The Rapiro is a nice open-hardware robot, controlled by an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi.
Earlier this week, I decided that he’d be nice if I could run Eclipse Orion directly on the robot, allowing me to write an app that would bridge the Rapiro to the Internet (there’s a WiFi dongle attached to the RaspberryPi so the robot does have Internet access), using MQTT.
I wrote about my experience in this blog post at Element14, so check it out! If you’re more interested in the final result, you may just want to check out the video below 🙂
Oh, and when I say it’s open-hardware, it really is: the 3D models of all the part of the robot are now on Thingiverse, so you are actually free to 3D-print your own version of the robot!
The most difficult aspect of developing an IoT solution is probably that one has to deal with the –embedded– hardware that will eventually run the application that talks to the sensors, thermostats, car entertainment, etc. Embedded is definitely complex: the resources are limited, the development tooling usually sets you back a decade, etc.
But when you have figured out your hardware, you need your devices to actually “talk” to the cloud. And there comes the not so trivial problem of finding an open and publicly accessible server to talk to. This is why Eclipse IoT has been proposing an MQTT broker an M3DA server for a while. Many people use them for connecting their prototype solutions, before actually moving to a more production-ready environment.
Last week, we deployed two new open IoT servers at iot.eclipse.org.
CoAP server
CoAP is an UDP-based protocol for IoT that mimics the REST paradigm in an IoT context. It provides an elegant and efficient way to do sensors monitoring on very constrained networks.
A CoAP server exposing test resources is now available at coap://iot.eclipse.org:5683 and is open for anyone to interact with, whether it’s for learning more about CoAP key principles, or for actually testing a client implementation against it.
Lightweight M2M
OMA Lightweight M2M aims at proposing standard resources and workflows on top of CoAP for Device Management. The freshly deployed LWM2M sandbox at Eclipse provides a nice way to connect LWM2M capable devices and monitor them using a web UI and REST API.
It runs the Leshan open-source LWM2M server.
If you’re actually interested in learning more about CoAP and LWM2M, you probably want to check out this presentation from Julien Vermillard at EclipseCon 2014.
On March 19, we were very lucky to host a great IoT event during EclipseCon 2014.
I think everybody in the room that day learnt a lot about the current challenges for IoT, and our speakers really did a good job at presenting the challenges for building an open, interoperable, and secure Internet of Things.
If you couldn’t attend the sessions, the videos are now available on the YouTube channel of the Eclipse Foundation.
You can watch them using the video playlist below:
If you are interested in getting the slides that were presented, you will find a link to get them in the description of each video.
