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.
#2 – VerneMQ
MQTT just got approved as an ISO standard. What else do you need to demonstrate that it's one of the key protocols for IoT? More open-source implementations!
VerneMQ is a highly scalable MQTT broker written in Erlang that is getting lots of interest if you judge by its 500 stars on Github!
#3 – RIOT OS
RIOT is a very impressive realtime operating system for IoT, with a very active community. For the first time this year, they are organizing a RIOT Summit – that certainly tells something about the maturity of the project!
#4 – Eclipse IoT
I could not not include Eclipse IoT in the list! 😉 The thing is, there really is a lot of cool stuff happening right now, and I think 2016 will be exciting to watch for Eclipse IoT. In particular, we're moving to the cloud, and projects like Eclipse Hono will provide a great foundation for building OSS-based IoT backends.
#5 – RHIOT
It's not a typo, both RIOT and... RHIOT in the same Top 5! Red Hat is already contributing to several open-source projects very relevant in an IoT context (e.g Apache Camel), and RHIOT is an interesting approach for implementing end-to-end IoT messaging.
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!
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.
[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.
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!
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.
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!
