Come the end of the year and you usually want to look back at what you’ve accomplished during the past twelve months. For us, at Eclipse IoT, it’s been a pretty busy and successful year!
So without further ado, here are the 5 most noteworthy things that happened in the Eclipse IoT community this year.
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5 new open-source projects!
Eclipse IoT is all about making IoT simpler by providing developers with actual code that they can use to build their solutions. We ended 2014 with 14 projects, and I’m glad to announce that this year we’ve seen 5 new projects join us! In case you’re wondering, here’s what they are all about:
⇢ 4DIAC
IoT certainly gets lots of traction in the industry. In order to help people build distributed industrial and automation systems, 4DIAC provides an open-source infrastructure based on the IEC 61499 standard.
In March this year, 4DIAC became an Eclipse project, and we are really glad to see 4DIAC embracing the Eclipse IoT community!
⇢ RISE V2G
Electric Vehicles are becoming more and more popular, and while we are not yet at a point where anyone is able to hack his own car, it is nevertheless great to see open-source projects like RISE V2G appear.
RISE V2G is the reference implementation of the ISO/IEC 15118 standard, that is used for communication between charging stations and electric vehicles. You can learn more on RISE V2G in our recent Virtual IoT webinar:
⇢ TinyDTLS
Security is an important aspect of IoT and we’re happy to see TinyDTLS moving from SourceForge to EclipseIoT.
DTLS allows to secure UDP communications (UDP being used in the context of IoT for e.g. CoAP or LWM2M), and TinyDTLS is a C-based implementation that is very lightweight.
⇢Tiaki
When Verisign became a member of the Eclipse IoT Working Group earlier this year, their interest was to help make IoT solutions more secure, and more flexible.
Eclipse Tiaki allows to leverage Internet standards like DNSSec and DNS-SD, for doing IoT service discovery. A Java implementation was just recently contributed, and a C implementation is coming!
⇢ Hawkbit
Rolling out software updates in the realm of IoT is a difficult challenge. You need to adopt very particular techniques when it comes to securely rolling out updates to millions of devices on the field.
Project Hawkbit is originating from Bosch Software Innovations and will provide all the back-end infrastructure one needs to manage software and firmware updates. The source code is currently going through intellectual property review and will be publicly available soon.
50% more contributors
The bar was already pretty high with 110 contributors on all the Eclipse IoT projects, but we’ve seen an increase of more than 50% of the numbers of contributors, with a total of 170 individuals who did contribute code or documentation to the projects. On behalf of the projects, I would really like to thank you guys. As you know, you’re really helping make a difference, and I hope to see many more contributions in 2016!
People are learning about IoT thanks to Virtual IoT
We have hosted many free webinars this year to educate people about IoT in general, and it’s pretty cool to see we have now three times as much members in our Virtual IoT meetup group than 12 months ago.
I highly encourage everyone of you to join the group, and to have look at the recording of our previous sessions.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy7t4z5SYNaQS1XZ8uiqqn0nNLi4qU-VW
Our projects deliver, and people are using them
At Eclipse, we are doing our best to make sure that our open-source projects deliver software that is easy to consume. From open IoT protocols (like CoAP, LWM2M or MQTT) implementations to frameworks like SmartHome, OM2M or Kura, many Eclipse IoT projects are doing a great job at producing regular high quality releases. From a project’s home page, you are typically one click or two away from downloading the code and getting started with the project.
With 22,000 downloads a month (from 1,200 last year), it’s pretty clear that our projects are getting lots of interest, and that lots of people are actually using them to build their IoT solutions.
A growing Twitter community: join us!
We have been sharing IoT-related news on our @eclipseiot Twitter account for a couple years now. If you are not following us yet, you should consider joining the 3,000+ people that already doing so!
Happy holidays!
