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Eclipse IoT

4 Takeaways from “All Things IoT” week at EclipseCon Europe

Last week, the Eclipse IoT community was pretty busy at EclipseCon Europe. We were having our largest Eclipse event of the year, and it featured lots of IoT.

After a much needed weekend break to recover from an incredibly fruitful week, I am taking some time to write down some of my personal takeaways.

Oh, and before you ask: we are working on uploading all the IoT sessions from the IoT Working Group meeting and IoT Day to YouTube. They will be available shortly, and as you can see in the blog post below, some of them already are! 🙂

IoT Day featured lots of real-world talks

I was really pleased with the turnout of the IoT Day. What was particularly interesting was hearing not only community insiders tell us about what they are doing for, and with, Eclipse IoT projects, but also getting the point of view of people who are pure consumers of the technology.

This year, for example, we had people like Müge Kural (Eteration) or Nicola La Gloria (Kynetics) telling us how projects like Eclipse Kura or Eclipse hawkBit have helped them implement use cases such as advanced dashboards for Electric Vehicles, or scalable software updates for Android-based IoT devices.

Look out for the video recordings of their talks, in the meantime, you can read more about Kynetics’ story in our recently published case study.

Eclipse IoT Testbeds Hackday

Open IoT Testbed Hackday at EclipseCon Europe
Open IoT Testbed Hackday at EclipseCon Europe

As you probably know by now, we are ramping up our Open IoT Testbeds initiative, and it was great to use EclipseCon Europe as an opportunity to spend some quality time with the different companies involved in the testbeds and discuss next steps. To encourage collaboration, we held a “hackday” on Wednesday.

There was a strong focus on the Industry 4.0 / Production Performance Management testbed, and it was great to see participants from different companies sitting at the same table, brainstorming about the roadmap for the next few months.

One of my action items from the hackday was to get a mailing list set up. So, if you want to get more involved in the testbeds, you can now subscribe to [email protected] to participate!

It’s all about the integration

EclipseCon Europe coincides with the anniversary of the Eclipse IoT Working Group, and 6 years into the adventure it is great to see that this year, even more than others, the project teams spent a lot of time discussing how to better integrate the different projects with one another. For example, it has become pretty clear that Eclipse hono will probably become the de-facto standard for device connectivity, and there were lots of discussions on how to provide hono protocol adapters for PPMP (Eclipse Unide), OPC-UA (Eclipse Milo), or Eclipse Kura gateways.

Also, at the IoT WG meeting, we discussed how to structure the community work better and collaborate towards a more integrated Eclipse IoT stack. It has been proposed that we establish a sub-committee of the IoT WG dedicated to integration work. Expect to see more on that topic soon!

New projects got unveiled

You may have seen the news: just a week before EclipseCon, two new Eclipse IoT project proposals have been announced.

First is Eclipse Thingweb, a project that will be hosting an open-source toolkit for the W3C Web of Things ecosystem. Matthias Kovatsch from Siemens presented the project, and you can get his slides here.

The other project, Eclipse Cyclone, will put an open source implementation of the DDS (Data Distribution Service) middleware standard of IoT developers. Hans van’t Hag from ADLINK gave the presentation below, and his slides are here.

I am looking forward to seeing these projects move to Eclipse IoT over the next few months!

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Eclipse IoT

Hack the Eclipse IoT Open Testbeds at EclipseCon Europe

By now you are probably pretty aware that EclipseCon Europe, coming in just a few weeks in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Oct 22-25, will feature All Things IoT!

But wait, there’s more! We will use the opportunity of having a lot of people from the Eclipse IoT community in the same location to spend some time hacking the Open IoT Testbeds on Wednesday, October 24.

“What can I expect from the Testbed Hackday?”

As we will be unveiling a new testbed focusing on Production Performance Management of industrial equipment, and with the Asset Tracking Management testbed well on its way, there will be many people who have been working on these testbeds attending the hack day.

They will be available all day to discuss (and experiment live!) how to extend them, and of course ready to show you how they are built.

“Why should I attend?”

  • If your company is creating IoT products that you would like to integrate with the existing testbeds,
  • If you are involved in an Eclipse or Eclipse IoT project and would like to see how your project can get involved complement the solutions already demonstrated in the existing testbeds,
  • You want to experiment with the actual hardware that the testbeds are featuring,
  • You are interested in starting a new testbed and would like to gauge the interest of the community and brainstorm some ideas face-to-face.

Please let me know if you plan on attending! I think the Open IoT Testbeds are a great opportunity for people and companies to collaborate on real use cases, and to demonstrate by example how open source, complemented by a strong commercial ecosystem, can jump-start the development of IoT solutions.

I really think the Open IoT Testbeds are a great opportunity for people and companies to collaborate on real use cases, and to demonstrate by example how open source, complemented by a strong commercial ecosystem, can jump-start the development of IoT solutions. If you share this conviction, you really don’t want to miss the hack day… and all the other days of EclipseCon Europe!

EclipseCon Europe 2017

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Unveiling the Eclipse IoT Open Testbeds

Today we are announcing the Eclipse IoT Open Testbeds, a new initiative for driving adoption of open source and open standards in the industry.

For more than five years, over 30 open source projects have been calling Eclipse IoT home. Yet, it doesn’t necessarily make it easy for people to understand how to put all the pieces together, from integration with sensors and hardware, to networking and connectivity, to cloud computing and enterprise integration.

More often than not, I am asked about where to find blueprints or reference architectures for IoT, and how one is expected to leverage open source software such as what Eclipse IoT has to offer. These are very legitimate questions as building any IoT solution requires much more than just open source software components.

I believe the Eclipse Open IoT Testbeds are a unique approach to answering these kind of questions, especially since this is the first time IoT leading companies are effectively developing the testbeds in open source.

Open Source FTW!

Creating testbeds that demonstrate how a particular set of technologies can be used is certainly not a new idea, I’ll give you that. What is unique with the approach we are taking, though, is that we are making the testbeds available in open source.

This means that you can really learn firsthand how all the pieces of an IoT solution are being put together to solve a real business case, as well as experiment with the actual code and dive into the architecture.

Over time I certainly expect people will start forking the testbeds’ code to create their own extensions and, even better, will contribute them back to the community.

Open Testbed for Asset Tracking

The first testbed we have been working on is around Asset Tracking Management.

In a nutshell, we are showing how to track valuable assets (think expensive/valuable parcels such as artwork) in real-time in order to optimize their transport, and in particular minimize the costs due to spoilage, damage or delays.

The testbed features Eclipse open source projects such as Eclipse Kura, Eclipse Kapua, Eclipse Paho or Eclipse Che, but is of course also leveraging other technologies and commercial offerings – like any solution should, right?

Head over to the Asset Tracking testbed webpage to learn how, to name a few, OpenShift, Zulu Embedded, Samsung ARTIK, and more, have been integrated to demonstrate a full end-to-end IoT solution, all the way from data collection to complex event processing, to exposing information to 3rd parties through open APIs.

What’s next?

The Asset Tracking Open Testbed is our first take at demonstrating how companies are building real IoT Solutions today.

We are already planning to create other testbeds around e.g Smart Manufacturing, and therefore are inviting anyone interested in existing or future testbeds to join us at https://iot.eclipse.org/testbeds.

Join us at Red Hat Summit and IoT World 2017!

If you are attending Red Hat Summit (May 2-4, Boston) or IoT World 2017 (May 16-18, Santa Clara), please make sure to stop by our Asset Tracking Testbed Demo, see it run live, and understand better the contribution each partner has been making to the testbed.