Categories
Eclipse IoT

5 open source IoT projects to watch in 2016

The IoT industry is slowly but steadily moving from a world of siloed, proprietary solutions, to embracing more and more open standards and open source technologies.
What’s more, the open source projects for IoT are becoming more and more integrated, and you can now find one-stop-shop open source solutions for things like programming your IoT micro controller, or deploying a scalable IoT broker in a cloud environment.

Here are the Top 5 Open Source IoT projects that you should really be watching this year.

  • #1 – The Things Network

    LP-WAN technologies are going to be a hot topic for 2016. It's unclear who will win, but the availability of an open-source ecosystem around those is going to be key. The Things Network is a crowdsourced world-wide community for bringin LoRaWAN to the masses. Most of their backend is open-source and on Github.
Note: you can click on the pictures to learn more!

 

What about you? What are the projects you think are going to make a difference in the months to come?

In case you missed it, the upcoming IoT Summit, co-located with EclipseCon North America, is a great opportunity for you to learn about some of the projects mentioned above, so make sure to check it out!

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Eclipse IoT’s 2015 Year in Review

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!

IoT logo

So without further ado, here are the 5 most noteworthy things that happened in the Eclipse IoT community this year.

[toc no_label heading_levels=”2″]

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!

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Announcing the 16 winners of the Open IoT Challenge starter kit!

It’s now been a bit more than 2 weeks since the second edition of the Open IoT Challenge has officially started. More than 80 teams have applied to be part of the challenge, and if you ask me, that’s really exciting!

They will be working until end of February next year to complete their project, and to demonstrate how open source and open standards can help build innovative IoT solutions faster.

We have awarded the 16 most promising proposals a starter kit that we hope will help them bootstrap their project. The kits  a $150 gift card to buy IoT hardware, as well as access to special offers from our sponsors.

sponsors iot challenge

The lucky teams/participants are:

  • Sarthak Sethi – Farm monitoring
  • Davide De Cesaris & Marcello Majonchi – IoT into space
  • Shivankur Pilania – Artificial Intelligence based circadian clock
  • Deepak Sharma & team – Smart kitchen container
  • András Vörös & team – Improving cyber-physical systems with IoT technologies
  • Iranga Supun Athukorale & team – Elderly care using advanced thermal footprint tracking
  • Tien Cao-hoang – Water level monitoring for paddy fields
  • Franz Schnyder – “IoT-ing” a mountain’s hut off-grid solar power system
  • Ettore Verrecchia – Remotely controlled intelligent street lamp
  • Mahavir Dwivedi & team – Remote monitoring of patient’s vital parameters for rural areas
  • Manolis Nikiforakis & team – Device management for the ESP8266 using LWM2M, Leshan, Wakaama and Kura
  • Aprian Diaz Novandi & team – Forest fire detection
  • Rajesh Sola & team – Adding MQTT-SN support to Eclipse Kura
  • MirMohamed Salman & team – Finding petroleum/service station based on vehicle breakdown indication
  • Tobiasz Dworak – Medical IoT gateway based on Eclipse Kura
  • Steve Liang  & team– Connected babies

All the participants will be sharing their experience on our dedicated Tumblr, so you probably want to follow it if you’re interesting in following their stories!