Open IoT Challenge deadline is approaching – prize pool over $20K!

Post author By Benjamin Cabé
Post date January 8, 2015
No Comments on Open IoT Challenge deadline is approaching – prize pool over $20K!

A quick reminder to everyone that we are accepting applications for the Open IoT Challenge until next week, January 17.

There are many exciting projects being proposed by developers all around the world, from wireless home automation solutions to geolocation solutions for quadcopters, and many more, so don’t wait and enter now! If you feel like you don’t have all the skills to build something by yourself, remember that we accept applications from teams, so talk to your friends and let your ambitious or crazy ideas become a reality!

Thanks to our sponsors Eurotech and IS2T, the prize pool for the challenge amounts to over $20,000, which I think will make the competition even more fierce and exciting!

I am happy to discuss any ideas you may have to help you put together amazing applications that I’m sure will turn into amazing projects, so feel very free to contact me.

Tags challenge, iot

Eclipse

Open IoT Challenge FAQ

The feedback following the announcement of the Open IoT challenge has been fantastic! The good news is that we’ve already improved the prize pool, and we are also happy to announce that the best applications will be eligible to get $150 worth of hardware parts required to build the final project. Thanks to our sponsor Eurotech for making this possible!

Several people have contacted me with questions so here is a little FAQ to clarify some of the conditions to participate.

Can I use a commercial product as part of my project?

Yes, of course! With this challenge we want to help demonstrate that there are really cool commercial IoT products out there that can really benefit from the ecosystem of open-source libraries and frameworks. If you know of a great commercial MQTT broker and want to use it to send your sensor data, that’s fine! If you want to hack a Nest thermostat to hook it to an open-source data analytics frameworks, that’s fine too!

Are there any publicly available IoT data sources that I could use?

There are many data sources that you may want to try and use as part of your project. The Google keyword here would of course be “open data“. Many cities are starting to make available the current position of their buses, the pollution levels, etc. You can for example have a look at the air quality of the city of London thanks to the London Air API. There are also many “offline” data sources (OpenStreetMap, geotagged Flickr pictures, etc.) that you may want to feed in your system to provide better data visualization, or to correlate environmental data with data coming from your sensors.

When is the deadline to participate?

You have until January, 17th to apply by filling the dedicated online form. If you are short-listed, your final project will have to be completed by February 27, 2015.

If you have more questions, please feel free to comment on this blog post or drop me an email using the contact form.

Tags challenge, iot

IoT

Top 10 IoT Hardware Platforms in 2014

Post author By Benjamin Cabé
Post date December 17, 2014
2 Comments on 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.

#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.
#2 – SeeedStudio Grove system
"It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away."
The Grove platform from SeeedStudio does just that. Their simple yet very smart connectors have become the standard platform for connecting IoT sensors. There is a huge list of sensors and actuators using the Grove standard connector, and you can literally hook Grove devices to anything, from Arduino to Raspberry Pi to Beaglebones thanks to the many shields available on the market.
#3 – Raspberry Pi Model A+ and B+
The Raspberry Pi Foundation really is doing a great job at keeping its very popular platform up-to-date. Every year, we get great upgrades to the existing models.
This year, the model A+ brings the Pi's price tag under $20, with a much smaller form factor, and 30% less power-consumption than its predecessor. The B+ is a model B on steroids: more USB ports, more GPIO headers, and again a power-consumption that dropped by 40%!
#4 – Texas Instruments CC3200 LaunchPad
A powerful Cortex-M4 micro-controller, a WiFi module, a very complete IP stack (DNS, mDNS, SSL-TLS with hardware crypto support, ...), and tons of examples: I really liked the CC3200 user-experience. The only downside is that I had to switch to Windows to use Code Composer Studio, but if you want to use Energia you can have a cross-platform IDE and a programming model very close to Arduino.
#5 – Advanticsys XM1000
I really wanted a nice and simple platform to experiment with wireless sensor networks, 6LoWPAN and CoAP. It turns out the XM1000 is a great platform (and so is the CM5000), that comes with support for both Contiki and TinyOS. The MSP430F2618 processor brings 116K of Flash and 8K of RAM to the table, which is actually pretty decent for most use cases. The external 1MB of Flash is also a nice-to-have if you want to store sensor data locally.
#6 – ESP8266
A $5 WiFi programmable module? Hell, yeah! Several alternative firmwares have popped up over the last few weeks (including a Lua-based one), but the most interesting one is probably the beta version of the FreeRTOS-based SDK.
#7 – Espruino Pico
Javascript on a USB stick, for just £15!
The first version of the Espruino was already an impressive piece of engineering, fitting a full Javascript interpreter in 256K of Flash, and 48K of RAM. The event-driven programming model is really nice, and makes power management completely transparent.
#8 – Spark Core
A super-tiny Cortex M3, that can do WiFi and that allows out of the box to be remotely programmed. Pretty cool, eh? You can indeed program the board either from an online IDE, or from a desktop IDE based on the Atom editor. The Spark Core blueprints are available under a Creative Commons license and the firmware and CoAP-based communication stack are open source too (LGPL).
#9 – CryptoCape
2014 has seen significant progress in the domain of security for the Internet of Things (look at IETF efforts to optimize DTLS for IoT, for example), and I certainly expect more in 2015.
With the Cryptocape, one can easily get hardware support for many cryptographic functions (Elliptic curves, AES, RSA, SHA-2, ...). The downside is that the complete datasheets of some of the modules included in the cape are only available under NDA 🙁
#10 – Rapiro
Last but not least, although a bit expensive, the Rapiro is a great platform for people interested in re-thinking the human-computer interactions. It's an open-hardware robot that is powered by an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi. Attach a Wi-Fi dongle to the Raspberry Pi and you have a wireless IoT robot that you can control using MQTT!