT devices become more prevalent in the consumer world, how long will it be before it’s cheaper to buy one, than to make one? Definitely not yet, which means if you want your very own IoT power strip — you’ll have to make your own. Good thing it’s not that hard!
[Dev-Lab] came up with this project which allows him to control several outlets with his phone.
The beauty with an IoT device like this is that it doesn’t require any infrastructure besides a WiFi enabled device with an HTTP browser — the ESP8266 module means no server is necessary. An Arduino was used in the project just because it was quick an easy to do.
IoT Power Strip
The device that allows to turn on/off two pairs of the outlet sockets via Web browser through Wi-Fi. Based on ESP8266 and Arduino Mini.
https://hackaday.io/project/8917-iot-power-strip
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bruce Schneier: IoT + DMCA = More Monopolies, Limits On Consumer Choice
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/12/27/1722236/bruce-schneier-iot–dmca–more-monopolies-limits-on-consumer-choice?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
The Atlantic published an article by Bruce Schneier predicting that the IoT will be abused in conjunction with DMCA to make our lives worse instead of better.
How the Internet of Things Limits Consumer Choice
A recent dustup over smart light bulbs illuminates a larger problem.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/internet-of-things-philips-hue-lightbulbs/421884/
In theory, the Internet of Things—the connected network of tiny computers inside home appliances, household objects, even clothing—promises to make your life easier and your work more efficient. These computers will communicate with each other and the Internet in homes and public spaces, collecting data about their environment and making changes based on the information they receive. In theory, connected sensors will anticipate your needs, saving you time, money, and energy.
Except when the companies that make these connected objects act in a way that runs counter to the consumer’s best interests—as the technology company Philips did recently with its smart ambient-lighting system, Hue, which consists of a central controller that can remotely communicate with light bulbs. In mid-December, the company pushed out a software update that made the system incompatible with some other manufacturers’ light bulbs, including bulbs that had previously been supported.
But the story of the Hue debacle—the story of a company using copy-protection technology to lock out competitors—isn’t a new one. Plenty of companies set up proprietary standards to ensure that their customers don’t use someone else’s products with theirs.
To stop competitors just reverse-engineering the proprietary standard and making compatible peripherals (for example, another coffee manufacturer putting Keurig’s codes on their own pods), these companies rely on a 1998 law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA).
Specifically, the DMCA includes an anti-circumvention provision, which prohibits companies from circumventing “technological protection measures” that “effectively control access” to copyrighted works. That means it’s illegal for someone to create a Hue-compatible lightbulb without Philips’ permission
Because companies can enforce anti-competitive behavior this way, there’s a litany of things that just don’t exist, even though they would make life easier for consumers in significant ways.
As the Internet of Things becomes more prevalent, so too will this kind of anti-competitive behavior—which undercuts the purpose of having smart objects in the first place. We’ll want our light bulbs to communicate with a central controller, regardless of manufacturer. We’ll want our clothes to communicate with our washing machines and our cars to communicate with traffic signs.
We can’t have this when companies can cut off compatible products, or use the law to prevent competitors from reverse-engineering their products to ensure compatibility across brands.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Weightless IoT Hardware Virtually Unavailable
http://hackaday.com/2015/12/28/weightless-iot-hardware-virtually-unavailable/
It has been over 2 years since we last mentioned the Weightless SIG and their claims of an IoT open standard chip with a 10 year battery life and 10km wireless range, all at a jaw dropping price of $2 per chip. There was a planned production run of the 3rd gen chips which I would suspect went to beta testers or didn’t make it into production since we didn’t hear anything else, for years.
Recently, a company called nwave began producing dev-kits using the Weightless Technology which you can see in the banner image up top. Although the hardware exists it is a very small run and only available to members of the development team. If you happen to have been on the Weightless mailing list when the Weightless-N SDK was announced there was an offer to get a “free” development board to the first 100 development members.
IoT Open Standard?
IoT projects tend to use WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular, or ZigBee/DigiMesh but those last two are more often seen in industrial applications. Weightless is proposing an “IoT Open Standard” for wireless communication that takes advantage of the unlicensed sub-GHz band in combination with the now unused UHF spectrum (800 MHz to 900 MHz) we once used for terrestrial broadcast television. Weightless plans to use both of these frequency bands as a global communication protocol with base stations mounted to external structures around the globe. The Weightless SIG first started working on this technology in 2011
Is There a Need For technology like Weightless?
The argument goes in both directions quite easily, after all WiFi (802.11) is cheap and readily available. The ability to add cheap WiFi to your project was recently popularized by the Espressif ESP8266 as well as the upcoming offering from Espressif, the ESP32.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Startup Raises Funds for Battery-Less IoT
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1328565&
PsiKick Inc. (Charlottesville, Virginia), a semiconductor startup formed to work on sub-threshold voltage operation wireless circuits, has raised $16.5 million in Series B financing led by Osage University Partners and joined by existing investors.
The startup has designed a proof-of-concept wireless sensor node system-chip using conventional EDA tools and a 130nm mixed-signal CMOS that operates with sub-threshold voltages and opening up the prospect of self-powering Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The company has claimed that its proof-of-concept chip design would consume between 100 and 1000 times less than any comparable chip.
As part of its proof of concept progress PsiKick is working on systems that can scavenge energy from multiple sources including indoor light, RF rectification, thermal gradient and piezoelectric vibration. One such system is a battery-less electrocardiogram (EKG) sensor that supports a 1Mbit per second data rate over 10 meters distance.
Other companies working on sub- and near-threshold operation of ICs include fabless startup Ambiq Micro Inc. (Austin, Texas) and ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England). Ambiq has launched the Apollo line of Cortex-M4F based microcontrollers claiming they offer a 10x reduction compared with other microcontrollers and ARM has been working in R&D on a processor core optimized for operation close to the threshold voltage of CMOS transistors and at clock frequencies of the order of tens of kilohertz.
Leading foundry TSMC has developed a series of processes characterized down to near threshold voltages, such as 0.6V. The ULP family for ultra low power are processes, introduced at the 55, 45, 28nm planar CMOS and the 16nm FinFET nodes.