Category: IoT

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Using MQTT and Eclipse Paho in Android Things

A couple of days ago, Google announced that they were essentially rebranding Brillo to Android Things (I do love that name, by the way!), and finally opening it for a Developer Preview.

There are a few things I already like very much in Android Things:

  • It is already supported on Intel Edison, NXP Pico and Raspberry Pi 3, and there are ready to use filesystem images that you can just flash to get going with Android Things in just minutes.
  • The Rainbow HAT sensor kit that’s available for Raspberry Pi is very cool, and includes a 4-digit LED display, 7 RGB LEDs, a temperature and barometric sensor, a piezzo buzzer for basic PWM-based audio, and three capacitive touch buttons. Sparkfun has a kit that’s targeting the Edison, while Adafruit’s kit is general purpose and meant for breadboard enthusiasts.
Rainbow HAT for Raspberry Pi (Photo credit: Pimoroni)
  • Anyone who’s tried to manipulate low-level peripherals using Java will be pretty happy to see that Android Things’ Peripheral I/O APIs provide nice wrappers for GPIOs, PWM, I2C, SPI and UART.
  • Implementing IoT sensor drivers taps into the existing sensor framework you may already be familiar with if you’ve already tried to access the gyroscope or light sensor of an Android device in your app, and the same SensorManager API you’re already used to can be used with your new devices (for which a driver may already exist, and if not adding a new one does not seem overly complex)
  • Finding good development tools for building IoT solutions is always a challenge. It’s great to be able to leverage the Android SDK tools and Android Studio for things like device emulation, debugging, etc.

I just received my Rainbow HAT today and thought I would use the opportunity to do a quick tutorial on how to use MQTT with Android Things, using Eclipse Paho. What’s more, I’ll also show you a cool feature in mqtt-spy that will allow us to easily display the live temperature on a chart.

I used the Weather Station example from Android Things as a starting point, as it is already including code to publish data to the cloud using Google Pub/Sub. My fork is available on Github, and as you can see the changes to the original example are very limited!

Check out the video, and let me know if you have any questions!

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Announcing the Open IoT Challenge 3.0 scholars

The third edition of the Open IoT Challenge officially started one week ago. More than 80 teams have submitted their entries and are now in the running to win the Open IoT Challenge 3.0!

Participants have about three months to complete their solution and show the world how open source and open standards can help build innovative IoT solutions. On February 27, they will have to submit their final project report and hope that their work ends up in the top 3 winning solutions.

For now, the judges have reviewed all submissions and we have awarded  a “starter kit” to the most promising solutions. We hope this will help them bootstrap their project. The kit comes in the form of $150 gift card to buy IoT hardware, as well as access to special offers from our sponsors.

The lucky teams/participants are (in no particular order):

  • Tom Morocz – Residential home diagnostics
  • Bilal Al-Saeedi – Water management for farms
  • Benjamin Lassillour – Fish farming management
  • Siva Prasad Katru – Agriculture app to manage a farm
  • Sergey Vasiliev – Environmental monitoring
  • Mark Lidd – build a secured device that can scan and detect IoT objects that could be compromised
  • Nedko Nedkov – Domestic intrusion detection system
  • Amarendra Sahoo – Retail food storage management
  • Deepak Sharma – Smart traffic lights and controller
  • Celso Mangueira – Breeding monitor
  • Vinayan H – MPulse: machine health monitor
  • Tien Cao-hoang – Sensor network to monitor fish farms
  • Anupam Datta – Factory equipment maintenance
  • Ettore Verrecchia – Intelligent monitored garbage collection system
  • Juan Pizarro – Greenhouse automation/smart farming platform
  • Marcos OAP – Low cost connected homes smart city system
  • Didier Donsez / i-greenhouse: monitor greenhouses for organic and auto-production agriculture with LoRa and Sigfox endpoints

As you see, all the submissions have very specific use cases in mind, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the solutions that will be built.

If you entered the challenge and your name does not come up in this list, it doesn’t mean you’re out – not at all! There were only so many entries we could select (and you may have noticed we selected more than initially planned), and unfortunately we had to draw a line somewhere. If you haven’t been awarded the “starter kit”, we still very much hope you will work on the project you’ve submitted.

All the participants will be sharing their journey on their blogs and on social media, so stay tuned to see what they will be up to! I will also be relaying some of the cool stuff being built on Twitter as well, of course.

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Live demo of the MoDeS3 project at EclipseCon Europe 2016

At EclipseCon Europe I spent a few minutes chatting with István Ráth from IncQuery Labs. He was demoing a pretty awesome set of development tools for safety-critical domains (here: railway inter-locking system), and showing how to use them in combination with some cool Eclipse IoT Projects such as Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Mosquitto.

On a related note, this project was a finalist in last year’s edition of the Open IoT Challenge. Don’t wait and enter this year’s before November 25!