According to Intel IoT is expected to be a multi-trillion-dollar market, with 50 billion devices creating 44 zettabytes (or 44 trillion gigabytes) of data annually by 2020. But that widely cited 50 billion IoT devices in 2020 number is clearly not correct! Forecast of 50 Billion Devices by 2020 Is Outdated. In 2017 we should be talking about about some sensible numbers. The current count is somewhere between Gartner’s estimate of 6.4 billion (which doesn’t include smartphones, tablets, and computers), International Data Corporation’s estimate of 9 billion (which also excludes those devices), and IHS’s estimate of 17.6 billion (with all such devices included). Both Ericsson and Evans have lowered their expectations from 50 billion for 2020: Evans, who is now CTO of Stringify, says he expects to see 30 billion connected devices by then, while Ericsson figures on 28 billion by 2021.
Connectivity and security will be key features for Internet of Things processors in 2017. Microcontroller (MCU) makers will continue to target their products at the Internet of Things (IoT) in 2017 by giving more focus on battery life, more connectivity of various types, and greater security. The new architectures are almost sure to spawn a multitude of IoT MCUs in 2017 from manufacturers who adopt ARM’s core designs.
ARM will be big. Last year, ARM’s partners shipped 15 billion chips based on its architectures. The trend toward IoT processors will go well beyond ARM licensees. Intel rolled out the Intel Atom E3900 Series for IoT applications. And do not forget MIPS an RISC-V.
FPGA manufacturers are pushing their products to IoT market. They promise that FPGAs solve challenges at the core of IoT implementation: making IoT devices power efficient, handling incompatible interfaces, and providing a processing growth path to handle the inevitable increase in device performance requirement.
Energy harvesting field will become interesting in 2017 as it is more broadly adopted. Energy harvesting is becoming the way forward to help supplement battery power or lose the need for it altogether. Generally researchers are eyeing energy-harvesting to power ultra-low-power devices, wearable technology, and other things that don’t need a lot of power or don’t come in a battery-friendly form factor.
Low power wide area networks (LPWA) networks (also known as NarrowBand IoT) will be hot in 2017. There is hope that f LPWA nets will act as a catalyst, changing the nature of the embedded and machine-to-machine markets as NB-IoT focuses specifically on indoor coverage, low cost, long battery life, and enabling a large number of connected devices. The markets will become a kind of do-it-yourselfers paradise of modules and services, blurring the lines between vendors, users and partners. At the same time for years to come, the market for low power wide area networks (LPWA) will be as fragmented and is already in a race to the bottom (Sigfox, said to be promising costs approaching $1 per node per year). Competing technologies include Sigfox, LoRa Alliance, LTE Cat 1, LTE Cat M1 (eMTC), LTE Cat NB1 (NB-IoT) and other sub-gigahertz options almost too numerous to enumerate.
We are starting to see a battle between different IoT technologies, and in few years to come we will see which are winners and which technologies will be lost in the fight. Sigfox and Lora are currently starting well, but telecom operators with mobile networks NB-IoT will try hit the race heavily in 2017. Vendors prep Cat M1, NB1 for 2017: The Cat M1 standard delivers up to 380 Kbits/second over a 1.4 MHz channel. NB-1 handles up to 40 Kbits/s over 200 kHz channels. Vendors hope the 7-billion-unit installed base of cellular M2M modules expands. It’s too early to tell which technologies will be mainstream and which niche. It could be that cellular NB-IOT was too late, it will fail in the short term, it can win in the long term, and the industry will struggle to make any money from it. At $2 a year, 20 billion devices will contribute around 4% of current global mobile subscription revenues.
New versions of communication standards will be taken into use in 2017. For example Bluetooth 5 that adds more speed and IoT functionality. In 2017, we will see an increase in the number of devices with the new Bluetooth 5 standard.
Industrial IoT to gain traction in 2017. Industrial applications ultimately have the greater transformative potential than consumer products, offering users real returns on investment (ROI) rather than just enhanced convenience or “cool factor”. But the industrial sector is conservative and has been slow to embrace an industrial IoT (IIoT), but is seems that they are getting interested now. During the past year there has been considerable progress in removing many of the barriers to IIoT adoption. A global wide implementation of an IIoT is many years away, of course. The issues of standards and interoperability will most likely remain unresolved for several years to come, but progress is being made. The Industrial Internet Consortium released a framework to support development of standards and best practices for IIoT security.
The IIoT market is certainly poised to grow. A Genpact research study, for instance, indicates that more than 80% of large companies believe that the IIoT will be essential to their future success. In a recent market analysis by Industry ARC, for instance, the projected value of the IIoT market will reach more than $120 billion by 2021. Research firm Markets and Markets is even more optimistic, pegging IIoT growth at a CAGR of 8% to more than $150 billion by 2020. And the benefits will follow. By GE’s estimate, the IIoT will stimulate an increase in the global GDP of $10 to $15 trillion over the next 20 years.
Systems integrators are seeking a quick way to enter the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. So expect to see many plug and play IoT sensor systems unveiled. There were many releses in 2016, and expect to see more in 2017. Expect to see device, connectivity and cloud service to be marketed as one packet.
IoT analytics will be talked a lot in 2017. Many companies will promise to turn Big Data insights into bigger solutions. For industrial customers Big Data analytics is promised to drive operational efficiencies, cut costs, boosting production, and improving worker productivity. There are many IIoT analytic solution and platform suppliers already on the market and a growing number of companies are now addressing industrial analytics use.
In 2016 it was all bout getting the IoT devices connected to cloud. In 2017 we will see increased talk about fog computing. Fog computing is new IoT trend pushed by Cisco and many other companies. As the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves, decentralized, distributed-intelligence concepts such as “fog computing” are taking hold to address the need for lower latencies, improved security, lower power consumption, and higher reliability. The basic premise of fog computing is classic decentralization whereby some processing and storage functions are better performed locally instead of sending data all the way from the sensor, to the cloud, and back again to an actuator. This demands smarter sensors and new wireless sensor network architectures. Groups such as the Open Fog Consortium have formed to define how it should best be done. You might start to want to be able to run the same code in cloud and your IoT device.
The situation in IoT security in 2016 was already Hacking the IoT: As Bad As I Feared It’d Be and there is nothing that would indicate that the situation will not get any better in 2017. A veritable army of Internet-connected equipment has been circumvented of late, due to vulnerabilities in its hardware, software or both … “smart” TVs, set-top boxes and PVRs, along with IP cameras, routers, DSL, fiber and cable modems, printers and standalone print servers, NASs, cellular hot spots, and probably plenty of other gear. IoT world at the moment is full of vulnerable devices, and it will take years to get then replaces with more secure devices. Those vulnerable devices can be used to make huge DDoS attacks against Internet services. The 2016 October 21 cyberattacks on Dyn brought to light how easily many IoT devices can be compromised. I expect that kind of incidents will happen more in 2017 as DDoS botnets are pretty easy to build with tools available on-line. There’s no question that everyone in the chain – manufacturers, retailers and consumers – have to do a better job securing connected devices.When it comes to IoT, more security is needed.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Security Challenges, Opportunities
Vendors see the importance of cybersecurity, but not everyone has gotten the memo yet.
https://semiengineering.com/iot-security-challenge-opportunity/
The specter of cybersecurity is haunting the Internet of Things—or more specifically, the lack of it.
Big companies in information technology and telecommunications have embraced the IoT as a significant business opportunity, and the field is inspiring hundreds of startups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Venture capitalists hungrily eye the IoT, betting on which companies will be the Amazon or Google for the Internet of Things. And Amazon and Google are looking for opportunities in conjunction with the IoT’s expansion by harnessing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other emerging technologies.
Still, the subject that often stops IoT’s happy talk and rampant optimism is security. Can IoT devices be more secure? Of course. Yet not all are willing or able to implement the necessary measures for cybersecurity success in the real world.
IoT World took place just days after the WannaCry ransomware struck more than 200,000 computers around the world, demanding ransom payments in Bitcoin
Ovum, the market research and consulting firm, identified security as one of five key themes in its “2017 Trends to Watch: IoT” report. “IoT security will become a core focus for both enterprises and providers, and will be part of every deployment discussion, as well as coming onto the radar for regulators,” the firm predicted in March.
“There are two sides to this, the consumer IoT and the enterprise IoT,” said Ronan de Renesse, Ovum’s practice leader for consumer technology, told Semiconductor Engineering. “At the enterprise, the awareness of security risks for IoT is much stronger. For consumers, in many cases, it’s not high costs.”
Cybersecurity vendors were out in force at the IoT World exhibit floor, but what was particularly noteworthy is that companies are starting to look at security from different angles. Rambus introduced and demonstrated its IoT Device Management service as part of its CryptoManager security platform. Rubicon Labs of Austin, Texas, and San Francisco touted its IoT identity platform as an alternative to public key infrastructure (PKI) security technology.
“We try to provide security all the way, from the device itself,” said Benjamin Binet, vice president of IoT marketing at Gemalto. “A SIM card, or a MIM card, is a security container.” IoT devices need a secure element, such as a chip or a software container, he added. “We have encryption solutions. We do encrypt data,” he continued. “The market is booming” for encryption, he said.
“Right now, a lot of software is being on-boarded onto devices worldwide.”
There seemed to be fewer consumer-oriented gadgets in the aisles and booths, as compared with the 2016 show, and more presentations of IIoT connectivity, security, and technology this year.
While many security solutions for networking technology are based on the Internet protocol, Winsborrow said that 90% of industrial equipment is not connected with IP. Instead, it relies on Profibus and other non-IP networking. The only way to secure that is with point-to-point security over any network, not just IP-based networks, he said.
Comparisons of IT and operational technology (OT) are a Silicon Valley construct, he noted. “OT is a Silicon Valley term. There is a cultural gap” when it comes to IP-oriented Silicon Valley ventures.
The DDoS attacks on Dyn and the WannaCry ransomware assaults are efforts by nation states with sophisticated tools, according to Winsborrow. They seek out complicated vulnerabilities — unprotected IoT devices
“What’s necessary is to build security into your products,” he said. “That’s a Valley problem. They don’t believe security should be in there.”
But for all of these segments, security is emerging as a key concern.
“As we talk more and more about cybersecurity, there are a lot of compatibility issues,” said Steve Brumer, a partner in 151 Advisors, a global consulting firm. “One crazy thing about IoT, as you know, is it’s not easy. You need a lot of partners, products, in the ecosystem in order to provide a solution, whether it’s smart agriculture, whether it’s connected car, whatever it is. There’s no one throat to choke in our IoT end-to-end business.”
The problem becomes worse as chips become more heterogeneous, as systems become more complex, and as completely unrelated technologies and systems share the same communications infrastructure. “The problem is you may have 10 different products with 10 different processors, and one application,” said Brumer. “How do you get them all to talk the same security language? The only common denominator may not be even the module. It could be the SIM. But confusion breeds opportunity.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Carriers Push Datacenter-Style Virtualization
https://semiengineering.com/carriers-push-datacenter-style-virtualization/
Move is viewed as way of adding flexibility and better security, and of tapping into IoT growth.
The world’s largest telco carriers are leading a broad movement to bring data center-style virtualization to the core of their telecommunications networks. In an industry known for being extremely conservative when it comes to change, this one appears to be significant.
The move has set off a scramble among a number of companies for unified control and forwarding plane designs, starting from the low to midrange systems and spanning everything from the access and aggregation layers of the fixed network.
Beneath the hood of this shift is an effort to tap into the growth of the IoT and the innovation surrounding it.
“The carriers are looking at these IoT-like services, and at the same time looking at how and when they transition off of their 2G networks, and virtualization is an absolutely key technology,”
Using virtualization, carriers can create a ‘network slice’ for IoT for a given set of customers and applications, like utilities and power meters, or banks for transaction processing. It’s this work that actually makes the IoT business model viable for carriers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Siemens: “iot-platforms two stores, we are one of them” – others: “pretty optimistic”
The race of industrial internet platform – or operating systems – domination is a two-way street, estimated last autumn, which published its own IoT platform Janne Öhman Siemens Finland, the company’s CEO on Wednesday, Tampere Manufacturing Performance Day event.
With the interpretation of Siemens, the race is held between General Electric, GE Predix and MindSphere, a German company. GE has a clear lead in the race, as the company first started using the concept of internet of things, which in Finnish is usually called the industrial internet.
In the past few years, Siemens has had several different platform solutions for different businesses, but last autumn, the company chose to base Mindsphere, which it offers to the most willingly.
GE platforms are strong in the United States, Siemens in Europe. In Asia, however, the race is still unresolved.
Other operators in the iot field are surprised by Siemens’ view. “Pretty optimistic” estimates Elisa IoT sales director Jukka Nurmi.
Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/siemens-iot-alustat-kahden-kauppa-me-olemme-toinen-niista-muut-aika-optimistista-6654302
Tomi Engdahl says:
Employees at this Swedish company can get a microchip inserted under their skin
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/this-swedish-company-is-implanting-microchips-in-its-employees?utm_content=bufferac527&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
The syringe slides in between the thumb and index finger. Then, with a click, a microchip is injected in the employee’s hand. Another “cyborg” is created.
What could pass for a dystopian vision of the workplace is almost routine at the Swedish startup hub Epicenter. The company offers to implant its workers and startup members with microchips the size of grains of rice that function as swipe cards: to open doors, operate printers, or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This is the new Ambient OS, Essential’s big bet to control your home
If this, then that, but much bigger
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/5/30/15711162/ambient-os-essential-home-andy-rubin
It’s a huge morning of news from Andy Rubin’s Essential: a new Android phone with a unique edge-to-edge display, a modular accessory system, a new 360 camera for that system, and a new intelligent speaker with a huge circular display.
But the biggest news of all might be the OS that runs on that speaker. Essential is calling it Ambient OS, and says that the goal is to “activate” your home by understanding the physical layout of your home, its occupants, and the various services and devices available to them. Ambient calls this “activating” your home, and says the Ambient OS is an “API” to all those things in combinations, allowing new kinds of applications to exist on top of them — like flashing your lights when a timer goes off.
If you’re thinking that that basically sounds like a supercharged version of IFTTT, well, you’re not wrong. But the difference here is that Essential is promising to run all this logic on the Essential Home device itself, protecting your privacy and data by forgoing the cloud whenever possible. According to Essential, Ambient OS will control devices directly over the local network when it can, instead of talking to cloud APIs, and it stores all user data locally when it can.
What’s more, Essential says that Ambient OS will only “suggest” smart home actions and let users decide whether to enable them, rather than doing new things as it learns and anticipates what you might want.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andy Rubin says Essential’s Ambient OS will be open source, just like Android
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/30/15716916/ambient-os-open-source-andy-rubin
Playground CEO Andy Rubin, whose new company Essential unveiled a new premium Android smartphone and Amazon Echo competitor today, says his company’s Ambient OS smart home platform will be open source. That means that Rubin, who rose to fame in the tech industry for co-founding Android, essentially wants to apply the same open-source philosophy that made Android the most dominant mobile operating system to the smart home.
Given how disparate the smart home landscape is right now, with myriad interoperability standards and wireless platforms trying to marry various devices together, Essential’s Ambient OS does have a massive opportunity here. However, the decision could also mean that the platform ends up as fragmented and splintered as Android is at the moment, leading some consumers to miss out on vital upgrades and advances.
Tomi Engdahl says:
First thoughts on the new UP Core
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/02/first-thoughts-on-the-new-up-core/
I normally stay away from talking about x86 single-board computers because I don’t have a lot to say about them. They’re too expensive, and run too hot, to be interesting. Enter the new UP Core funding now on Kickstarter.
The UP Core is just 56.5 mm × 66 mm (2.2 in × 2.6 in) and powered by a 64-bit Quad Core Intel Atom clocked at either 1.44 GHz or 1.92 GHz. It will ship with either 2 GB or 4 GB of RAM, and either 32 GB or 64 GB of eMMC. The board has a USB 3 port, HDMI, DSI/eDP, and two MIPI-CSI ports supporting either a 2 MP or 8 MP camera. It has both WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth LE built-in.
In other words it’s powerful enough to serve as a desktop PC running Linux, Android, or a full Windows 10 installation. The cheapest UP Core configuration—with 1 GB memory and 16 GB eMMC—is €69, or around $75.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/802007522/up-core-the-smallest-quadcore-x86-single-board-com
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hackaday Prize Entry: Water Level Station
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/03/hackaday-prize-entry-water-level-station/
[Benne] project devises a low-cost, cloud-connected, water level measuring station to allow remote and central water level monitoring for local authorities. He hopes that by being able to monitor water levels in a more precise and timely fashion, authorities can act sooner to warn potentially affected areas and increase the chance of saving lives in case of a natural disaster.
Latest version consists essentially in an Arduino UNO, an ultrasonic distance sensor, and a DHT temperature/humidity sensor to provide calibration since these characteristics affect the speed of sound.
Affordable Water Level Measuring Station
https://hackaday.io/project/21579-affordable-water-level-measuring-station
An Affordable cloud connected water level measuring station for developing countries.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ESP8266 MQTT Remote Gate Entry
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/04/esp8266-mqtt-remote-gate-entry/
Do you live in an area where you (or your car) are locked in by a gate? If so, you may know how [Alexander Else] feels about letting his guests in and out constantly with a remote control — it’s just not convenient. [Alexander] could have just purchased some extra remote controls and passed them out, but they aren’t exactly as cheap as party favors. Not to mention it wouldn’t make sense to hand one out to every single visitor anyway. Because the gate is a community gate, hacking the actual gate system was not an option. There was only one thing he could do — hack the remote control!
Like just about every other hacker, [Alexander] had a spare ESP8266-based board lying around
Now [Alexander] can just set up HTTP Request Shortcuts on each trusted visitor’s smartphone. From there on out they can open/close the gates themselves!
Originally, he was using IFTTT to trigger the string of events that make it all happen, but there was a delay of about 8 seconds (from trigger to relay action). [Alexander] was not having this so he turned to the HTTP Request Shortcuts app. When he made this change, the delay disappeared.
esp8266 internet controlled relay (garage opener)
https://hackaday.io/project/21074-esp8266-internet-controlled-relay-garage-opener
A project to activate a remote control for a garage via smart phone using an esp8266 module, a pair of relays and some cloud services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple announces the HomePod
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-announces-the-homepod/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
Apple’s long-rumored Amazon Echo competitor is real. It’s called the HomePod (yes, I know). “We want to reinvent home music,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the company’s WWDC keynote. The Apple Speaker is focused on music first, not Siri.
Apple’s SVP of Global Marketing Phil Schiller said Sonos aren’t smart speakers and Amazon Echos aren’t good speakers.
So Apple wants to combine the best of both worlds.
HomePod is shipping later this year
The device is a pill-shaped circular speaker. It has a seven beam-forming tweeter array. It has a custom-made woofer and an Apple A8 chip.
Of course, the speaker works well with Apple Music. You can talk to the speaker to play anything in your Apple Music library and more. You can say “play more songs like that,” or “I like this song.”
You also can ask other Siri queries
Apple also announced AirPlay 2 earlier today, which lets you pair multiple speakers and play music in multiple rooms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple:
Apple unveils $349 HomePod, a Siri-enabled speaker with spatial awareness, 7 tweeter array, woofer that ties in with Music, Home apps; coming Dec. in US, AU, UK — Sneak Peek of Apple-Designed Home Music Speaker with Amazing Sound Quality and Intelligence — San Jose, California …
HomePod reinvents music in the home
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/06/homepod-reinvents-music-in-the-home/
Sneak Peek of Apple-Designed Home Music Speaker with Amazing Sound Quality and Intelligence
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hackaday Prize Entry: Sub Gigahertz RF
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/05/hackaday-prize-entry-sub-gigahertz-rf/
For all the press WiFi and Bluetooth-connected Internet of Things toasters get, there’s still a lot of fun to be had below one Gigahertz. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Adam] is working on an open source, extensible 915 and 433 MHz radio designed for robotics, drones, weather balloons, and all the other fun projects that sub-Gigaherts radio enables.
The design of this radio module is based around the ADF7023 RF transceiver, a very capable and very cheap chip that transmits in the usual ISM bands. The rest of the circuit is an STM32 ARM Cortex M0+, with USB, UART, and SPI connectivity, with support for a battery for those mobile projects.
S1G RF: Sub 1GHZ Radio Modules 915MHZ and 433MHZ
https://hackaday.io/project/17997-s1g-rf-sub-1ghz-radio-modules-915mhz-and-433mhz
Sub 1GHZ RF wireless modules operating at 915MHZ and 433MHZ ISM bands, based on the ADF7023, full open source!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Manufacturers Gain from IoT But Slip on Security
https://www.designnews.com/iot/manufacturers-gain-iot-slip-on-security/17346428656842?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170606.tst004t
A BDO study finds that manufacturers are getting gains from IoT deployment even while they’re skimping on cybersecurity protection.
According to the data from a recent study, manufacturers are seeing significant gains in productivity and profitability from using IoT technology. Yet the study also found manufacturers are overlooking two critical pieces that could derail their progress: cybersecurity and R&D tax credits.
The IoT study – conducted by the MPI Group and sponsored by BDO – surveyed 374 global manufacturers on their readiness to incorporate smart devices and embedded intelligence within their plants and into their products.
“The goal is to shed light on the potential the IoT offers manufacturers in terms of growth and profits, as well as the new business risks it introduces.”
This is the second year of an annual study. Year-over-year results revealed a marked increase in IoT awareness and preparedness among manufacturers. “In last year’s study, few manufacturers had a strategy in place to apply IoT technologies. One-third didn’t even have plans to develop a strategy,” said Schreiber. “In addition, 67% of respondents reported no or limited companywide understanding of the IoT.”
That percentage dropped to 31 percent this year. The percentage of manufacturers with no plans to develop an IoT strategy dropped to just 13 percent. “Based on these huge drops, we think the IoT is finally on the radar for manufacturers.”
Biggest Gains May be in Manufacturing Processes
While many manufacturers are grabbing a market edge by enabling IoT in their products, BDO analysts noted that the largest benefits from IoT may be in the plant rather than in products. “Enabling IoT in manufacturing processes is where we’re seeing some of the biggest opportunities for growth and innovation,” said Schreiber. “About half of plant processes are currently managed via the IoT, up from an average of 31 percent in 2016.” He noted that a hearty 81 percent of manufacturers are planning to increase their IoT plant and process investments in the next two years.
“The Internet of Things is just the first piece of a much larger puzzle,”
Bringing Cybersecurity into the Mix Too Late
While more than two-thirds of manufacturers report productivity and profitability gains from the IoT
just in the last year, the vast majority may be overconfident in their cyber-risk-management programs to protect their IoT enabled products. BDO analysts noted that a statistically significant number of manufacturers don’t start thinking about cybersecurity until their products reach the quality control or marketing stage.
“The end-user tends not to think about the security risk to their personal information until after it’s been compromised,”
Cybersecurity within products is most effective when it’s designed-in at the earliest stage of design. “The challenge for manufacturers is balancing security with product innovation and ease of use. That’s why cybersecurity needs to be a consideration from the design phase onward,” said Shaghaghi. “If you tack on security controls as an afterthought, you’re not thinking about how it impacts the overall user experience.”
“We were surprised at the manufacturers’ level of confidence in the adequacy of their cybersecurity risk management programs,”
Shaghaghi cautioned that the worst is yet to come with IoT cybersecurity. “Hackers are just beginning to experiment with harnessing the power of the IoT to wage attacks. And even the most sophisticated cyber-defense technology isn’t impenetrable, so early breach detection and a tested incident response plan are key,” said Shaghaghi. “A good cyber risk management program assumes hackers will, sooner or later, successfully breach the barriers and thus they focus on mitigating the impact.”
2016 Internet of Things Executive Summary
http://mpi-group.com/product/internet-of-things-executive-summary/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fochica – Forgotten Child in Car Alert
https://hackaday.io/project/20902-fochica-forgotten-child-in-car-alert
Fochica, forgotten child in car alert, is a no hassle, low cost and extensible system that helps prevent forgetting children in vehicles
Why not use technology to make sure you don’t forget your kids? Fochica’s mission is to prevent forgetting children in vehicles and thus save children’s lives.
Fochica™ is comprised of a Fochica open hardware, open software, Arduino-based device that is installed in a car and a Fochica app that is installed on the driver’s smartphone. Sensors monitor whether the child car seats are occupied or empty and send the data to the device. The device communicates with the app via BLE passing the information to the driver. When the driver’s smartphone goes out of range and a seat is occupied an alarm will sound on the smartphone.
Fochica is an alert, not a reminder. Meaning it will not nag you to “not-forget” your kid when you turn off the car or when you exit the vehicle. It is designed to alert when you have forgotten, which Fochica considers as being out of BLE range while a seat is occupied.
The source code for the device is available on GitHub and licensed as GPLv3.
More information is available on the Fochica site.
http://fochica.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Modular IoT Gateway
https://www.eeweb.com/design-library/modular-iot-gateway
The NXP modular IoT Gateway reference design enables large node networks (LNNs) with pre-integrated, tested and RF certified support for a wide array of wireless communications protocols including: Thread, ZigBee and Wi-Fi. This range of capability allows developers to easily build gateways based on this solution, using their choice of wireless protocols for end-to-end wireless communications in LNN configurations with supporting cloud options.
Operators of smart commercial buildings and smart industrial environments deploying massive mesh networks need to be able to commission, control and monitor thousands of end nodes. Built on a fully-supported, open source Linux platform running on the latest i.MX Processor, the robust Modular IoT Gateway addresses this demand by connecting Thread and ZigBee based end node devices securely with the cloud through Wi-Fi or Ethernet. In addition, local intelligence enables time critical responses and operation even when cloud connectivity is not available.
Tomi Engdahl says:
March of the Touchless User Interfaces
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1331859&
The world of user interfaces is rapidly expanding. It’s no longer just touch but it includes a great variety of gestures and speech assistants. What can we expect from such advancements?
“Alexa, play the motion picture soundtrack to Moana.” Just two years after Amazon announced Amazon Echo, “Alexa” is part of the common lexicon. “Okay, Google,” “Siri” and “Hey, Cortana” have joined Alexa in the panoply of speech assistants as consumers migrate toward touchless user interfaces – which now include gesture as well as voice. What can we expect from these new user interfaces – and how will MEMS and sensors suppliers help us to get there?
Voice lends itself to selecting music, TV shows, and movies. That’s because there is a “massive unstructured database of content that is hard to navigate through hierarchical windows,” says Matt Crowley, CEO of Vesper. Crowley adds that use cases that involve simple tasks such as setting a timer, asking for weather forecasts, or opening a door are well-suited to voice.
Always-listening devices such as smart speakers and smart earbuds are also ideal for voice. The catch, however, is that the always-listening MEMS microphones that are essential to such devices must be power-efficient. MEMS microphone makers Vesper and InvenSense approach the power-consumption issue differently.
It’s not just about voice user interfaces, though, because new gesture technologies are coming to market – and designers are racing to incorporate them.
MEMS-based ultrasound time-of-flight sensors enable consumer devices – including virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) systems — to sense motion, depth, and position of objects in three-dimensional space. Because most existing 3D sensing technologies are based on light, either visible light or infrared light, they have trouble with sunlight, which tends to overload optical receivers. They also have a hard time detecting dark-colored or optically transparent surfaces (like glass windows).
In scenarios where a touch interface demands too much attention – such as in the car, where finding the right location to touch is distracting to the driver, Horsley says it’s appealing to imagine making adjustments with a wave of your hand rather than fussing with a little screen to interact with an application.
“The evolution of user interfaces has taken us from pounding at keyboards to pawing at slabs of glass. What’s next?” asks David Allen, president of Virtuix. “The answer is mixed reality – a blend of the virtual and the real.”
“With machine learning, someone can point their smartphone at a person, their dog or an object, and he or she will see information or funny filters/animations on top of that focal point.” Sauvage points out that machine learning is much better at recognizing what is a dog, or say, a muffin. In fact, at that Facebook conference, only 72% of programmers could tell the difference while machine learning got the right answer 93% of the time!
With consumers eager to interact with the digital world more freely and naturally, we can expect more alternative user interfaces that use MEMS and sensors to make devices smarter and more environmentally aware.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The future plant is controlled remotely
The Technology Research Center VTT, the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) and the Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) have established a common digital factory demon. It monitors and manages remote robots from different places in organizations at a single location.
VTT, TUT and TAMK set up a joint digital factory demo in the SMACC state of Tampere Campus Arena. Each organization has, in accordance with its own robot system, connected its own facility to a remote SMACC state. There is a system control room in which the screens on the screen are used to steer and monitor the robot’s work and product preparation step-by-step.
- The future digital plant is a decentralized business network with sub-networks that can be global. Manufacturing is controlled via the internet remotely from one point. The factory produces products at the site that is at the moment the best possible. Criteria for the manufacturing site can be, for example, efficiency, quality or customer proximity, “says Risto Kuivanen, Business Development Manager at VTT.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6430-tulevaisuuden-tehdasta-ohjataan-etana
More:
SMACC Digital Factory demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FjZqSfbDHQ&feature=youtu.be
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smart Automation Prompts Need for Skilled Workforce
https://www.designnews.com/automation-motion-control/smart-automation-prompts-need-skilled-workforce/77979885156879?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170607.tst004t
While smart automation tools are designed to take over repetitive fast-moving plant work, the smart tools require a skilled workforce for installation and maintenance.
Can advanced manufacturing deliver a clear ROI? This may be an especially thorny question when it comes to retrofitting a plant with aging assets.
According to TBM Consulting, a firm that helps manufacturers balance their technology and workforce, the biggest mistake manufacturing industry managers make is relying solely on smart automation tools as the solution to downtime and lost revenue. While manufacturers are pressing ahead with data analytics systems, TBM analysts see a skills gap that can hamper the effectiveness of smart manufacturing tools.
One of the keys to implementing advanced manufacturing is creating a team that can run the smart tools effectively. “With downtime being a silent killer, it’s essential to build a smart workforce around the supplemental systems and analytics that track root cause and counter measure tools in real time,” Ken Koenemann, VP of TBM Consulting, told Design News . “Workers need to understand the results and adjust certain lagging aspects to avoid further issues.”
Searching for the Skilled Workforce
Though advanced tools can help reduce a manual workforce while delivering efficiencies, it may not be enough to offset the need to invest in workers will a higher skillset. “What does smart automation mean when it comes to the type of resources you need? You take people off the production line, but the more automation you have, the more skills you need to maintain the automation,” said Koenemann. “It’s a net-sum game, and in some cases, it’s a net loss.”
Automating Piece by Piece
Another challenge facing manufacturing is deciding what to automate across a factory full of exiting assets. Most manufacturers can’t afford to replace much of their equipment. “While there are lots of new capabilities, if you look at most organizations, they cannot afford to overhaul their complete business by automating everything,” said Koenemann. “This is a matter of focus. How do you find the right automation to improve quality, productivity, and safety when you can’t automate everything?”
The emerging automation tools are flexible. They can be deployed in a variety of settings. Yet these tools do not come cheap. Manufacturers have to pick and choose what to automate and how. “The automation itself probably works in any plant environment, but it’s the amount of capital that is needed to do it that’s a challenge,” said Koenemann. “That’s going to take time. Companies have 15- or 20-year-old equipment and replacing that will cost a lot of money.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Putting Smart Tech on Old Machines
https://www.designnews.com/automation-motion-control/putting-smart-tech-on-old-machines/62576852556902?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170607.tst004t
Manufacturers are deploying advanced-technology solutions on older factory equipment – but at what cost?
Most manufacturing equipment is designed and deployed to last at least a couple decades. In that timeframe, tons of important new technology is introduced. Many manufacturers seek ways to derive the benefits of advanced-manufacturing technology without having to replace existing equipment that remains in fine working order. Yet many of the existing machines were simply not designed to support new technology.
One current example is connectivity. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers a wide range of benefits, but tying it to older machines is not easy.
“It is difficult to deploy IoT solutions alongside legacy equipment. The reason is that legacy systems were designed with particular requirements in mind, such as minimal data transferred at relatively long update rates,” Steve Mustard, cybersecurity chair at the Automation Federation , told Design News . “As a result, the infrastructure is not suited to the modern IoT and big data approach of large volumes of data transmitted in near-real-time.”
Cyber Security and Legacy Equipment
Cybersecurity is another critical consideration when connecting older equipment to the outside world. Much of this equipment was conceived to live in an air-gapped world. “Legacy equipment was not designed with security in mind. It was designed to be used in relatively secure facilities with everything self-contained,” said Mustard. “IoT solutions are all about enabling businesses to get real-time data from manufacturing systems in order to manage the business, communicate with suppliers and customers, and with machinery manufactures who are maintaining the production line.”
Mustard also noted that the IoT equipment itself may not be entirely secure. Manufacturers need to take a ground-up approach to cybersecurity. They need to assume none of the equipment comes with bullet-proof security. “IoT is not designed with security in mind – it is first and foremost about delivering the technical requirements as quickly as possible and making the solution easy to use,” said Mustard.
Cybersecurity functions must be considered independent of manufacturing needs and ease-of-use. “Security makes things more difficult and takes more time, so is a counter to manufacturing objectives,” said
Moving to New Equipment May Be Cheaper
Adding new tech to existing equipment successfully required a full reconsideration of what needs to be accomplished and what’s the best strategy for doing it. ““The temptation is to go straight to the latest technical solution and work out how it can meet a requirement,” said Mustard. “In many cases, if the requirement is properly understood it may be possible to achieve it with fewer, less disruptive changes, to the existing environment.”
One of the advantages of IoT is that it’s relatively inexpensive compared with most machines and automation systems. Yet that low cost may be a siren song. “It’s easy to conclude that the latest IoT device is cheaper than upgrading legacy hardware if one looks only at unit costs. However, if one considers the changes required to the infrastructure, the additional training required for maintenance, and so on, then it may not be cheaper long-term,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Show Us Your Internet of Useful Things by Monday
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/07/show-us-your-internet-of-useful-things-by-monday/
Don’t forget to get your connected device entered in the Hackaday Prize by Monday morning. The current challenge is IuT ! IoT, a clever tilt at the Internet of Things, which is so hot right now. We don’t just want things to connect, we want that connection to be useful, so save your Internet Toasters and Twittering Toilets for another round.
So what are we looking for here? Any device that communicates with something else and thereby performs a service that has meaningful value. The Hackaday Prize is about building something that matters.
IUT ! IoT (Internet of Useful Things)
https://hackaday.io/prize/details#two
Let’s take the Internet of Things and make it practical for everyday life. The Internet of Useful Things showcases a way to build a better tomorrow with the data you track and analyze. Prevent sick cattle and livestock with an IoT Farm, create a way for denizens to find clean well water in rural villages, or reduce energy waste in a smart home. Make for the greater good of your home, your city, your nation.
Minimum entry requirements:
Idea + image + documentation + 4 build logs
Tomi Engdahl says:
Accelerating AI experiences from edge to cloud
https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/accelerating-ai-experiences-from-edge-to-cloud
Artificial intelligence (AI) is already simplifying and transforming many of our lives and it seems that every day I read about or see proofs of concept for potentially life-saving AI innovations. However, replicating the learning and decision-making functions of the human brain starts with algorithms that often require cloud-intensive compute power. Unfortunately, a cloud-centric approach is not an optimal long-term solution if we want to make the life-changing potential of AI ubiquitous and closer to the user for real-time inference and greater privacy. In fact, survey data we will share in the coming weeks shows 85 percent of global consumers are concerned about securing AI technology, a key indicator that more processing and storing of personal data on edge devices is needed to instill a greater sense of confidence in AI privacy.
Enabling secure and ubiquitous AI is a fundamental guiding design principle for ARM considering our technologies currently reach 70 percent of the global population. As such, ARM has a responsibility to rearchitect the compute experience for AI and other human-like compute experiences. To do this, we need to enable faster, more efficient and secure distributed intelligence between computing at the edge of the network and into the cloud.
ARM DynamIQ technology, which we first previewed back in March, was the first milestone on the path to distributing intelligence from chip to cloud. Today we hit another key milestone, launching our first products based on DynamIQ technology, the ARM Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 processors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Wearable IoT Development Board for Body Sensing
https://hackaday.io/project/21523-a-wearable-iot-development-board-for-body-sensing
A wearable IoT development board based on the ESP8266 and ESP32 for human body sensing and Cloud applications
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet of Beds
https://hackaday.io/project/25330-internet-of-beds
IoB is a Bluetooth Low Energy weight sensor, placed under your bed, that force you to get-up in order to stop your alarm clock!
IoB is a Bluetooth Low Energy weight sensor, placed under your bed, that force you to get-up in order to stop your alarm clock!
Two weight sensors (from a cheap scale) are placed under the bed frame. The sensors are connected to an Adafruit Feather 32u4 BLE via an HX711 . TheFeather board send the measured values to an Android alarm clock application through Bluetooth.
Tomi Engdahl says:
#140 IKEA Tradfri IOT Smart Lightning System Hack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olxPqiJcUAQ
In this video, I will hack the Tradfri remote control and enable it to be used with MQTT
Control Tradfri lights with Alexa and Google Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGcP3bO68Gw
This video show how you can use Samsung SmartThings to control your Ikea Tradfri smart bulbs using Alexa or Google home. Its really easy to setup, and I give you a step by step guide.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple Turns Up Speakers, AR
Sounds better, but not as smart
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331855
Apple announced a $349, Siri-powered speaker, leveraging its expertise in music against rivals Amazon and Google. It also rolled out developer’s kits for augmented reality and machine learning on iOS 11 and upgraded its Macintosh and iPad computers.
The HomePod is a 6.8-inch speaker driven by an Apple A8 SoC to handle echo cancellation and optimize sound for a given space. It packs a four-inch woofer and an array of seven tweeters, each with its own driver to deliver better sound than smart speakers such as Alexa and Google Home.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to build your own Amazon Echo — or something like it
http://www.electronicproducts.com/Internet_of_Things/Household/How_to_build_your_own_Amazon_Echo_or_something_like_it.aspx
A development kit containing the audio components needed for creating a voice-activated system using Amazon’s Alexa voice service is now available
The success of personal assistants that you interact with via the spoken word, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google Home, has made voice control a hot-ticket item in system design. Getting started in this technology, though, has required significant audio and signal processing expertise to address issues in background noise and the speaker’s location. A new development kit from Microsemi, in partnership with Amazon’s Alexa voice service (AVS), seeks to simplify startup so developers can focus on application rather than implementation.
The AcuEdge development kit is a starting point for developers working on voice-activated systems but is not an out-of-the-box system. The kit contains a development module based on Microsemi’s ZL38063 Timberwolf audio processor preloaded with the company’s license-free AcuEdge audio processing software
Once the hardware is assembled, the next thing needed is a developer’s account with Amazon AVS. The account is free, however, and enjoys substantial support from Amazon for everything from technical training to product marketing guidelines. Then power up the hardware, install the software from Microsemi’s github, start up the Alexa service, and start talking with Alexa.
With this kit, developers are able to quickly start working on applications that leverage rapidly growing consumer interest in speech control. According to Microsemi, the market for voice-enabled systems is expected to be 75 million units annually within five years, with two-thirds of those being digital assistants like Echo. Applications such as lighting systems, appliances, set-top boxes, and the like form an even larger market for voice activation features.
Integrate Alexa Into Your Product
https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-voice-service/
Use the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to add intelligent voice control to any connected product that has a microphone and speaker. Your customers will be able to ask Alexa to play music, answer questions, get news and local information, control smart home products, and more on their voice-enabled products.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Multiple Vulnerabilities Found in Popular IP Cameras
http://www.securityweek.com/multiple-vulnerabilities-found-popular-ip-cameras
Multiple vulnerabilities have been found in China’s Foscam-made IP cameras. The vulnerabilities were reported to the manufacturer several months ago, but no fixes have been made available. Foscam cameras are sold under different brand names, such as OptiCam. Users are advised to check on the manufacture of any IP cameras, and if necessary, take their own mitigation steps.
The vulnerabilities, 18 in all, were discovered by F-Secure, who specifically found them in the Opticam i5 and Foscam C2 cameras. F-Secure warns, however, that these vulnerabilities will likely exist throughout the Foscam range and potentially in all 14 separate brand names that it knows to sell Foscam cameras.
The flaws include insecure default credentials, hard-coded credentials, hidden and undocumented Telnet functionality, command injection flaws, missing authorization, improper access control, cross-site scripting, and a buffer overflow. All are detailed in a report (PDF) published today.
“Security has been ignored in the design of these products,” said Janne Kauhanen, cyber security expert at F-Secure. “The developers’ main concern is to get them working and ship them. This lack of attention to security puts users and their networks at risk. The irony is that this device is marketed as a way of making the physical environment more secure — however, it makes the virtual environment less so.”
While attention on IoT device security — especially cameras — has been focused by the Mirai botnet and the largest DDoS attack against the internet infrastructure in history, the quantity and severity of the Foscam vulnerabilities is particularly concerning. “These vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets,”
VULNERABILITIES IN FOSCAM IP CAMERAS
http://images.news.f-secure.com/Web/FSecure/%7B43df9e0d-20a8-404a-86d0-70dcca00b6e5%7D_vulnerabilities-in-foscam-IP-cameras_report.pdf
F-Secure’s discovery of multiple flaws in two models of Foscam-made IP cameras is another example of a poorly engineered device that offers attackers an easy target. Should an attacker infiltrate the company network and find such a device, they could infect it with malware that would not only fully compromise the device, but also grant free reign inside the network, including access to network systems and resources.
This paper details the vulnerabilities inside the Foscam IP cameras and their impact, and offers mitigation recommendations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Threat Modeling the Internet of Things Part 2: Three Steps to Pizza
http://www.securityweek.com/threat-modeling-internet-things-part-2-three-steps-pizza
One way to apply security to the development of any system is through the process of threat modeling. A threat model assessment (TMA) brings together system designers and security experts to:
1. Catalogue the assets in play
2. Identify potential threats
3. Score the threats vs. the assets
Sounds complex, right? It doesn’t really have to be, and when done with the right attitude and the right people, it can be inspiring and, gasp, even fun. Let’s have a look at the mechanics of threat modeling, and then drop some tips about how to initiate a new threat model program.
Step One: Catalogue the Assets at Play
For an Internet of Things project, the scope of the assets includes not just the device itself, but all the systems that the support that device.
The OWASP IoT Project page identifies many of the assets of an IoT system.
Step Two: Identify Potential Threats
You’ve gotten lucky, again. Many potential threats are already known; you just have to apply them to your project. One of the early “models” in threat modeling is STRIDE threat classification. The STRIDE acronym is designed to help you remember to ask these questions:
• (S)poofing – can an attacker pretend to be someone he’s not?
• (T)ampering – can an attacker successfully inject tampered data into the system?
• (R)epudiation – can a user pretend that a transaction didn’t happen?
• (I)nformation Disclosure – is the application leaking data to outside parties?
• (D)enial of Service – how can the application be shut down maliciously?
• (E)scalation of Privilege – can users gain superuser powers?
Step Three: Score the Threats versus the Assets
Once all of the threats have been brainstormed and recorded, it’s time to score them. Go back through the list and determine a risk assessment for each threat. Choose an ascending numbering system of 1-3, 1-5, or 1-10 where 1 is the least bad. Then use the DREAD acronym to give scores to each of these variables:
• (D)amage – how much damage could this threat cause?
• (R)eproducability – how reproducible is this threat?
• (E)xploitability – is this a boundary condition that is unlikely to be exploited?
• (A)ffected Users – are all users affected? Some? Or just a single user?
• (D)iscoverability – what is the likelihood that this threat would be discovered?
Threat Modeling the IoT—with Pizza
If you’re setting up a threat modeling system, here are some informal tips.
• Remember that you’re analyzing threats and assets, not people.
• Don’t use the second person (“you”) as in saying things like, “You’re doing it wrong.”
• Have a kickoff luncheon where you model something politically safe (like a doghouse or a competitor’s product), and bring pizza.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Threat Modeling the Internet of Things
http://www.securityweek.com/threat-modeling-internet-things
It’s Not Just Internet-connected Toasters
Don’t dismiss the IoT as just a consumer security problem. IoT security is critical for other sectors beyond retail. Consider:
Government: City planners are busily designing so-called smart cities replete with sensors and connectors to make services more efficient. IoT can optimize ground transportation, shipping and power for smart cities, and all of these services will be using the IoT.
Industrial: Heavy industries will monitor workers’ exposure to dangerous natural or synthetic chemicals with internet-connected sensor networks. Sensors in factories will assist with predictive maintenance and feed operational data into analytic engines. General Electric jet engines already produce terabits of data that airlines use to optimize flight paths and fuel plans.
Enterprise: The new world of soft perimeters will be complicated by the IoT. Nearly half of all new tech workers are remote employees who often work from their domiciles. Imagine their houses full of hundreds of quasi-secure IoT devices hoping to catch a ride into the corporate VPN. IT departments are already sweeping their guest networks for the rogue IoT devices appearing there.
Let’s Fix IoT Now Before We Go Back to Space
Tomi Engdahl says:
The funding of urban smart lighting could hinge on 5G
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2017/06/the-funding-of-urban-smart-lighting-could-hinge-on-5g.html?cmpid=enl_leds_ledsmagazine_2017-06-07&[email protected]&eid=289644432&bid=1777480
The boss of Holland’s Luminext believes that the next-generation cellular technology will give a much needed boost to the outdoor IoT business case, and will attract investors.
While the lack of a business case is currently discouraging investors from backing streetlight-centric smart cities, the pending arrival of 5G mobile networks could help change all that, according to the boss of a Dutch software and systems firm
“5G is very important,” said Henk Walraven, managing director of Luminext, speaking at the Smart Lighting Conference 2017 here this week. “The reason for 5G to be there is to actually to finance the whole thing.”
Many enthusiasts believe that urban outdoor lighting infrastructures are ready-made to form the backbone of smart cities. The idea is to outfit luminaires, or the poles that house them, with sensors and communication chips that gather data on crowds, traffic, parking, air quality, noise, weather conditions, and much more. This data, when connected to the Internet, can then help authorities operate cities more effectively, can help people make informed choices about how to use the city, can feed retailers and other businesses with useful information, and so on.
But claiming that a lot of this today requires expensive wired networks (even though many early examples also use some form of wireless), Walraven noted, “There’s no business case.” But in the near future, the huge leap in bandwidth and capacity augured by 5G will help support data transfer rates that will expand the capabilities of what wirelessly connected smart lighting can do.
“If you want to do fiberoptics to the lampposts every five lampposts, there’s nobody that wants to pay for it,” said Walraven. “But if I can then go to small cells and 5G equipment, then the investors in that will actually have a little bit more patience in waiting for their investment to pay back.”
5G represents the next major advance over today’s 4G in mobile networking speeds and capacity. It is expected to be generally ready by around 2020.
For Luminext, 5G would help support smart city systems and applications, such as an “aggression detection” system that Luminext has deployed in a small pocket of Eindhoven. In that project, 22 “sound cameras” are mounted on light posts, anonymously detecting sound and converting it into a graphic that can alert police of yelling and screaming.
“You can actually determine what kind of sound it is and how many people there are.”
In the Hague, Luminext is behind a smart street lighting system that is intended to slash road salting costs. The new computer-connected system measures road surface temperature, takes note of the road material, measures traffic, and scans tweets for references to slippery roads in the city.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Greengrass Embeds Amazon in IoT
AWS runs on GHz-class embedded processors
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331867
Amazon Web Services can now run on a gateway or even a high-end node for the Internet of Things. Greengrass is a Linux runtime from the Web giant, aiming to extend its reach deeper into the IoT.
The code aims to help businesses speed AWS-based IoT deployments. It uses Amazon’s familiar online tools to create programs that run on users’ local IoT networks, accessing and analyzing data from local IoT nodes. Since it’s part of the AWS family, users can integrate with Amazon’s cloud services as needed.
“There’s value in processing data at the source,” such as quick response and a known security model using AWS authentication and encryption, said Dirk Didascalou, vice president of AWS IoT at an event here. A Greengrass node also can synch a variety of other nodes when connectivity is intermittent, he added.
The Web giant is perhaps the largest of more than 20 companies working on IoT software platforms for edge networks. It’s a hot area for a growing number of companies seeking their way into the Internet of Things such as Stanley Black & Decker.
The tool maker selected AWS IoT as its preferred cloud services platform two years ago. It evaluated about eight edge-network IoT platforms 18 months ago and selected one from startup ClearBlade (Austin). More recently it added Greengrass, and it expects to continue evaluating the growing set of offerings.
The fact that Greengrass requires a GHz processor with 128 Mbytes of memory and must be programmed, for now, in Python are not barriers
Amazon attracted many partners for Greengrass given its clout in cloud computing.
Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung are among chip makers that have ported Greengrass to their embedded processors. Set-top box maker Technicolor will start shipping gateways that support Greengrass to one customer later this year. Nokia has a gateway it says will support the code, too.
Intel used Greengrass to bring up in two weeks an IoT use case for a mining company. Qualcomm showed a smart video camera from ThunderSoft using its Snapdragon 410E, supporting Greengrass. Samsung said its Artik 530 and 710 IoT modules support Greengrass.
The chip makers typically are agnostic, supporting multiple IoT cloud services. Qualcomm, for example, also supports cloud services for Google’s Android Things as well as Verizon’s IoT initiative.
Technicolor said it hopes Greengrass helps it address new vertical markets beyond the smart home.
For now, Greengrass uses a hub-and-subscribe programming approach that lets a single runtime act as a master. It does not support multiple runtime instances collaborating among cores on an SoC or nodes on a network.
Amazon suggested Greengrass may support other programming languages in the future, perhaps including C and C++. It may also explore a version of the runtime that operates on smaller processors.
For many companies the biggest headaches are more fundamental.
“For traditional lines of business that only thought of hardware products, the need to leap into fused hardware/software digital products is a challenge that requires lots of experimentation and education,”
“Another aspect is coming up with the right business models…”
In technology, “connectivity is always an issue, you don’t always have networks available, and there are multiple networking options and approaches–it hasn’t sorted itself out yet,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple will now let Makers build their own HomeKit devices with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other dev boards.
Why Apple’s HomeKit Announcement Is a Big Deal for Makers
https://blog.hackster.io/why-apples-homekit-announcement-is-a-big-deal-for-makers-9d3c3d7fdbc8
Apple is moving HomeKit outside of the prohibitively complex licensing regime of the MFi program, and opening it up to normal developers, may well be the biggest thing to come out of this year’s WWDC.
The focus during the keynote was on the release of the HomePod—pitched by Apple as a reinvention of home music—the smart speaker also includes Siri support, and is a direct competitor to both Amazon’s Echo and the Google Home.
But during the “What’s new in HomeKit” session developers were told that HomeKit smart devices—that had previously had to go through extensive testing and include a special cryptographic chip for authentication — can now use software based authentication, and be self-certified.
You can in fact now even build your HomeKit devices out of an Arduino, or a Raspberry Pi.
Of course you could sort of do that before using something called HomeBridge—a lightweight NodeJS server you can run on your home network that emulates the iOS HomeKit API—as it’s pretty easy to get HomeBridge running on the Raspberry Pi.
What’s different now is that, amongst other things, you don’t have to fear a DMCA take down notice from Apple. But also that your microcontroller-based HomeKit device can talk directly to your phone, without going through a bridge.
For those of you with Apple Developer accounts the HomeKit Accessory Protocol Specification, at least for non-commercial use, is now available.
sell a HomeKit-enabled device commercially, you still have to enrol in the MFi Program.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Data Makes Big Waves
Efforts expand tools and data sets
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331733&
You could say that big data got its start when Sergy Brin and Larry Page helped develop an algorithm that found more relevant results on the web than the search engines of their rivals. The lesson of Google continues to ripple through all businesses seeking competitive insights from their data pools, however large or small.
Today, the Internet of Things is opening vast new data sources, expanding big data’s promise to reshape business, technology, and the job of the technologist. Along the way, big data is inspiring new kinds of processor and systems architectures, as well as evolving algorithms and programming techniques.
“The concept of being overwhelmed by data is the new normal,” said Anthony Scriffignano, chief data scientist of Dun & Bradstreet, at a recent event hosted by the Churchill Club.
Inderpal Bhandari, the first chief data officer of IBM, also spoke at the event. The goal of the new role is to “change major processes an enterprise has so that their outcomes are better, so faster and better decisions get made,” said Bhandari.
Some of the largest recent IPOs in tech are being fueled by big data. They include Cloudera and Hortonworks, who helped drive Hadoop, an open-source equivalent of Google’s core MapReduce algorithm.
“Machine learning is impressive but really hard to use. Even the most sophisticated companies might only have a couple of people that can apply those techniques optimally,”
The IEEE Big Data Initiative is taking a different approach, making large data sets freely available for research through its Dataport service. So far, they include examples as diverse as real-time feeds of New York City traffic and neuron movements in a human brain.
The rise of big data has made the data scientist the sexiest job in tech, according to the Harvard Business Review.
“The demand currently outstrips supply by a wide margin,” said Eglash of Stanford. “It feels like every company on the planet has discovered that they are sitting on a trove of valuable data and trying to figure out how to unlock it.”
Eglash suggests that the trend is not just a passing fad but a new level of technical literacy.
“Just like every educated person should be able to write a paragraph and do arithmetic, it feels like we’re entering a time when, as a society, we feel that a well-educated person needs a basic proficiency in data science. It probably doesn’t mean that everyone needs to be able to write a program, but they do need to be a critical consumer of the inferences of data analytics.”
Smart companies will learn what they can outsource and what expertise they need to have in-house. The ability to pose focused questions is key, said Eglash.
http://bigdata.ieee.org/
Tomi Engdahl says:
EU Agency Offers Corrective for IoT Security ‘Market Failure’
Urges standards, product labeling to promote consumer trust
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331869&
LONDON – Products connected to the Internet of Things should meet a minimum defined level of security and should be labeled accordingly to promote consumer trust, according to the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA). The agency worked with Infineon, NXP, and STMicroelectronics to produce a position paper that reflects the European semiconductor industry’s IoT security concerns and provides guidelines for policymakers.
The paper warns of a current “market failure” for cybersecurity and privacy: Incorporating security measures increases cost, but buyers are reluctant to pay more for solutions with added security. There is thus “no basic level, no zero level defined for the security and privacy of connected and smart devices,” the authors state.
The position paper urges the European Commission to ensure minimal security requirements for connected devices. It recommends establishing baseline requirements for security and privacy that would set reference levels for trusted IoT solutions depending on the complexity of the device. A third party should evaluate and certify devices, and those that meet the required security level should be identified with an EU Trust Label, the paper suggests.
“Ideally, the use of the label should be mandatory as a symbol of trust for citizens, consumers and businesses in the connected world,” the paper states. “An obligatory reference framework and an associated label would ensure appropriate levels of security for products and services. This would further lead to a level playing field for the entire industry.”
Another priority should be the development of reliable security processes and services, such as providing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with information and training on security solutions, according to the paper.
https://www.enisa.europa.eu/publications/enisa-position-papers-and-opinions/infineon-nxp-st-enisa-position-on-cybersecurity
Tomi Engdahl says:
DAISEE – Buiding the Internets of Energy
Distributed Data & Physical Infrastructure for a Shared Governance of Energy | #Energy #P2P #DAO
https://hackaday.io/project/21954-daisee-buiding-the-internets-of-energy
DAISEE is an open design program for people who consider Energy as a Common(s) an want to contribute to building the Internets of Energy with resilient, decentralized, secured and trusted data and physical energy infrastructures.
DAISEE was a challenger to the 2016 Hackday Prize : https://hackaday.io/project/10879-internets-of-energy-call-me-daisee. We focused on assessing the relevance of using specific technologies, such as #blockchain, to build a peer-to-peer infrastructure for energy sharing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Renesas Getting Healthy with Healthcare
Home-grown FD-SOI, wireless charging coming
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331763&
Nobody would question Renesas Electronics’ MCU prowess in the automotive market. The Japanese chip company held the number three spot in the global automotive IC market in 2016, largely by leveraging the strength of its MCUs in cars.
But what does Renesas have up its sleeve in non-automotive segments?
He also discussed Renesas technologies devised for ultra-low energy IoT end-node devices.
These include Silicon-on-Thin-Box (SOTB), Renesas’ version of FD-SOI, and an internally developed wireless technology to charge a small lithium secondary battery used in healthcare, wearables and hearing aids.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Renesas has touted SOTB. But now, the Japanese company is confident that it can slash power consumption in its MCUs, reducing, for example, a 20 mW Synergy microcontroller to 2 mW. The goal is a quantum leap in battery life in IoT devices that could lead to a “battery-less” product when combined with energy harvesting, according to the company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Greengrass Embeds Amazon in IoT
AWS runs on GHz-class embedded processors
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331867&
Amazon Web Services can now run on a gateway or even a high-end node for the Internet of Things. Greengrass is a Linux runtime from the Web giant, aiming to extend its reach deeper into the IoT.
The code aims to help businesses speed AWS-based IoT deployments. It uses Amazon’s familiar online tools to create programs that run on users’ local IoT networks, accessing and analyzing data from local IoT nodes. Since it’s part of the AWS family, users can integrate with Amazon’s cloud services as needed.
The fact that Greengrass requires a GHz processor with 128 Mbytes of memory and must be programmed, for now, in Python are not barriers, said Hamid Montazeri, director of software engineering for the tool maker. Such chips are becoming increasingly cheap and Stanley Black & Decker already has staff using Python in AWS, he said.
Amazon attracted many partners for Greengrass given its clout in cloud computing.
Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung are among chip makers that have ported Greengrass to their embedded processors. Set-top box maker Technicolor will start shipping gateways that support Greengrass to one customer later this year. Nokia has a gateway it says will support the code, too.
Intel used Greengrass to bring up in two weeks an IoT use case for a mining company. Qualcomm showed a smart video camera from ThunderSoft using its Snapdragon 410E, supporting Greengrass. Samsung said its Artik 530 and 710 IoT modules support Greengrass.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The First Careful Steps Toward Smart Manufacturing
Converting a plant to advanced automation works best if it is deployed incrementally, with a targeted ROI in each stage.
https://www.designnews.com/automation-motion-control/first-careful-steps-toward-smart-manufacturing/64049919156920?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170609.tst004t
The question I keep hearing at conferences on smart manufacturing is, “What do I do first?” At one conference, an attendee raised his hand and said, “Everything you’re saying about the IoT and big data sounds great, but we’re just now moving from clipboards to Excel.”
There’s a world of small- to mid-size manufacturers who know they have to adopt new technology in order to stay competitive, but they don’t know where to start. One plant manager complained that new advanced plant technology was delivered to the factory and it sat in a corner for six months because nobody knew what to do with it – or had time to do anything about it.
Those who are experienced with bringing aging plants into the world of smart manufacturing suggest small steps at first. “I think that the best approach is to try and work incrementally, identifying key projects that can deliver returns on their own,”
The Roadmap to ROI
The idea is to plan the complete conversion, and then take incremental steps. The final goal needs to be envisioned in order to make sure the early stages are in line with what will come later. “A road-map showing the various stages, and the ROI at each stage, is a good way to start,” said Mustard. “Although the initial stage may not appear to achieve a significant return, it is the foundation for much bigger returns later.”
Mustard warns that the adoption of each new technology has to be determined by the benefit it will deliver to the overall operation. “There is no point in considering any changes unless a clear business benefit is identified. Often, I hear end users saying, ‘We need to look at IoT’ or ‘We need to use big data’ but they don’t have an actual end-goal in mind,” said Mustard. “In theory, IoT, smart manufacturing, and big data should be able to deliver benefits to some degree. However, it is essential that the total life-cycle cost and impact is considered.”
Should Vendors, Consultants, and Integrators Point the Way?
When considering total cost and impact, unexpected results can pop up and undermine the basic goals of improving uptime, increasing throughput, and improving efficiency. “If you reduce an element of your manufacturing process costs but increase your system maintenance costs because of the added complexity you may not have achieved anything – and in fact you may end up spending more,”
“Vendors can play an important role with upgrades by being realistic about the cost and impact of deploying their technology,” said Mustard. “For example, rather than telling end users that everything is easy to deploy and maintain, they can recommend the necessary retraining required for maintenance technicians to properly manage the new infrastructure.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Google could fire up its smart home play
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/04/how-google-could-fire-up-its-smart-home-play/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
When it was unveiled at last year’s I/O, Home felt like little more than Google’s attempt to cash in on the Echo’s success. And the intervening year hasn’t done a lot to dispel that notion. The company announced a handful of additions to Home and Assistant at this year’s event to try to pull even with Amazon’s lead, but the whole Google Home offering still feels ambling and aimless.
It’s clear Assistant is a long play for Google. The company has the technological infrastructure and machine learning capabilities to build something truly great. For now, the thing doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from Alexa (unless you count annoying people with unwanted audio ads, or being annoyingly triggered by opportunistic TV ads…)
Home is definitely a big piece of that puzzle, as it attempts to plant its flag in the smart home. But from the looks of industry estimates, Google’s late start isn’t doing it any favors. Recent analyst estimates put the company at around 23 percent of the 35 million or so devices currently out there. Amazon’s number is hovering around 70 percent.
For now, it remains to be seen how much damage has been done to Google’s search business by Amazon’s careful, long-term maneuvering in the voice AI space, and now by the Echo’s early lead inside the smart home.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smart Devices- A Guide for Students Who Are Renting
http://www.mysmartahome.com/smart-devices-student-renters/
The world of technology moves at something close to warp speed.
Every week there is a new “must have” gadget that will make our lives better and easier.
Only a few years ago all of the hype was on the next big thing in smart phones and tablets.
But now, it is all about the smart home- it is not just your phone that needs to be smart but your TV, coffee machine and lights do to.
This is the world of home automation…
And what does it all mean to you as a college student- living away from home in a dormitory or in private rented accommodation?
Should you be interested in making your home life smarter and more automated?
Is is possible to have a smart home, when you only rent?
In this in- depth guide, I will lead you through the “Home Automation Haze”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IFTTT- The Ultimate Guide
http://www.mysmartahome.com/ifttt-ultimate-guide/
Chapter 1: What is IFTTT?
IFTTT is a very powerful website and app.
It stands for “If This Then That”.
It aims to make your life easier and faster by automating parts of it.
IFTTT connects 2 “services” together in an “applet”.
A service are the apps and the devices that you use everyday. The majority of them are very famous, household brands.
Services are either web apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Gmail or they are smart home devices such as Amazon Echo or the Ecobee smart thermostat.
There are over 360 services that work on IFTTT
Services used to be called channels.
Think of an applet as a recipe (which is what they used to be called.)
Applets link 2 services together so that they interact and respond with each other.
If This happens in one service
Then That happens in another service.
This chart displays the “Top 5 Devices for IFTTT users”
47% use IFTTT for fitness wearable
39% use IFTTT for voice activated assistant
37% use IFTTT for connected lights
34% use IFTTT for “smart thermostat” and
24% use IFTTT for home security.
It is a question that relates to home automation and the Internet of Things.
Over 350,000 lights are connected to IFTTT.
Just under 350,000 fitness trackers are connected.
Just under 300,000 voice devices are connected.
Slightly less than 200, 000 thermostats are connected and
Just over 100,000 security related gadgets are connected
Tomi Engdahl says:
SDR Sniffing Electric Gates
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/11/sdr-sniffing-electric-gates/
Most wireless OEM hardware traditionally use 433MHz OOK modules to exchange information. The encoding and encryption of this data stream is left as a task for the embedded software designer. In most cases, the system can be hacked using a replay attack where an RF packet is recorded and replayed to emulate a valid user. [Gilad Fride] hacked his parking gate using this technique but decided to go the extra mile of connecting it to the internet.
He used an RTL-SDR dongle and ook-decoder by [jimstudt] to sniff out the gate code and this code was tested using an Arduino. The final implementation was done around an Onion Omega which talks directly to the RF transmitter module using the fast-gpio binary. Internet connectivity was achieved using Onion Cloud API which is used to trigger the execution of code thereby sending the gate opening signal.
[Gilad Fride] uses the IFTTT Do button to provide a GUI
Connected RF Gate Remote
https://www.hackster.io/giladfr/connected-rf-gate-remote-d9b0ae
Using an onion-omega and a cheap RF transmitter, remotely send a pre-recorded OOK (on/off keying) code to open a gate or garage door.
The sniffing part was done using a RTL SDR dongle (such as this one from eBay) and a readily available decoder application that runs on Linux.
you connect the dongle and run the ookdump program inside the ook-decoder folder, press the remote signal and printed on screen should be the code in question.
You can see that you get the high time (transmission) and low time (no-transmission) for 53 pulses in this key example. Replaying the exact sequence over and over a few times will open the gate in case this is indeed a simple OOK remote.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ook-decoder reads On-Off Keying radio data commonly used in the 433MHz ISM bands using a software defined radio (SDR).
https://github.com/jimstudt/ook-decoder
Ook-decoder reads On-Off Keying radio data commonly used in the 433MHz ISM bands using a software defined radio (SDR).
On-Off-Keying (OOK) is a simple radio modulation scheme where the carrier is pulsed on and off to encode data. Morse code is a well known historical example. In modern times OOK is commonly used in the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) radio bands (433MHz, 900MHz, and others) by simple telemetry devices like weather stations, remote thermometers, alarm systems, and other remote sensors.
ookd receives and analyzes the RF data looking for bursts of pulses. When it finds a pulse burst it multicasts the pulses to an arbitrary number of listens. ookd doesn’t know anything about any specific protocol. Most of the computation takes place in ookd. In a typical environment ookd will receive and perform computation on 2MB/s and pass on less than 100B/s. You should not need to alter ookd to support a new device.
ookdump is a client which characterizes and dumps received bursts. You will find it useful for understanding your device’s protocol and if you are lucky how to set the parameters to an already existing function to convert your pulse stream into an array of bytes.
wh1080 decodes weather information from Fine Offset wh1080/wh1081 based weather statio
nexa decodes ON/OFF signals for Nexa wireless units (http://www.nexa.se) of the smart home. This outputs the transmitter code to stdout and can also send statistics to StatsD server.1
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Week In Review: IoT
Thoughts on the IoT; startup raises $17M; the Internet of Eyes.
https://semiengineering.com/the-week-in-review-iot-54/
“The Internet of Things presents many new possibilities, and it would be foolish to dismiss those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with skepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives – no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us,”
The Pew Research Center notes that there are an estimated 8.4 billion connected things operating around the world now. The organization surveyed about 1,200 people in a non-scientific canvassing about what the IoT cyberattacks and other issues mean for the general populace; of those responding, 15% said a significant number would disconnect as a result, while 85% said most people will move more deeply into the connected life.
Cybersecurity is lacking in many IoT devices, according to Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert. What’s the solution? “We’re going to get government intervention here because the market won’t fix this problem by itself,” he said at a conference in London, England.
Altman Vilandrie reports that 48% of IoT networks have had at least one data breach, in a security survey of almost 400 organizations. Larger enterprises which have annual revenues of more than $2 billion typically have a loss of more than $20 million related to a single IoT security breach, the firm notes.
Vodafone says it successfully tested narrowband IoT modules from Neul and Qualcomm, connecting them with networking equipment supplied by Ericsson, Huawei Technologies, and Nokia. The interoperability tests were carried out in multiple regions of the world.
Deloitte has worked with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to provide four joint IoT offerings. They are a Turnkey IoT solution for manufacturing; a Smart Retail solution
a Smart Workplace solution
a Smart Venue solution for stadiums to enhance the fan experience.
Apple made its move into IoT this week with the unveiling of the HomePod speaker and personal assistant, which will compete with the Amazon Echo and Google Home products.
Cisco Systems estimates worldwide Internet protocol traffic will reach 3.3 zettabytes by 2021, with video streams accounting for more than 80% of IP traffic. The Internet of Things, augmented/virtual reality, and software-defined wide-area networks will also be significant factors in increasing IP traffic, according to the company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Artificial intelligence deals with ECG recorders data
The University of Tampere and the TAYS Cardiac Hospital utilize the artificial intelligence technologies developed by VTT in home care for cardiac patients. A small ECG recorder is attached to the patient’s chest, whose metering data can be transmitted over the internet for artificial intelligence analysis.
In addition to the patient’s real-time measurement data, the research project utilizes the patient’s real-time measurement data, but accumulated data pools that have been generated during treatment but fragmented into separate systems are analyzed and utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques taught by the patients in the past, developed for the needs of myocardial infarction patients.
The method of targeting complications and controlling risk patients also enables manufacturers of equipment manufacturers to provide healthcare professionals and consumers with access to international markets as well.
MADDEC – MAss Data in Detection and Prevention of Serious Adverse Events The clinical trial of the events leading to complications in the Cardiovascular diseases project was launched in May at the TAYS Cardiac Hospital and the study will be presented at the international EMBEC 2017 conference on Thursday in Tampere.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/06/12/tekoaly-kasittelee-ekg-tallentimet-tiedot/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The long read
Rise of the machines: who is the ‘internet of things’ good for?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/06/internet-of-things-smart-home-smart-city?CMP=share_btn_link
Interconnected technology is now an inescapable reality – ordering our groceries, monitoring our cities and sucking up vast amounts of data along the way. The promise is that it will benefit us all – but how can it? By Adam Greenfield
Tomi Engdahl says:
How smart is it to deploy smart meters on the smart grid?
http://www.edn.com/design/power-management/4458391/How-smart-is-it-to-deploy-smart-meters-on-the-smart-grid-
Conventional power grids worldwide are beginning to strain against rising energy needs. Blackouts are increasing in number of occurrences. How can we improve these systems in a sustainable way?
One possible solution, of which we have all heard, is the integration of information technology to the electric grid. By integrating modern technology, architectures and tools to the electric grids already employed and in service, as well as integrating these methods into newly planned electric grids, would be a very good start.
Most conventional electric grids are composed of many electromechanical systems and in these existing grids, communication only goes in one direction, to the customer, for the most part. We must have a two-way means of communication to share and use information to improve the service and efficiency of power distribution.
Conventional grid structure has the power generation centralized for the most part. The main power generating center does send the main power to distribution centers for localized distribution to customers.
The smart grid
What is needed is a wider number of distribution sources deployed throughout a region for a true distributed energy architecture, such as the deployment of renewable energy sources—that’s a big part of what we call the smart grid.
In the smart grid case, now even consumers can produce energy as well as distribute excess energy via various means such as solar and wind (even though the power utilities see that as their competition and there is push back here). The smart grid is a properly networked system which has two-way communication capabilities.
Conventional grids are ‘dumb’ and ‘blind’ since they do not monitor themselves using various modern sensor technology like those deployed in a typical smart grid architecture.
With a communications-enabled utility power meter finding its way into many homes going forward, utility companies and energy regulators seek to take advantage of the technology to improve energy conservation and awareness. Using this concept, sometimes called the smart grid, the utility company seeks to use networks that enter their customers’ homes so they can actively manage the transmission load.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hackaday Prize Entry: Earthquake Warnings via Tweets
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/10/hackaday-prize-entry-earthquake-warnings-via-tweets/
Seismic waves travel through the Earth’s crust at about four kilometers a second. Light travels through fiber at about 200,000 kilometers per second. Taking network lag into account, it’s possible to read a Tweet about an earthquake a few seconds before the shaking starts. This is the concept behind an XKCD strip and a project for the Hackaday Prize.
Earthquake validation gadget
https://hackaday.io/project/21369-earthquake-validation-gadget
Remember the last time you felt like an earthquake has started but you were not sure so you spent precious seconds looking around and to your phone to check social media instead of acting to save yourself and your family? Our gadget gives you certainty in a second so you can act and not panic!
Currently, the Earthquake validation gadget is a functional prototype designed to enable people to alleviate uncertainty and thus not panic when an earthquake occurs. In a nutshell, the gadget detects both vibration and tweets next to your location that contain earthquake references. Once the earthquake is validated from both sources, the gadget signals its presence through a loud noise and a red light.
Use case
It can be also be seen as an opportunity for hospitals, public institutions or companies in order to help people not to panic. In time data can be gathered and could become an important asset to create a mapped area with the information from the sensors.
Even though at the moment it has only one sensor in order to demonstrate that this concept is feasible, other sensors can also be investigated for a higher sensitivity and other online services apart from twitter (like official seismic institutes) could be used to crosscheck and validate the information or to improve the reaction time.
It’s a gadget that detects both the vibration of an earthquake and the tweets next to your location that contain #earthquake references.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Internet Of Interactive Cats
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/10/the-internet-of-interactive-cats/
Her idea is to make a flying robot equipped with a camera on a gimbal, and because to mounting it on a multirotor platform would be a hazard, instead she’s making something closer to the aerial cameras you might be familiar with from sporting fixtures, a motorised platform suspended from the corners of her roof space on a set of nylon ropes, that can move at will by adjusting the length of each tether. It is suggested that one day the device will be able to launch plastic bolts for [Tuco] to chase and to incorporate other interactive features to allow online users to engage with him.
Tuco the Cat’s Robot – scanlime:018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SCMkpgi4l0
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hackaday Prize Entry: USB GSM GPS 9DOF SD TinyTracker Has All the Acronyms
http://hackaday.com/2017/06/11/hackaday-prize-entry-usb-gsm-gps-9dof-sd-tinytracker-has-all-the-acronyms/
[Paul] has put together an insanely small yet powerful tracker for monitoring all the things. The USB TinyTracker is a device that packages a 48MHz processor, 2G modem, GPS receiver, 9DOF motion sensor, barometer, microphone, and micro-SD slot for data storage. He managed to get it all to fit into a USB thumb drive enclosure, meaning that you can program it however you want in the Arduino IDE, then plug it into any USB port and let it run. This enables things like remote monitoring, asset tracking, and all kinds of spy-like activity.
USB TinyTracker
A USB-flash sized GSM/GPS tracker with a wide array of features
https://hackaday.io/project/25211-usb-tinytracker