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 Forecast of 50 Billion Devices by 2020 Is Outdated.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:
Fog computing reference architecture released
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/fog-computing-reference-architecture-released/bd6c3c6502963d812d9ff53c4c2a6874.html
The OpenFog Consortium released the OpenFog Reference Architecture, which is a universal technical framework designed to enable data-intensive requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
The OpenFog Consortium released the OpenFog Reference Architecture, which is a universal technical framework designed to enable the data-intensive requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The reference architecture is a step forward in creating standards for interoperability and security in complex digital transactions.
The OpenFog Reference Architecture is a high-level framework that will lead to industry standards for fog computing.
The OpenFog Reference Architecture is based on eight core technical principles, termed pillars, which represent the key attributes that a system needs to encompass. These pillars include security, scalability, openness, autonomy, RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability), agility, hierarchy, and programmability.
OpenFog Consortium
https://www.openfogconsortium.org/
Tomi Engdahl says:
What industrial analytics platforms offer manufacturers
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/what-industrial-analytics-platforms-offer-manufacturers/0532f4f19b410151c3fa37f46445693e.html
Challenges and benefits of analytics applications for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are highlighter as well as the value analytics can provide.
Found at the core of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) transformation, industrial analytics is the engine that turns machine data into actionable insights, driving intelligent industrial operations and business processes.
Whether applied to discrete manufacturing or process production, an industrial analytics platform can be a solid foundation to build this powerful engine and ease the convergence of operations technology (OT) and information technologies (IT) by adapting requisite information technologies and innovating based on operational requirements.
IIoT seeks to connect machines, equipment, and industrial control systems (ICSs) to enterprise-information systems, business processes, and people. By applying analytics to the large volume of data collected from connected machines, we gain insights into their operations and the ability to use these insights to drive intelligent operations of the machines and business processes. Data, analytics, and applications are key elements in the intelligent lifecycles that turn data into insights, and insights into actions
This will enable us to:
Detect anomalies, diagnose faults, raise alerts and prescribe actions for speedy repair of machine failures, thereby increasing uptime;
Perform smart-monitoring of machine-usage patterns to optimize work plans and increase utilization;
Improve quality-control and correlate it with the manufacturing-process metrics to optimize operation parameters;
Predict needs for maintenance actions to repair machines before unexpected breakdowns, thereby avoiding interruptions and reducing unnecessary routine services;
Detect and eliminate wasteful-usage patterns to reduce energy and material consumption; and
Perform optimization on a fleet of machines by dynamically adjusting the operation level of individual devices based on resource availability, operation cost and production demand.
Analytics requirements
To meet the needs of the production industries, an industrial-analytics solution should demonstrate a few important capabilities. The first one is to deliver correct results and to “do-no-harm.” This requires strong analytics and safeguards in their application. Further, as we just have seen, continuous application of analytics must be possible. However, continuous analysis often requires substantial amounts of data to be transferred from the point of data collection to the point of analysis-the decision point.
Therefore, the analytics solution must support distributed deployment at the edge, whether in IoT gateways next to the equipment, within a server cluster in a facility, or in a remote data center and the Cloud. Different deployment tiers may be required depending on the scope of the data being analyzed. For example, analytics for comparing performance of several factories may be performed better at an enterprise data center. Analytics for local supervisory monitoring may be performed better at the edge, enabling higher reliability, shorter latency, smaller data transfer volumes, and better control over the data.
To meet the requirements discussed above, an industrial-analytics platform should have the following capabilities:
Streaming analytics to generate continuous, near-real-time information flows from live machine data;
Distributed analytics in the Cloud, at the factory-floor edge, and in IoT gateways for data processing;
Actionable analytics to turn data into insights and insights into actions;
Multi-modal analytics with multi-dimensional statistical aggregation, complex-event processing (CEP) and machine-learning-based pattern recognition for powerful and efficient analysis of behavior of individual assets, as well as groups of devices;
Adaptive data flow for protocol adaptation, data normalization, policy-based validation and filtering, transformation, and data enrichment to enable easy integration;
Simple customization with code-less configurations for data injection, processing and analytics; and
Security by rigorous design, implementation and validation in accordance with security best practices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Prototype Your Next IoT Device With Bread’s Plug-and-Play B-Line
https://blog.hackster.io/prototype-your-next-iot-device-with-breads-plug-and-play-b-line-9871c4a445a1#.t9rzsj8ge
It’s available in the form of the “Mega-B,” a shield for the Arduino Mega, or the HUNI-B, a smaller sensor board, meant for data collection.
Once you’ve connected everything to the main board, the Breadware design suite enables you to quickly program your gadget, and takes care of interfacing with the cloud automatically.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SoftBank Predicts Big Things for ARM’s Internet of Things Business
http://fortune.com/2017/02/27/softbank-arm-chips/
SoftBank’s semiconductor subsidiary ARM will deliver about a trillion chips designed for the so-called Internet of things (IoT) over the next 20 years, the chairman and CEO of the Japanese company said on Monday.
SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son said the number of “brain cells” in chips would surpass the number of human brain neurons in 2018
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your Internet of Things Speaks Volumes About You
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/26/your-internet-of-things-speaks-volumes-about-you/
As an IoT service, ThingSpeak takes data from an ESP-8266, graphs it, and publicly displays the data. Some of you may already see where this is going. While [Volders] was using the service for testing, he realized anyone could check the temperature of his man-cave — thereby inferring when the house was vacant since the location data also happened to be public
Not a vulnerability with the software per se, but [Volders] well observes that privacy settings must needs be altered whenever you’re using an online IoT service.
Burglars invited
http://lucstechblog.blogspot.fi/2017/02/burglars-invited.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Old Thermometer Gets New Eyes
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/24/old-thermometer-gets-new-eyes/
As much as we’d like to have the right tools for the right job all of the time, sometimes our parts drawers have other things in mind. After all, what’s better than buying a new tool than building one yourself from things you had lying around? That’s at least what [Saulius] must have been thinking when he needed a thermometer with a digital output, but only had a dumb, but feature-rich, thermometer on hand.
Luckily, [Saulius] had a webcam lying around as well as an old thermometer, and since the thermometer had a LCD display it was relatively straightforward to get the camera to recognize the digits in the thermometer’s display.
Dumb thermometer gets digital output
http://kurokesu.com/main/2017/02/20/dumb-thermometer-gets-digital-output/
Some time ago I purchased 4 channel thermometer. Soon after tried few optical character recognition (OCR) techniques on 7 segment symbols including pytesseract, they worked but I was not happy with results. Few days ago pyimagesearch published article detailing his approach. So I pushed it a bit forward and made solution more robust. Also added possibility to analyze video instead of single frame.
Not much was needed – camera, thermometer and bracket to keep them mechanically connected.
4-Channel K-Type Digital Thermometer from eBay
Kurokesu C1 USB camera with 2.8-12mm CS lens
Stainless steel articulating arm with C clamp
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ultrasound: Can Chirp Usurp UI?
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331408&
BARCELONA — Now that motion (Nintendo Wii), touch (Apple iPhone) and voice (Amazon’s Alexa) are old hat, “touchless” looms large and lucrative as the next user interface (UI) of choice for consumer devices. Or so attendees at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) are being told.
“Major consumer electronics breakthroughs have always been triggered by UI revolution,”
Chirp offers a single-chip ultrasonic time-of-flight (ToF) sensor, allowing users to interact with wearable devices without actually touching screens, or to interact with devices sans a screen.
Although Kiang isn’t saying “touchless” – based on ultrasonic sensing – will replace other existing UIs, she believes “it can add another modality” to wearables, AR/VR, smartphones and even automotive.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT in Industry Still ‘Infant,’ But a Big One
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331409&
A panel member speaking here at the Mobile World Congress declared boldly Monday that the intelligent use of industrial IoT (the Internet of Things) even today has the power to eliminate the uncertainty of whether a company’s “hundreds of millions of investment will pay off, that their one dollar will turn into three dollars.”
The “predictive insights” provided by data gathered from connected industrial devices, said Brad Keywell, founder and CEO of Uptake, pose a great opportunity for profit creation with unprecedented “productivity, reliability and safety,” but only if industries “understand” how to take advantage of the power of connected devices.
potential of industrial IoT, cited statistics that forecast $4 trillion in value that will derive from these technologies in the next ten years – an amount equal to Japan’s annual gross domestic product (GDP).
But Atluri added that this number represents only about a quarter of all companies who could exploit industrial IoT.
One key to advancing the use of IoT effectively for industrial efficiency is for more machines, more companies and more people to interconnect, interoperate and share data, a promise complicated by issues of inertia, security and human nature.
“agility is the key” for companies to respond to and use the sort of “predictive insights” produced by a constant flow of data into the industrial process. “But agility is hard for industrial companies who are used to buying equipment and letting it run for 20 or 30 years.”
“Create an insight. Deliver it to a human being in an industrial setting who has to take action.”
Brent’s three steps: 1) collect data from lots of sensors, 2) apply a lot of analytics to understand the data and 3) take action.
ideal human interface with the industrial Internet of Things would be a “hybrid individual.”
More seriously, Herrera said industries might require a “culture change” that broadens the outlook of its technology workers. He cited relatively young workers, “millennials who are getting the data, but are not concerned with how it’s gathered and how it translates operationally.”
Indeed, the greatest worry among all the panelists was the issue of data security in an emerging era of universal data sharing, a realm both governed and sabotaged by humans
“We want our customers,” added Brent, “to own the decision of where their data is going.”
Protecting sensitive data, even in an era when everyone seems to know something about everybody, is certain to slow the proliferation of the Internet of Things in general. This is particularly true in the “closed world,” in Herrera’s words, of many industries that could right now be much more closely – and productively – interconnected.
“It’s still very, very legacy,” said Herrera.
And still very, very human, as Engel finally emphasized.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MWC2017: Ericsson brings network platform to truck
Ericsson brings a new kind of Connected Vehicle Marketplace network solution that allows you to build ecosystems of digital services was connected to the vehicle.
The Swedish Scania will be the first client access solution
One of Scania is a customer platform that enables operators and their customers as well as the drivers have access to a car manufacturer access to new services. The system can be monitored in real-time logistics flows always from large construction sites, public transport and long-distance transport
The Swedish Scania will tell you that their vehicle is connected to a network 250 000, corresponding to two thirds of the cars that they have sold in the past five years.
The amount of embedded network transport is growing rapidly – as well as in commercial vehicles and passenger cars. Research firm Strategy Analytics predicts that the world is 382 million grid-connected vehicles by 2025.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/02/28/mwc2017-ericsson-verkkoalustan-kuorma-autoon/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bluey
https://hackaday.io/project/19962-bluey
Nordic nRF52832 BLE development board with Temperature/Humidity/Light/Accelerometer sensors.
- Nordic nRF52832
- TI HDC1010 Temperature/Humidity sensor
- Avago APDS-9301 ambient light sensor
- MMA8653 accelerometer
- RGB LED
- 2 push buttons
- CP2104 USB interface (built-in serial bootloader for code upload)
- Coin cell holder
- External Power supply options
- SWD interface
- 2.4 GHz PCB antenna
- built-in NFC PCB antenna
Nordic nRF52832 BLE development board with sensors.
https://github.com/electronut/ElectronutLabs-bluey
Tomi Engdahl says:
Example what issues relying very much cloud can cause when cloud end has problems:
AWS’s S3 outage was so bad Amazon couldn’t get into its own dashboard to warn the world
Websites, apps, security cams, IoT gear knackered
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/
Tuesday’s Amazon Web Services mega-outage knocked offline not only websites big and small, by yanking away their backend storage, but also knackered apps and Internet of Things gadgets relying on the technology.
In fact, the five-hour breakdown was so bad, Amazon couldn’t even update its own AWS status dashboard: its red warning icons were stranded, hosted on the broken-down side of the cloud.
Essentially, S3 buckets in the US-East-1 region in northern Virginia, US, became inaccessible at about 0945 PST (1745 UTC). Software, from web apps to smartphone applications, relying on this cloud-based storage quickly broke, taking out a sizable chunk of the internet as we know it.
AWS has many regions, and US-East-1 is just one of them. Developers are supposed to spread their applications over different data centers so when one region goes TITSUP, it doesn’t take your whole platform down. For various reasons – from the fact that programmers find distributed computing hard to the costs involved – this redundancy isn’t always coded in.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 28
Power converter for IoT; improving lithium-sulfur batteries; compressible supercapacitors.
http://semiengineering.com/powerperformance-bits-feb-28/
At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, researchers from MIT presented a new power converter that is efficient at a wide range of currents, which could be a boon for IoT sensors that have variable power requirements. The device maintains its efficiency at currents ranging from 500 picoamps to 1 milliamp, a span that encompasses a 200,000-fold increase in current levels.
The researchers’ converter is a step-down converter and takes input voltages ranging from 1.2 to 3.3 volts and reduces them to between 0.7 and 0.9 volts.
If no device is drawing current from the converter, or if the current is going only to a simple, local circuit, the controllers might release between 1 and a couple hundred packets per second. But if the converter is feeding power to a radio, it might need to release a million packets a second.
Researchers devise efficient power converter for internet of things
Design reduces converter’s resting power consumption by 50 percent.
http://news.mit.edu/2017/efficient-power-converter-internet-of-things-0217
If no device is drawing current from the converter, or if the current is going only to a simple, local circuit, the controllers might release between 1 and a couple hundred packets per second. But if the converter is feeding power to a radio, it might need to release a million packets a second.
To accommodate that range of outputs, a typical converter — even a low-power one — will simply perform 1 million voltage measurements a second; on that basis, it will release anywhere from 1 to 1 million packets. Each measurement consumes energy, but for most existing applications, the power drain is negligible. For the internet of things, however, it’s intolerable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Industrial IoT: Scaling Systems Reliably and Securely
https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/multimedia/industrial-iot–scaling-systems-reliably-and-securely?contactid=1&PC=L&c=2017_02_28_esd_newsletter_update_v2
As the Internet of Things continues to transform businesses and entire industries, key enabling technologies must evolve to address the ever-increasing requirements for these systems. Of particular note is the trend of “fog computing”, an architectural design where key functions (typically executed in powerful cloud server infrastructure) are pushed towards the network edge with the goal of making intelligent decisions locally to avoid flooding Internet bandwidth with raw data.
Fog computing is made possible by the extraordinary growth of computing power, connectivity, and functional consolidation in traditional embedded devices. These fog computing assets can now scale to “systems of systems” with a layered databus architecture implementation using Data Distribution Service (DDS). However, these architectures generate concerns about security, reliability, and Quality of Service among other things.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The deep blue, I mean, the deep Azure sky before me
https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/blog/post/the-deep-blue-i-mean-the-deep-azure-sky-before-me-6add59a5-e276-4408-8a4b-30b67cde748e?contactid=1&PC=L&c=2017_02_28_esd_newsletter_update_v2
Businesses are indeed implementing various IoT systems and collecting data from the devices in those systems. Of course, they’ve been doing this for some time now, but today’s technology enablement and business pressures are pushing them to collect more data, and to use that data in advanced analytics for functions like predictive or prescriptive maintenance – and eventually for machine learning. At the basis of these systems are smart devices. One keynote presenter at ARC made a specific point that the intelligent factories of the future would not be possible without these smart devices, which provide the data and information that enable the advanced analytics. So, it all starts with smart devices.
Regarding the commercial cloud, it’s very clear that Microsoft Azure is the choice for both plant operators and the manufacturers of the equipment. Azure was mentioned many times in keynotes and sessions. In talking to one veteran editor about our Azure strategy, he simply said “everybody here is using Azure.” While talking about Azure to one of Mentor’s current customers, he told me that “Azure is the only cloud for industrial businesses.”
One element of our investment is to integrate the Microsoft Azure software development kits (SDKs) with our Mentor Embedded Linux and Nucleus real-time operating system (RTOS) platforms. This integration provides device manufacturers and their downstream customers with integrated and intrinsic connectivity to the Azure cloud.
Once connectivity is established, data can be pushed seamlessly from the smart edge device to the Azure IoT hub. This connectivity makes the data available to the massive breadth of Microsoft’s cloud services, which can then be leveraged by customer-specific advanced analytics and cloud applications. Why do device manufacturers care? Well, it gets back to the competitive situation: they need to focus their scarce resources on differentiated functionality, reduced risk, and how to get to market quickly.
In summary, Mentor’s platforms integrated with Microsoft Azure SDKs combined with our ability to provide deeply embedded device information to customers makes the smart device even smarter. Because Microsoft Azure is the cloud of choice for the industrial automation market, we are strategically aligned to help our customers and their downstream customers be more successful in the realization phase of their digitalized systems and business models.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ericsson tested the NB-IoT technology in factory
China Mobile and Ericsson have teamed with Intel experimented with successfully over the first mobiilverkon functioning of the IoT as a networked factory. In the trial, the network is connected, inter alia, a screwdriver, and it was carried out Ericsson Panda Communication Company factory Ericsson independent subsidiary in Nanjing.
the results of the test were presented at the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona.
Mobile World Congress presents particular, Precision screwdriver, which is connected to the movement of the following NB-IoT sensors, which transmit real-time data from the tool over the mobile network.
The plant is about 1000 Precision screwdriver, which require calibration routine measures and lubrication, depending on how much it is used.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/5927-ericsson-ja-china-testasivat-nb-iot-tekniikkaa-tehtaassa
Tomi Engdahl says:
Measuring support for IoT devices
Rohde & Schwarz has built up on the basis CMW500 tester system, which allows the measurement of 3GPP Release 13 NB-IoT units. The company has presented the image of the test unit mobile device power consumption measurements.
Rohde & Schwarz presents the Barcelona Mobile Fair in new extensions testauslaitteisiinsa. IOT and future mobile devices, battery life is more important than ever. The new RT-ZVC offers, combined with the R & S CMW-radio measurement place the ability to monitor the power consumption of wireless chipsets, modules, and mobile devices.
Rohde & Schwarz also does things with Qualcomm’s MDM9206 LTE modem NB-IoT testing.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/03/01/rohdelta-mittaustukea-iot-laitteille/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish IoT transmitter module works LoRaWAN networks
SKS Automation WLT-manufactured wireless transmitter has been granted 310 LoRaWAN certificate. It is a certificate issued laws in you first intended for industrial use in Finland.
WLT transmitter 310 can be measured in a number of different variables such. temperature, pressure, flow, vibration, and the quality of the oil. The device monitors independently the measurement items and generates an alarm system, the limit value is exceeded, wirelessly.
WLT-310 transmitter is compatible with LoRaWAN networks in countries that use the 868 MHz frequency. It is suitable, for example, the automation of industrial production and agricultural productivity.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/02/23/suomalaiselle-iot-lahetinmoduulille-serifiointi/
More: http://www.sks.fi/www/_kenttavayla-verkko&id=lorawan
Tomi Engdahl says:
Italian Ducati MotoGP racing motorcycles are tuned in top shape IoT latest technology and Accenture’s machine learning solutions. Ducati Corse racing team is working with Accenture’s MotoGP race bikes for testing.
Italian motorcycle manufacturer Ducati Corse competitions department and Accenture will work together to develop intelligent testing solution that takes advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence technologies.
It makes use of data from a motorcycle up to a hundred IoT produced by the sensor, as well as more test data.
“MotoGP is a 18 racing track. In order to get a motorcycle all the performance out, we need to test them in so many assembly and scenarios as possible, ”
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/02/28/moottoripyoraan-sata-iot-anturia/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Swiss company u-bloxin wireless Wi-Fi & Bluetooth network module is suitable for the implementation of the IoT industry interface. Swedish HMS Industrial Networks to take advantage of the module Anybus-supply.
Anybus Wireless Bolt used IoT solutions for u-bloxin ODIN-W2 Bluetooth + Wi-Fi IoT gateway module. Bluetooth and via Wi-Fi connection can manage the machine via a tablet or smartphone, or a cloud service.
IoT module is compatible with industry-standard protocols that operate in serial, CAN or Ethernet interfaces. ODIN-W2′s ARM processor and the ARM mbed support via the customer can integrate their own applications to the module.
“ODIN-W2 and the ARM mbed provides us with the performance and flexibility needed for the development of customized applications,”
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/02/21/langaton-iot-moduuli-teollisuuteen/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Create Cheap Philips Hue Compatible Devices
http://hackaday.com/2017/03/01/create-cheap-philips-hue-compatible-devices/
He started off by trying to clone a Zigbee Light Link device to a MeshBee — Seeed studio’s open source Zigbee Pro module based on the NXP JN5168. Even though the MeshBee used the same device as a Hue lamp, it would not connect to the Hue bridge. But another clone lamp called Innr that he purchased from the local hardware store did connect quite easily. Using NXP’s open source tools, he was able to download the flash and EEPROM contents from the Innr and copy them to the MeshBee which did the trick.
With all of the software taken care of, and having cheap ZigBee Light Link compatible modules on hand, building low cost Hue compatible lights becomes pretty straight forward.
Custom firmware Hue lights
https://peeveeone.com/?p=187
In my previous posts I described how I was able to connect a Mesh Bee with cloned firmware to a Philips Hue and how the cloned firmware provided me with the key to connecting custom firmware to my Philips Hue. For the past few weeks I have been doing just that, creating custom firmware that connects to a Philips Hue. Using the NXP Light Link demo project as starting point, I managed to created two custom binaries, one for a monochrome dimmable light and one for a dimmable color light. Both binaries use the PWM output of the JN5168 for controlling the levels, which makes them suitable for driving led’s directly or through an external driver.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Device Pulls Its Weight in Home Brewing
http://hackaday.com/2017/03/01/iot-device-pulls-its-weight-in-home-brewing/
Brewing beer or making wine at home isn’t complicated but it does require an attention to detail and a willingness to measure and sanitize things multiple times, particularly when tracking the progress of fermentation. This job has gotten easier thanks to the iSpindel project; an ESP8266 based IoT device intended as a DIY alternative to a costly commercial solution.
Tracking fermentation normally involves a simple yet critical piece of equipment called a hydrometer (shown left), which measures the specific gravity or relative density of a liquid.
To replace this process, the iSpindel measures specific gravity and temperature regularly and hands-free. The device consists of a plastic tube, a 3D printed raft, an IMU for measuring the angle at which the tube floats, a temperature sensor, a rechargeable battery, and a Wemos D1 mini (ESP8266EX based) microcontroller. The inclination angle of the floating device changes in relation to the device’s buoyancy, and therefore in relation to the sugar content of the fermenting liquid.
This is a clever DIY solution that hits all the right notes and takes advantage of all the right elements. The plastic tube is easily sealed and easy to keep clean. The device itself has no effect on the fermenting process, the battery is more than sufficient to monitor fermentation of a batch from start to finish, the sensors give readings every bit as accurate as a properly used manual hydrometer, and the wireless capabilities are used to transmit data from a sealed environment.
iSpindle Documentation
https://github.com/universam1/iSpindel/blob/master/docs/README_en.md
Tomi Engdahl says:
Electronic “Tattoos” for Healthcare Shift to Gather Business Data
http://electronicdesign.com/iot/electronic-tattoos-healthcare-shift-gather-business-data
Ben Schlatka maintains that the company he helped found is focused on healthcare. As vice president of corporate development at wearable healthcare startup MC10, he helped supervise the release of the company’s first product, BioStamp, an electronic skin patch filled with advanced sensors that record and transmit data about a person’s muscle activity and nerve health.
But another feature of the electronic patch has enticed industries far outside healthcare. The Massachusetts-based company builds extremely thin and flexible electronics that mimic human skin. These can be glued directly onto the skin and, using a smartphone or other device, transmit data into the cloud. The information is meant to be accessed by doctors and researchers, or analyzed by software programs.
The “electronic tattoo” is a combination of advanced polymers and stretchable metal interconnects known as the Wearable Interactive Stamp Platform, or WiSP.
While the Biostamp can be recharged and reused, WiSP devices are low-cost and disposable, Andre Yousefi, co-founder of Lime Lab, the design engineering division of PCH, said in an e-mail. The electronic tattoos could be handed out instead of tickets at a concert or paired with a smartphone to let people make payments with the patch on the back of their hand. PCH is “already in discussions with several major brands in these categories,” he added.
Businesses can also build custom sensors into the devices and program the NFC chip to perform different tasks, like give someone backstage access at a concert.
The possibilities for WiSP underline the increasingly porous boundaries between healthcare, consumer electronics, and businesses now that everything seems ripe for data mining. Most wearables have skirted around healthcare by making devices that collect data on personal fitness. These fitness trackers have inspired a new kinds of smart bracelets, like Disney’s MagicBand, which allows guests at Disney World to access parks and make contactless payments.
While these sensors are not likely to help people get into concerts or make mobile payments, they underline the unique changes in how we interact with electronics. “The goal is really to blur the distinction between man-made electronic systems and biology,” Rogers said.
https://www.mc10inc.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Philips taps Microsoft as part of indoor-positioning partnering push, adds Bluetooth to the mix
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2017/02/philips-taps-microsoft-as-part-of-indoor-positioning-partnering-push-adds-bluetooth-to-the-mix.html?cmpid=enl_ledsmagazine_showdailyvideoenewsletterstrategiesinlight_2017-03-01
With location-based services still stuck on the launchpad, the company’s new “Location Lab” reaches out to data and app developers. Meanwhile, Philips finally acknowledges that Bluetooth, not just VLC, can light the way.
In two moves to jump-start the stalled indoor-positioning business, Philips Lighting said it has rounded up IT companies including Microsoft and SAP to develop compelling data-linked uses that might actually attract customers. And in an underlying wireless technology change, Philips quietly revealed that it is now embracing radio-based Bluetooth in addition to the visible light communication (VLC) that it has long preferred.
Indoor positioning — also known as location-based services — transmits signals to smartphones in order to guide and engage people around buildings such as retail stores and offices. Lighting companies want to use ceiling luminaires to send the signals. Philips has persistently championed VLC, which embeds signals in the modulation of lightwaves emitted by LEDs. Other vendors such as Osram and startup Gooee prefer Bluetooth beacons that send signals from chips inside light fixtures.
Regardless of the technology, one of the big early adapters is supposed to be the retail industry, which would guide shoppers around physical stores, pinging them with discounts of interest to the individual based on buying history, loyalty programs, and the like. The schemes represent a potential bonanza in the buying and selling of data that can be analyzed, scrubbed, and repurposed across many industries.
Success in the retail area will require the buy-in of large retail chains and brands.
To help develop broader applications for the technology, Philips today launched a new initiative called the Location Lab partner program, whose initial members include Microsoft, SAP, and Capgemini, among others.
The fortified partnership emphasis echoes a strong push by Philips rival GE, where the newfangled lighting division — called Current, powered by GE — has over the last year signed a number of indoor-positioning partners.
Like Philips, GE has had a notable dearth of public indoor-positioning announcements, even though GE began heavily promoting retail use some three years ago
Another large Philips rival, Osram launched its indoor positioning a year ago but has yet to announce a retail deployment
One lighting company that could be making headway is Atlanta-based Acuity Brands, which last month said it has now installed Internet of Things (IoT) lighting in nearly 40 million ft2 of retail space. Lighting-based indoor positioning is a type of IoT lighting.
Target uses both VLC and Bluetooth technologies in its indoor-positioning trials.
Until now, Philips has steadfastly backed VLC, a light-based technology that provides better accuracy than Bluetooth does — VLC will steer a shopper closer to the beer or soap or whatever they desire. But one of VLC’s drawbacks is that it requires a phone to be in direct line-of-sight with a luminaire. Bluetooth, which uses radio frequencies rather than lightwaves, does not require such direct contact.
Philips has now added Bluetooth to its positioning topography, even if it did not go out of its way to proclaim the move.
Philips’ Location Lab announcement comes on the heels of its acquisition of French VLC specialist Luciom.
In its incipient form, one of Li-Fi’s principle advantages is that it can augment the amount of bandwidth available for wireless Internet, because the light spectrum is somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 times wider than the radio spectrum
Acuity says it has deployed IoT lighting in 40 million square-feet of retail space
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2017/01/acuity-says-it-has-deployed-iot-lighting-in-40-million-square-feet-of-retail-space.html
LED lighting vendor Acuity Brands said it has now deployed lighting-based indoor positioning systems (IPS) in nearly 40 million ft2 of retail space, a claim it made as it and software giant Microsoft jointly showed off Internet of Things (IoT) technology at the National Retail Federation exhibition in New York.
The two companies showed Acuity luminaires communicating information to in-store shoppers and sending data to Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing system to discern useful retail patterns and insights. Acuity reported significant headway since demonstrating IPS with Microsoft at the same show last year.
Target in particular has gained attention for trialing IPS, as LEDs sister magazine Lux Review first revealed nearly two years ago.
By November of 2015, at least 100 Target locations were known to have trialed IPS technology, a number that could well have surged by now.
Acuity’s lighting-based IPS communicates with end users’ smartphones via either the modulation of LED lightwaves — a technology known as visible light communication (VLC) — or via Bluetooth chips embedded in ceiling luminaires. Either way, the lights can welcome the shopper to the store and then direct him or her to discounts of particular interest to that individual. The system can then send data about the customer’s actions to the cloud, giving the retailer and its suppliers valuable insights on sales and shopper behavior.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The resolution of converging lines of interest – The LED Story
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2017/02/the-resolution-of-converging-lines-of-interest-the-led-story.html?cmpid=enl_ledsmagazine_showdailyvideoenewsletterstrategiesinlight_2017-03-01
This industry is experiencing an unimaginable whirlwind of technical directions in which it can move. With the Internet of Things (IoT), LED lasers, Li-Fi (light fidelity), high power, chip-on-board (COB), flip chip, etc., the topics and terms are endless. The Pandora’s Box of issues related to a new technology and a rush to market has been opened.
The lighting industry had been static or at least in flux in past years. The advent of solid-state lighting (SSL) was, in fact, a panacea for the Illumination world. Companies had reached the end of discharge lighting potential and phosphor performance marks. LED lighting arrived on the scene at a perfect time to pump life into a commoditized world. But that’s what capitalism does to all products bought and sold. When creativity becomes stagnant and good ideas wane, they reach back into the box and recycle. We shouldn’t worry about the next big thing — rather, what we can do with an aging infrastructure of 100-plus-year-old legacy lighting? Is now the time to change? With a clean slate in front of us, would we choose an Edison socket?
As I have said on numerous occasions, “We are not alone.” Many other industries (i.e., information technology) see the lighting pie as delicious and are ready to take a bite. The problem is we (lighting folks) see it as the whole meal, not just the dessert. Apple, Google, and Amazon are poised and ready to feast at any moment. With SSL, the possibilities are endless and that is the crux of the issue.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Trojan horse enters the land of lighting
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2017/01/the-trojan-horse-enters-the-land-of-lighting.html
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Internet of Things and LED lighting lately and found some confusion in the marketplace. First, not all devices or fixtures actually use the “Internet” in the Internet of Things (IoT). Many are controlled wirelessly via Bluetooth, RF, etc., but get lumped in as an IoT device. I also think people don’t like the term “Things.” They would much rather call items or devices by what they are or what they are designed to do.
So how does this apply to IoT and lighting? The premise of IoT is probably the most welcomed and misunderstood concept in the 21st century lighting business. We as an industry should quickly and intelligently embrace the power we currently hold. It distills down to illumination, data, power, and control(s). We (lighting people) have the potential to be the conduit or collectors of information to provide it neatly and concisely to the rest of the world. It makes sense to have all of the impending amassed data do something important, rather than collect data for data collection sake. The lighting industry is poised to be the gatekeeper of this information — and with great power comes great responsibility. Simply put, we have been handed a powerful genie that is still amiable to live within the bottle…our bottle. Fixture manufacturers should responsibly embrace this task and not get sidelined due to the lack of forethought or future proofing the business. In the rush to be part of the IoT rage, the lighting industry appears to be giving up too much control.
I’ve said this in several talks before: “There are many other capable industries looking to play in our sandbox.” Some may be nice (at first) but most will not understand the basic sharing principle. This will further disrupt the fragile ecosystem that we know today and minimize the “lighting” control on the building footprint. Does the ceiling grid manufacturer have the ultimate ownership of the light plane or does the electrical grid own the control of power to illuminate the space?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is today’s gizmo-loaded car a hackers dream machine?
http://www.electropages.com/2017/02/is-todays-gizmo-loaded-car-a-hackers-dream-machine/?utm_campaign=&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=article&utm_content=Is+today%E2%80%99s+gizmo-loaded+car+a+hackers+dream+machine%3F
I recently met a senior engineer that had worked for a large international car maker for most of his career and the topic of our conversation was how modern cars had become laden with electronically enabled systems.
Naturally, part of the conversation was taken up with just how many of the electronic gizmos on today’s cars do drivers actually use or want?
Don’t get me wrong. Electronics has done some wonderful things for automotive design when it comes to safety, power-train management and infotainment. But is too much control being taken away from the driver and does managing all these automotive electronic “goodies” actual impinge on car safety by distracting the driver’s primary role of controlling the vehicle using their skill, experience and that highly advanced computer called the human brain?
Tomi Engdahl says:
2016.09.25: The hard problems in IoT
http://manuvr.io/blog/2016/09/25/2016-04-19-the-hard-problems-in-iot/
specification requires more options for protocol apart from CoAP.
You wanted a list of the hardest things in the IoT space. This will largely depend on your audience, but these are all unsolved problems. These are all software concerns, so if you are talking to hardware vendors, I would think that for them to partner with us would be largely a matter of showing them that we have good solutions to these problems without too-badly impacting their designs or business strategies.
Application-layer “AKA: end-to-end” security: “Security” is a two-sided problem… Authentication (a wax seal on the envelope, or a signature), and concealment (“crypto” is from the Greek word for secret). These are largely solved problems at the transport layer (IE, “protecting the wire” [DTLS, HTTPS]).
The trick is to make that security carry past the couriers of the communication, such that only your intended endpoint understands you, despite having many independently-secured wires forming the path.
Policy implementations and “Identity”: These are two separate issues that (like auth and concealment), are linked at the hip. Most everyone I talked to and heard from wanted control without connectivity. This might mean your local gateway is alive and accessible, but there is no internet. Most seem to me to want the option of access-management and data-access from the cloud, but without strictly depending on it.
Shared concepts of data and application semantics: Is my idea of “apple” the same as yours? Does your definition include “red” (whatever that means), average mass (in what unit system), expiration date (with what notation of time). Etc…
The problem is exactly the same for application semantics, but instead of sharing data, it involves giving and taking orders.
Hardware vendors are often in the position of writing their own verticals. This sucks, and most of them seem to know it.
When building hardware, I make choices based on my BOM, and my perception of what the software stack will want, rather than engage in what amounts to “market research” in areas unrelated to my product. I will always miss something. Possibly something lucrative.
Conversely, software vendors see practically everything as a “brownfield” device that must be wrappered to accommodate their goals, assuming it doesn’t outright dictate their stack. They have no direct means of providing feedback into the hardware people with respect to their desires from the hardware, and are commonly mired in numberless layers of wrapper that a variety of hardware vendors have dropped in their lap (mostly without any mal-intent). Some teamd manage to navigate such a mess, but many companies wouldn’t be able.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intro to DTLS
http://www.joshianlindsay.com/index.php?id=169
Intended audience
This post is aimed at technical readers who know what TLS is used for, but may know nothing about its operation. It is also an attempt to explain why DTLS was developed, and how it applies to IoT.
What and why?
DTLS (“Datagram Transport Layer Security”) is a means of securing a datagram-oriented transport. This is useful in situations where your available transport does not provide all of the following things:
connection
guaranteed delivery
ordered delivery
payload integrity
On the internet, this means UDP. But it might equally well apply to packet radio (like BLE or APRS), SMS text messages, or QR codes printed and posted in public places.
These transports are all connectionless.
TLS (with no “D”) expects that the bytes it is fed from the outside world are in-order with no gaps or additions, and that they are coming from only one source (it needs a connection). If those criteria are not met, TLS will fail to operate. As it turns out, these standards are far too high for many communication channels to meet.
DTLS includes features that TCP normally provides, but UDP does not (sequence numbers, checksums), and the machinery to handle those features for the sake of constructing an artifice of “session” on top of a transport that does not natively support this concept, and/or isn’t reliable.
Ok…. so why would you want to use UDP in the first place if you are going to rebuild TCP on top of it anyway?
Valid question. There are a few compelling reasons:
1. The notion of “multicast” doesn’t make sense within a “connection”. So you would need an out-of-band means of doing discovery.
2. Keeping a TCP session alive means a constant resting memory load in your transport driver, and probably network activity to prevent timeouts. While you incur these costs in DTLS anyway, at least they are confined to the presentation layer, and therefore under more direct application control. In terms of compute: TCP has higher fixed-costs at runtime.
3. TCP represents a protocol layer that maintains a concept of “logical” connection for which there exists no physical or cryptographic basis. Because it costs non-zero compute and bandwidth to maintain this illusion of connection, it is therefore itself a target for a unique set of exploits. EG: SYN-flooding. DTLS allows the application layer to make choices about which clients are worth serving.
To sum it up, UDP and TCP are not simply “two ways to do the same thing”. Beyond moving bytes over IP, they don’t do the same things
0xFF,0×00-0xFF
Remember when I said we’d come back around to IANA? IANA provides an 8-bit dead-zone within the 16-bit cipher suite identifier space. It calls this dead-zone “private use”. Private Use means any implementation can declare custom cipher suites and try new ideas without the risk of running afoul of some other implementation.
Datagram Transport Layer Security Version 1.2
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6347
Tomi Engdahl says:
Derive value from IIoT data
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/derive-value-from-iiot-data/d970a337bf3c32fc2da832208f48c73b.html
Collecting data from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) isn’t enough; companies need to know what to do with it. They also need safeguards to ensure that the data they’re processing isn’t breached.
One of the biggest challenges is knowing how to derive value from the onslaught of data gained from adopting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
While data overload isn’t the goal, it can easily become the byproduct of IIoT, and that can quickly stifle the process’ worth. Too much data is of little use, and can even boomerang negatively by becoming a distraction. Successfully interpreting data and translating it into useful information is a process that takes skill and analytics, but—most importantly—a clearly defined, goal-oriented strategy. The goal with IIoT is not only about collecting data, but knowing exactly what will be done with it.
Build robust security
Collecting data from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) isn’t enough; companies need to know what to do with it. They also need safeguards to ensure that the data they’re processing isn’t breached. Courtesy: Eric J. ByresThe best IIoT systems are those designed with security and robustness in mind. They include elements such as automated failback features, an increased tolerance for short-term failures, and security monitoring within the system operations plan.
As “the complete security life-cycle program for industrial automation and control systems,” ISA/IEC 62443 consists of 11 standards and technical reports, introducing the concepts of zones (groupings of logical or physical assets that share common security requirements based on criticality, consequence, and other such factors; equipment in a zone should share a strong security level capability) and conduits (paths for information flow between zones). ISA/IEC 62443 standards provide requirements based on a company’s assessment of cyberattack risks and vulnerabilities.
In your IIoT security checklist, strategize accordingly so you can ensure and implement the following proactive and protective measures:
Design security in from the start. Never leave it as an afterthought.
Enlist expert help. Fuse a team of senior management and security specialists who can communicate and work together to design protective strategic measures that work seamlessly with the plant’s (and whatever products or services therein) functionality and features.
Compartmentalize IIoT solutions into security zones to prevent the spread of malware throughout the plant. In tandem, integrate security best practices during each phase of the developmental process on the plant floor.
Monitor your IIoT system continuously to understand vulnerabilities and manage emerging threats. It essential to detect issues as early as possible.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Old Thermometer Gets New Eyes
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/24/old-thermometer-gets-new-eyes/
he needed a thermometer with a digital output, but only had a dumb, but feature-rich, thermometer on hand.
Luckily, [Saulius] had a webcam lying around as well as an old thermometer, and since the thermometer had a LCD display it was relatively straightforward to get the camera to recognize the digits in the thermometer’s display.
Once the camera was mounted to an arm and pointed at the thermometer’s screen, an algorithm running on a computer detects polygons and reports its information into a CSV file. This process is made simpler by the fact that LCD screens like this are very predictable. From there, the data is imported into LibreOffice and various charts and graphs can be made.
Dumb thermometer gets digital output
http://kurokesu.com/main/2017/02/20/dumb-thermometer-gets-digital-output/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Simple and Effective Car Lock Jammer Detector
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/25/simple-and-effective-car-lock-jammer-detector/
Tomi Engdahl says:
DIY Smart Home bedside remote
https://hackaday.io/project/20062-diy-smart-home-bedside-remote
For less than $60, make a bedside remote to turn off all your lights remotely and automate them with Prota smart hub for automation.
This project aims at showing how simple home automation can be. For less than an hour, with no special skills and for as little as $60, you can make a bedside remote control to turn off your lights from your bed and discover how to automate (at least 5).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your Internet of Things Speaks Volumes About You
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/26/your-internet-of-things-speaks-volumes-about-you/
If only Marv and Harry were burglars today; they might have found it much easier to case houses and — perhaps — would know which houses were occupied by technically inclined kids by capitalizing on the potential vulnerability that [Luc Volders] has noticed on ThingSpeak.
As an IoT service, ThingSpeak takes data from an ESP-8266, graphs it, and publicly displays the data.
Burglars invited
http://lucstechblog.blogspot.fi/2017/02/burglars-invited.html
Thingspeak is an IOT service to which you can send information from an ESP-8266 for example and have it published on a website that is publically accessible. For me it is ideal for testing purposes. The service takes the data I send to it, and puts it on a chart. This makes it possible for me to examine information from my home systems even when I am at work or abroad.
There goes the privacy
So when I got home from work and we sat at dinner I said to my girlfriend:
” Hey you woke up late today. And I saw that you went out at about half past twelve and came back at around half past five.”
First she was flabbergasted and then mad. It was a serious breach of her privacy.
But how did I know ??
Well easy. My girlfriend is kind of ECO aware. So at night she turns down the heating. When she wakes she turns it on and when she leaves the house turns it off again and naturally turns it on again when she gets back.
Well the temperature chart told me when she woke, left the house and entered it again.
Burglars invited !!!
So please be carefull on what information you make PUBLICALLY available on IOT platforms. If it is private information make sure you checked the private checkbox in Thingspeak. And do not blame Thingspeak for any privacy breaches the users have inflicted on theirselves.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Powering IoT Infrastructure Systems
http://electronicdesign.com/white-paper/powering-iot-infrastructure-systems?utm_rid=CPG05000002750211&utm_campaign=9729&utm_medium=email&elq2=a62f0c65960b48a7907fe7871d77978f
The growth of IoT is pushing infrastructure equipment to the limit in terms of processing power and bandwidth. For power designers, the main challenge is how to efficiently power and cool this equipment, while ensuring minimal electricity usage. Designers also must balance board power footprints with thermals when using today’s advanced processors, ASICs and FPGAs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DDoS attacks over 100 Gbps increase 140%
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2017.
https://www.rambus.com/blogs/ddos-attacks-over-100-gbps-increase-140/
A recent report published by Akamai confirms a 140% percent year-over-year increase in DDoS attacks greater than 100 Gbps. The report also notes that 7 of the 12 Q4 2016 “mega attacks” with traffic greater than 100 Gbps can be directly attributed to the Mirai botnet.
Interestingly, the number of IP addresses involved in DDoS attacks grew significantly in Q4 2016, despite DDoS attack totals dropping overall. Perhaps not surprisingly, the United States sourced the most IP addresses participating in DDoS attacks – totaling more than 180,000.
“As we saw with the Mirai botnet attacks during the third quarter, unsecured Internet of Things (IoT) devices continued to drive significant DDoS attack traffic,” stated Akamai’s Martin McKeay. “With the predicted exponential proliferation of these devices, threat agents will have an expanding pool of resources to carry out attacks, validating the need for companies to increase their security investments. Additional emerging system vulnerabilities are expected before devices become more secure.”
Akamai’s report follows an equally sobering warning from Juniper Research that cybersecurity has reached a “boiling point” as the threat landscape continues to widen.
As we’ve previously discussed on Rambus Press, Mirai malware infects vulnerable IoT devices by continuously scanning the Internet for systems utilizing factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords. According to cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, vulnerable devices are then seeded with malicious software that turns them into ‘bots,’
It is therefore important for consumers to be cognizant of the very real threat posed by insecure IoT devices, such as connected appliances, routers, IP cameras and digital video recorders. Unlike PCs and mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones, serious or even critical vulnerabilities are very rarely addressed with firmware updates by manufacturers in a timely manner.
With the number of devices, sensors and actuators are projected to reach over 46 billion by 2021, making the specter of attackers exploiting vulnerable and poorly secured IoT devices loom ever larger.
One approach to achieving a safer IoT environment would see devices secured throughout their lifecycle from chip manufacture, to day-to-day deployment, to decommissioning. This can be accomplished with a silicon-based hardware root-of-trust that offers a range of robust security options for IoT devices, including secure connectivity between the IoT device and cloud services
Akamai Releases Fourth Quarter 2016 State of the Internet / Security Report
Q4 report highlights a 140 percent Year over Year increase in DDoS attacks greater than 100 Gbps SQLi web application attacks increased by 44 percent Year over Year
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2017-press/akamai-releases-fourth-quarter-2016-state-of-the-internet-security-report.jsp
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rambus IoT security articles
https://www.rambus.com/search/?_sf_s=IoT+security
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mitigating DDoS Attacks with Secure IoT Endpoints
https://www.rambus.com/mitigating-ddos-attacks-with-secure-iot-endpoints/
The IoT is expected to comprise 20.8 billion devices by 2020, with Gartner estimating that 5.5 million new ‘things’ went online daily during 2016. Nevertheless, robust IoT security remains mired in the creation phase along with nascent interoperability standards. As more and more ‘things’ connect to the Internet, the danger of nefarious attackers exploiting unsecured devices looms ever larger.
It is therefore important for the industry to be cognizant of the very real threat posed by vulnerable IoT devices. Once infected with malware, IoT devices are often hijacked and instructed to join botnets.
From our perspective, life-cycle management, which includes over-the-air (OTA) updates and vulnerability management, is essential to maintaining the continued security of IoT devices. Specifically, life-cycle management should be implemented via a secure hardware root-of-trust to ensure secure updates of firmware and cryptographic keys.
This secure connectivity paradigm helps mitigate the effectiveness (and damage) of DDoS attacks against the IoT service itself, while ensuring the integrity and protection of collected data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Secure element for Sigfox LPWAN network
http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/secure-mcus/authentication-secure-iot/stsafe-a1sx.html?querycriteria=productId=SC1558.&ecmp=tt4732_gl_enews_feb2017
The STSAFE-A1SX is a secure element that comes preloaded with Sigfox network keys, and provides secure services for data exchanges on the Sigfox’s low-power wide-area network (LPWAN). It constitutes a plug-and-play solution that allows Sigfox Ready™ IoT (Internet of things) devices to connect to the Sigfox network while ensuring data integrity and confidentiality. The STSAFE-A1SX is a highly secure, tamper-resistant solution that relies on a certified, secure EAL5+ Common Criteria chip, on top of which runs a dedicated secure operating system.
The STSAFE-A1SX can be integrated in IoT devices designed for the Sigfox LPWAN in applications such as industrial, utility or transportation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Five Critical Challenges Facing IIoT in 2017
https://www.designnews.com/iot/five-critical-challenges-facing-iiot-2017/146714711456396?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170303.tst004t
FreeWave Technologies predicts major developments in IIoT, from cybersecurity advances to the adoption of HaLow as a widespread wireless protocol.
We’re likely to see big changes in IIoT during 2017 as companies deploy wireless system within plants and in the field. As steep IIoT growth continues, issues such as cybersecurity and wireless protocols will become increasingly pressing.
“2017 is going to be critical for IIoT innovation and product development,” Scott Allen, CMO at FreeWave told Design News. “The adoption of IIoT technology will be challenging as many organizations also work through digital transformation efforts and the growing skills gap.”
Prediction 1: 2017 will see strong security rollouts thanks to emerging technology
In 2017, we’ll see more Fog Computing – a decentralized network architecture that brings computing power closer to where data is generated and acted upon. This will enable analysis, control, and automation closer to the “Things” in IIoT. Since Fog Computing reduces the amount of data being sent to the Cloud, cybersecurity will be enhanced by reduced attack surfaces on IIoT networks.
Prediction 2: IIoT app development programs will begin to outgrow and outpace consumer IoT app development within the next three years.
Third party IIoT application development at the edge – Fog Computing specifically – will alter the use of big data and predictive analytics. The ability to filter specific data directly at the source means less of a need to collect all the data for broad analysis.
Prediction 3: Recruitment of IoTT talent will continue to be a challenge
The biggest challenge affecting IoTT talent recruitment is the skills gap – there are not enough qualified applicants to take on new digital-centric IT roles.
The IT/OT convergence further complicates the issue. Enterprises are transforming the way they operate, and that impacts everyone – especially the folks on the operations side dealing with legacy systems. Each of these factors is creating a talent gap for many organizations.
Prediction 4: By the end of 2017, millions of smart IoT devices will be deployed into networks that use the 802.11 ah (HaLow) protoco
According to FreeWave, the rise of Smart City initiatives is helping the 802.11 ah (HaLow) wireless networking protocol overpower Bluetooth for critical infrastructure applications such as traffic management, public safety, energy efficiency, and public infrastructure design. “Where HaLow shines – high-speed data transmission rates for longer distances – Bluetooth 5 falls flat,” said Allen. “As urban areas continue to expand outward, the need for high bandwidth solutions will become more important, which would seem to favor HaLow in the long run.”
Prediction 5: A public utility closure will occur in 2017 due to aging infrastructure
The maturation of interoperability standards and the evolution of remote data collection technologies are forcing critical infrastructure and utility organizations to adapt at a new pace.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Defining The Edge Of IoT
http://semiengineering.com/defining-the-edge-of-iot/
The proliferation of low-cost sensors opens up opportunities for an array of innovative products.
“Life on the edge of IoT is where creativity knows no bounds.”
Brian Derrick, Vice President Corporate Marketing and General Manager, Mentor Graphics.
We are living in a remarkable time for electronic product design and development. In his blog post, Brian Derrick explores how the race to create the latest smartphones results in the availability of advanced, low-cost sensors, which has opened up unlimited opportunities for companies to create innovative IoT edge products. From hobbyists, to small and large companies, designers are taking their new IoT ideas to market. A new breed of designers has arrived and they are making hardware design trendy again.
This new breed of designers are reshaping design flows and they have new expectations. They typically work in small teams and require integrated design flows to quickly and easily produce a functioning device while spending as little money as possible. They require the capability to develop a proof-of-concept for system validation in order to capitalize on the opportunity of the IoT market.
Smartphone Innovation Ignites IoT Creativity
https://www.mentor.com/tannereda/blog/post/smartphone-innovation-ignites-iot-creativity-a0d30e59-1fd4-4e2d-ab3c-2c0078bb52de?cmpid=10171
For example, advanced technology drones, created by DIY experimenters or teams at small companies, can take full advantage of cheap smartphone sensors to create flight control, autopilot, navigation, and imaging systems. Hobbyists can now create inexpensive drones that rival those created by the military industry, sans weaponry, of course! New startups are forming every day, such as Chirp Microsystems Inc. which offers a low-power, ultrasonic gesture recognition technology for use in mobile and wearable devices. Small groups within large companies are developing innovative technology, such as the team of IC designers at Google that created a contact lens containing a sensor that measures glucose levels in tears, to improve diabetes treatments.
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 Design Aspects of IoT PCB Designs
A look at unique design and layout challenges in IoT devices.
http://semiengineering.com/7-design-aspects-of-iot-pcb-designs/
To consumers, IoT devices look sleek and simple, but they are comprised of a distinct set of components, physical interfaces, PCBs, and circuitry that presents unique design and layout challenges. This paper looks at seven things to consider when designing PCBs for successful IoT devices.
https://www.pads.com/resources/overview/7-design-aspects-of-iot-pcb-designs-96400e16-084a-4516-8c2f-3a46680dcec2?cmpid=10171
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet Security? Not Even Close
http://semiengineering.com/internet-security-not-even-close/
The number of threats continues to expand. It’s time the tech industry began embracing solutions.
This week’s outage at Amazon Web Services is yet another reminder that Internet security is still not quite there.
Amazon isn’t a second-tier cloud services provider. It’s one of the biggest cloud companies on the planet. If Amazon can’t get it right, it’s hard to imagine anyone can. The company’s Simple Storage Service, aka S3, was the target, and it took about five hours before this online storage was up and running.
Compared with other outages, damage was minimal. It doesn’t appear that private data was hacked, which is good because one of Amazon’s S3 customers is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. As a point of reference, Yahoo suffered from three successive attacks that gave hackers access to data from at least 1.5 billion accounts. And Target’s 2015 breach compromised the data of 40 million customers.
There are four major problems, and a number of remedial steps that will be required. Among the problems:
1. Existing security protocols are insufficient. Large companies such as financial institutions point to their compliance with Transport Layer Security and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer, as industry best practices. The truth is these are more like a speed bump for attackers than an impenetrable force field.
2. Legacy infrastructure only can offer so much protection. The number of new threats that are proliferating on the darknet is like the scene out of apocalyptic movie where natural or evil forces threaten to destroy civilization.
There is no single solution to these problems, but there are steps that can be taken to make future attacks less rewarding for cyber attackers.
To begin with, security needs to be designed in at the system level. While most of the attacks so far have been at the software or networking level, compromising the security of hardware and embedded software has the potential to do far more damage. Gain access to the hardware, and you potentially gain access to far more than a single company.
While the chip industry has been focused on hardware-software co-design, it really needs to be hardware-software-security co-design. Security needs to include everything from obfuscation techniques and authentication to complete separation of signal paths, a security certification for black-box IP that is used in these devices, and an end-to-end supply chain tracking for every piece of hardware and IP that is used in a device.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Six IoT Security Predictions
https://www.securerf.com/six-iot-security-predictions/?utm_campaign=Email%20Newsletter&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=43668617&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–olLK12vJuba4awBcFKGEmX8CNsZ5McVtEOP2xpvgRLJ3WR21Qb5WvgolCp8GUHnA-vVn2kbLMuaddpz7Qu1hgj4o_6LOYCSXYSRL8axr-mFQfkJY&_hsmi=43668688
New, Unexpected Things in the Internet of Things Will Increase Security Breaches
IoT Will Be a Fact of Life – and Pose Increased Risks for Homeowners
IoT Security Standards Will Emerge
IoT Product Developers Will Increase Their Focus on Security
Quantum-resistant Cryptography Goes from “Nice to Have” to “Must Have” Status
There Will be a New Focus on Educating Consumers About IoT Security
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rigol IoT test tools
https://www.rigolna.com/iot/?utm_source=EDN&utm_campaign=2-17%2520IoT&utm_medium=web%2520ad
Tomi Engdahl says:
How the Gadgets We Love May Make Us More Vulnerable to an Attack
Cyber threats are a growing issue, but most people don’t know that the gadgets they love may be part of the problem.
http://www.inc.com/anne-gherini/are-your-wearables-helping-cyber-criminals.html
In October of 2016 the internet went dark, or at least that is how it felt to many of us
The reality was a large scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack caused internet platforms and services to be unavailable to large groups of users in Europe and North America.
What makes this even more interesting is that the attack was part of a genre of DDoS attacks that are executed through Internet of Things (IoT) devices (think wearables, printers, cameras, routers, thermostats, baby monitors) via a botnet, a network of internet-connected devices infected with malware and controlled as a group.
The attack in October 2016 was not an outlier. Cybersecurity is a real and growing issue for companies of all sizes, across all industries and around the world. According to the 2017 SonicWall Annual Threat Report, companies experienced both record-high levels of ransomware attacks and the largest-ever DDoS attacks thanks to IoT devices in 2016.
These methods of attack focus on disrupting business and can prove costly for their victims. Ransomware locks down companies’ data and/or systems and demands a certain amount of bitcoin be paid to regain access. According to SonicWall, cyber criminals used this type of malware in 638 million attack attempts in 2016 vs. only 3.8 million in 2015. What’s more is the rise of ransomware-as-a-service, where individuals who want to profit from ransomware don’t need to be IT experts. They simply download and deploy a malware kit, enabling just about anyone to become a cyber criminal.
Between these two methods of attack, companies lost hundreds of millions of dollars to emergency response efforts and business disruptions.
“The cybersecurity landscape is an arms race between business leaders and security professionals on the one hand, and cyber criminals on the other hand,” said Bill Conner, president and CEO, SonicWall. “As with any arms race, advances made by the good guys are often offset by advances made by the bad guys.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Week In Review: IoT
Mobile World Congress; embedded world 2017; Jasper likes NB-IoT.
http://semiengineering.com/the-week-in-review-iot-42/
The number of IoT and IoT-related conferences continues to grow, but IoT also is beginning to make inroads into established conferences. The Mobile World Congress, held this week in Barcelona, Spain, teemed with Internet of Things announcements from many companies.
SEMICON Southeast Asia
e embedded world 2017 exhibition and conference
Altair Semiconductor said its ALT1160 CAT-1 LTE for IoT chipset has been certified to run over T-Mobile’s 4G LTE network.
Altair, Landis + Gyr, and Sierra Wireless reported that Telstra is working with their IoT products on its network in Australia.
Rohde & Schwarz worked with Qualcomm Technologies to test and verify Qualcomm’s MDM9206 global Cat M1/Cat NB-1 dual-mode LTE modem for narrowband IoT networks.
Jasper, a unit of Cisco Systems, now supports NB-IoT with its Control Center platform.
The TOBY-R202 and TOBY-R200 LTE Cat 1 modules from u-blox are certified for T-Mobile’s 4G LTE network.
Research and Markets forecasts the IoT managed services market will increase from $21.85 billion last year to $79.6 billion by 2021, for a compound annual growth rate of 29.5%.
Internet of Things (IoT) Managed Services Market by Service Type (Infrastructure Management, Security Management, Network Management, Data Management, Device Management), Vertical, and Region – Global Forecast to 2021
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/qxmsp4/internet_of
Tomi Engdahl says:
Osram wedges into indoor positioning by selling Bluetooth chips
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2017/03/osram-wedges-into-indoor-positioning-by-selling-bluetooth-chips.html?cmpid=enl_ledsmagazine_showdailyvideoenewsletterstrategiesinlight_2017-03-03
As vendors struggle to sell lighting-based indoor-positioning systems, Osram has come up with a different way to make progress: Sometimes, instead of selling lighting, settle for providing the wireless radio chips that transmit signals such as Bluetooth which are crucial to the technology’s operation.
That’s what Osram did in Switzerland, where it furnished Bluetooth chipsets to a fashion retailer that tacked them onto existing lights at 23 stores throughout the country, including Guess and Marc O’Polo shops. The only purpose the lights serve in the indoor-positioning job is related to power supply: The Bluetooth transmitter runs off the same electricity conduit as the lights, thus avoiding troublesome batteries and their annoying tendency to drain.
In an indication of just how important the sale of IT products can be to the future of the lighting industry, Osram told LEDs Magazine that it makes the Bluetooth transmitters itself, rather than stocking them through a private-label partnership with an IT company.
Indoor-positioning systems at Guess, Marc O’Polo, and Gallery shops in Switzerland have induced customers to spend over 10% more than they would have, according to Osram.
Earlier this week, Osram rival Philips Lighting cited a forecast from ABI Research that the indoor-positioning market will triple by 2020 to over 1 million installations.
But one challenge the lighting industry faces is that the IT industry could dominate the market, which does not really require lighting technology.
One bonus that lighting has it that it provides a ready-made ubiquitous infrastructure. Some lighting vendors, Philips among them, have also advocated using lightwaves from LED light sources rather than Bluetooth radio as a means to transmit to phones. That technology is called visible light communication (VLC).
At any rate, the indoor-positioning concept has been slow to take off for lighting vendors. The largest known lighting-based retail trial, by US giant Target, was covering about 100 stores at last count over a year ago.
There have been few announcements of indoor-positioning installations, even though the lighting industry has been talking up the possibility for at least four years.
Bluetooth versus VLC
Philips also revealed that it is now embracing Bluetooth radio chips as a means for sending signals to phones, while continuing to back VLC, the technology which embeds signals in the modulation of LED lightwaves. VLC would also guarantee that lighting companies, as much as IT companies, secure a solid share of the indoor-positioning pie.
Osram eschews VLC in favor of Bluetooth, a view shared by other lighting specialists such as startup Gooee.
VLC has the advantage of being more accurate than Bluetooth as a location tool. In cavernous stores, such as a Walmart or a Target, it can more reliably direct a shopper toward the beer or diapers, for example.
But pinpoint accuracy might not be so critical to many humans
Navigation aside, the main objective for any retailer’s indoor-positioning deployment would be to increase customer spending, which seems to be happening for Bollag-Guggenheim. Osram’s webpage says the stores have so far “generated a lift in average basket value of more than ten percent,” and implies that shoppers have been cashing in Einstone-delivered coupons at a high rate.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SIL STRIKING POINT: Cybersecurity enables the next wave of innovation for smart lighting
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2017/02/sil-striking-point-cybersecurity-enables-the-next-wave-of-innovation-for-smart-lighting.html?cmpid=enl_ledsmagazine_showdailyvideoenewsletterstrategiesinlight_2017-03-03
As more businesses begin to dive into the Internet of Things, the lighting industry must tend to cybersecurity issues in order to exploit the full market potential of smart lighting, says PAUL JAUREGUI.
As viable new business models and value creation opportunities solidify across every industry, today’s leaders are beginning to see cybersecurity as an enabler of next-wave innovation and a requisite for new technologies to meet their full market potential. This certainly holds true for connected and smart lighting solutions, all of which face cybersecurity challenges.
Joining the Internet of Things (IoT) is a significant advancement for lighting, but it also means that connected bulbs, lighting networks, and supporting controls are now subject to similar security issues faced by all other connected products. Securing user data, privacy, ensuring availability, and protecting network-connected devices against unauthorized access will be key for companies wanting to gain and maintain trust with smart lighting buyers.
Penetration testing is one of many practices that helps companies ramp up their cybersecurity efforts
Penetration testing activities help organizations identify security weaknesses in systems the same way a real-world attacker would — by hacking them. This enables organizations to better understand and ultimately minimize the risk associated with IoT systems.
Praetorian’s IoT penetration testing services take a holistic approach to security testing by reviewing the entire product ecosystem, from edge to cloud, while prioritizing vulnerabilities so our clients can successfully balance risk with time-to-market pressures. It provides end-to-end security assurance that helps organizations better deliver and deploy secure connected products.
different product teams grapple with the same set of common security problems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 Design Aspects of IoT PCB Designs
https://www.pads.com/resources/overview/7-design-aspects-of-iot-pcb-designs-96400e16-084a-4516-8c2f-3a46680dcec2?clp=1
To consumers, IoT devices look sleek and simple, but they are comprised of a distinct set of components, physical interfaces, PCBs, and circuitry that presents unique design and layout challenges. This paper looks at seven things to consider when designing PCBs for successful IoT devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Salo mobile phone factory was sold – IoT center created
A sales contract between Microsoft and Salo IoT Park was signed today. Real and personal property of the total purchase price is EUR 6.2 million. The sale includes the land in addition to approximately 90 000 square meters of production and office space.
Salo IoT Park gets control of the marketing of the property, which the shelter has been developed during decades of significant cellular and smart device business.
” Users of these spaces give certainly continue to rise to global success stories, “says Chairman of the Board of Directors Salo IoT Park Petri Olkinuora.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/03/02/salon-kannykkatehdas-myytiin-iot-keskus-syntyy/