Categories
IoT

Top 10 IoT Hardware Platforms in 2014

This year, a lot of IoT hardware platforms have been released, and all the semiconductor companies have finally started getting really serious about providing affordable development boards showcasing their portfolio of processors and sensors.
Here are the devices that particularly caught my attention, with some links to additional educational material.

  •  FRDM-K64F

    #1 – FRDM-K64F

    The FRDM-K64F is a development board for the Kinetis K64. Freescale had the great idea to not only make the platform compatible with the ARM mbed platform, but also to provide a board that is compatible with Arduino shields.
    Since a few months, you can also install a Java ME embedded firmware on the FRDM-K64F, turning it into what is probably the cheapest Java development board on the market.
Note: you can click on the pictures to learn more!

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Announcing the Open IoT challenge

2014 is almost over, and one of the first big events for Eclipse IoT next year will be EclipseCon 2015, March 9-12 in Burlingame, California.
If you haven’t seen the EclipseCon program already, I highly encourage you to check out all the great sessions that we have selected as part of the IoT Theme Day, and of course the rest of the program which has just been announced. This year, EclipseCon is colocated with FOSS4G North America, the largest global gathering focused on open source geospatial software.

In order to encourage everyone to start making Internet of Things a reality, we are launching a programming contest that fosters the creation of IoT projects based on top of open-source technologies, and that we hope will keep everyone busy during the few months separating us from EclipseCon. You can get familiar with the conditions to participate at http://iot.eclipse.org/open-iot-challenge.

Here are a few ideas of projects or technologies that I would really like to see used by the participants:

  • Geolocation technologies like the ones available as part of the LocationTech initiative. How about, for example, using GeoMesa to store spatio-temporal data points corresponding to the air quality measured by environmental sensors?
  • A project combining low-cost/low-power IoT microcontrollers powered by an embedded OS like Contiki or RIOT, and a more powerful IoT gateway (running for example Kura) in charge of the heavy lifting of the sensor data before it’s sent to the cloud.
  • IoT is merely a buzzword (sorry, I hope you already knew! :smile:) for “connecting more devices to the internet”. Those devices’ core value is their data, and there are many opportunities for your projects to leverage time-series databases or stream processing technologies to actually make sense out of the amount of data generated by the IoT.

To enter the challenge, you simply have to apply via this online form before January 17, 2015 and tell us what you plan to build. Don’t wait!

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Espruino Pico on Kickstarter: only 4 days to go!

If you follow our regular IoT hangouts, you probably have seen this presentation of the Espruino Pico already:

If you don’t, you really want to check out espruino.com!

Espruino is an Open Source and Open Hardware project that provides a super-tiny implementation of Javascript that runs on micro-controllers. The Espruino board is a ready-to-use board that you can use to run Javascript IoT applications, but the Espruino interpreter can also run on lots of other targets.

Gordon Williams, the lead of Espruino, is working on a new version of the Espruino board with a tiny form factor, and his Kickstarter ends in only 4 days.
While the initial goal has already been reached, I would really like to see him reach the £50,000 stretch goal since it means he will implement socket support in the Espruino interpreter, allowing IoT developers to use MQTT, CoAP, and the like right from their Javascript code!

Please consider supporting this very cool open source project and don’t wait any longer to go visit their Kickstarter page!