Category: IoT

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Eclipse IoT

IoT Programming Workshops

Over the past two years, I’ve delivered several training sessions and workshops about IoT Programming. Depending on the audience and their background, those sessions have been either one-day or two-day long.

As you probably know, IoT is really broad, and one needs to be familiar with all the pieces involved in an IoT solution to be able to design and build an efficient IoT solution. For example, I strongly believe that every software developer building an IoT solution today needs to care about the hardware, which is why the workshop starts with a pretty extensive overview of the hardware landscape, and goes through things like the different classes of IoT devices that may exist (from micro-controllers to powerful system-on-chips, when should you use one or the other?), to the different kinds of sensors, before moving on to the communication protocols suited for IoT (like MQTT or CoAP).

The training includes many hands-on sessions, and the participants get a chance to learn first-hand how to master the MQTT protocol (using Eclipse Paho), how to program IoT gateways, or how to build IoT visualizations.

The overall outline is the following, and can be adapted on a case-by-case basis, depending on the trainees’ expectations:

  1. Introduction to the Internet of Things
  2. Sensing and acting on the physical world: micro-controllers or powerful gateways?
    1. What can be sensed and acted upon?
    2. Overview of sensors and actuators technologies
    3. Making an intelligent object
      1. Different classes of devices for different needs
      2. Interacting with sensors and actuators
      3. Overview of IoT operating systems and frameworks.
  3. Connecting things, or how to build efficient and scalable sensor networks
    1. Constraints of IoT Communications
    2. Overview of different topologies for IoT networks
    3. IoT Communication protocols
      1. MQTT – Eclipse Paho, Eclipse Mosquitto
      2. CoAP – Eclipse Californium
  4. Managing IoT solutions
    1. IoT Gateways – Eclipse Kura
    2. Device Management & Software Provisioning – Eclipse Leshan, Eclipse hawkBit

If you are interested in participating to similar workshops in the future, either for yourself or for your company, please get in touch!

Categories
Eclipse IoT

On making standards organizations and open source communities work hand in hand

eclipse-and-standardsDid you know that the Eclipse Foundation is home to many open source implementations of industry standards?

From IETF to ISO to oneM2M or OASIS, we have many open source projects that provide industrial-grade implementations that anyone can use to evaluate a given standard, or to effectively use it in their commercial solution.

We do believe that open source is key to the adoption of standards, and in a presentation I gave last week at an Open Source Think Tank organized by IEEE, I shared some thoughts on what makes a standard successful, as well as how Eclipse has proved with recent success stories that open source and open communities are a key factor.

The two examples I used in my presentation (see the slides at the end of this post) originate from the Eclipse IoT community.

OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) LWM2M is a standard for doing device management of IoT devices (i.e remotely monitor the device’s health, upgrade its firmware over-the-air, etc.). The first drafts of the standard have been published less than 4 years ago and today, LWM2M is already used in commercial products, and has a thriving community of developers and contributors gathered around two Eclipse open source projects: Eclipse Wakaama, and Eclipse Leshan. I think you will agree that this is the kind of timeline you would like to see for all standards!

The other example is MQTT, a very popular IoT protocol that I’m sure you’ve heard about! 🙂 In just a few years, it went from a de-facto standard to an actual OASIS and ISO/IEC standard. Having a rich ecosystem of open source MQTT implementations (including Eclipse Paho clients, and the Eclipse Mosquitto server) certainly helped the standards organizations to pin down the issues that need to be fixed in the spec much faster. What’s more, open source projects will also fuel the future of the MQTT specification, as they allow for new ideas to be explored (see e.g this recent work on MQTT-SN).

My hope is that Standards Developing Organizations will start embracing open source initiatives more and more. Open source communities are a great place for innovation, and can host standard implementations that sometimes actually become reference implementation. They also complement very well the role of the SDOs, which are here to enforce some needed processes when it comes to evolving a standard, anticipating incompatibilities or corner cases, etc.

As mentioned above, here are the slides I used during my presentation. I am looking forward to hearing your comments and feedback.

On making standards organizations & open source communities work hand in hand from Benjamin Cabé
Categories
Eclipse IoT

5 Things I Learnt at IoT World 2016

Last week I attended IoT World in Santa Clara. It was a great event, and what was particularly exciting was to meet with adopters of Eclipse IoT technology who stopped by our booth. It just felt incredibly energizing (and even more so given I had to spend 2.5 hours at US immigration the day before the show, which was quite annoying, to say the least), and moments like this are why I love my job, really.

Here are 5 things I learnt at IoT World that I thought I would share with you:

→ Eclipse Wakaama and Eclipse Leshan are saving lives

thingwaveThat tweet I reshared above was done right after a discussion I had with Jens Eliasson from Thingwave. Thingwave is a company that is building a connected device that aims at monitoring vibration in rock bolts used in the mining industry, in order to detect anomalies such as excessive strain.

Their solution, called the Smart Rock Bolt, is attached directly to a bolt (see picture) and uses LWM2M (thanks to open source implementations Eclipse Wakaama and Eclipse Leshan) and IPSO Smart Objects to expose sensor data that a gateway collects and analyzes.

You can read more on the Smart rock bolt on Ericsson Research blog.

→ MQTT remains an IoT protocol of choice

mqttorgIt was only one hour or so before the end of IoT World that my colleague Ian and I found out that just next to our booth was a company, infiswift, building an IoT platform around a highly-scalable MQTT broker. But in fact, it is no surprise, since pretty much every person we met, and many of the companies exhibiting, were either building solutions using MQTT or already very much aware of its capabilities. So we should have just guessed about infiswift 🙂

→ Eclipse IoT technology to be shipped with a Kickstarter project that raised $1.7M

pine64bw

Pine 64 is a Raspberry Pi-like single board computer which aims to be a very affordable 64-bit computing solution, with a price tag starting at just $15.

I met Daniel Kottke, one of the persons involved with the Pine 64 project (and employee #12 at Apple, where he participated to the H/W design of the Apple I), and this is from him that I learnt about the project and its incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign. What I found really exciting is that Pine 64, in its “IoT Package” version, will ship with openHAB pre-loaded on its SD card. And as you probably know, openHAB is running on top of the very popular Eclipse IoT project Eclipse SmartHome.

smarthome

→ Eclipse Kura becoming a framework of choice for building IoT gateways

kuraFrom Litmus Automation, to Eurotech, to the likes of Microsoft or Cisco now looking at Eclipse Kura, it was great to see that many companies are endorsing it as a framework of choice for building modular and extensible IoT gateways.

→ Consumer IoT leaving the headlines

All in all, IoT World was a very good conference. I am looking forward to next year’s edition and to see how the IoT industry will have evolved by then.

This year it was pretty clear that the consumer IoT market is starting to consolidate, and that everyone’s attention is shifting towards Industrial IoT (as an example, this year’s hackathon was sponsored by GE).  And how could I complain to see that end-consumer gadgets like connected dog collars are leaving room to more useful, like Thingwave’s connected rock bolt, or to see that the likes of GE are working on kick-ass Industrial IoT platforms built on top of open source and open standards such as CloudFoundry or MQTT.

By the way, from one conference to the other: this week I am in Austin for OSCON’16. If you are attending, please stop by Eclipse Foundation booth to say hello!