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Eclipse IoT

Enter the Open IoT Challenge 4.0: some ideas for your submission

There are only a couple weeks left (deadline is Nov. 13) for entering the fourth edition of our Open IoT Challenge!

The Open IoT Challenge encourages IoT enthusiasts and developers to build innovative solutions for the Internet of Things using open standards and open source technology.

Open IoT Challenge 4.0

You probably remember last year’s edition and its winner, Sébastien Lambour, who built an amazing solution: InTheMoodForLife. The project aims at analyzing sleep patterns to anticipate mood disorder episodes for people suffering from bipolar disorder.

Sébastien won $3,000, and we also provided him with an additional $1,000 to fund his participation in Eclipse IoT events where he presented his project. For example, Sébastien attended the Eclipse IoT Day in London, a couple months ago, and gave a brilliant talk where he shared his experience.

As a reminder, there is already a nice incentive for you to enter the challenge, even if you feel like you can’t compete for the first place (and you shouldn’t feel like that, by the way!). In fact, if you are among the 10 best submissions, our jury will award you a $150 gift certificate that will help you buy the hardware you need to build your project!

I thought it would be useful to share some of the ideas I would like to see come to life, and some of the technologies that I think would be interesting to use.

Deep learning

With Deeplearning4j moving to Eclipse, now is the perfect time to think of having deep learning play a role in your project. Whether you plan on doing image recognition, predictive maintenance, or natural language processing, I am curious to see if Deeplearning4j, or other open source projects in the machine learning / deep learning area, can help you implement your solution. There are some IoT gateways out there that are fairly capable, and even some that include a GPU, so please be crazy and push the boundaries of edge computing! 🙂

Industrial IoT

Many – too many, probably – IoT solutions are very consumer oriented (connected toothbrush anyone?), so I certainly hope to see lots of projects that are more industry-focused. Our production performance management testbed can probably give you some pointers regarding open source projects that are applicable, and even provide you some code to get started.

Blockchain and distributed ledgers

Beyond the buzzword and the hype, blockchain is still an interesting topic, which you may want to put to use in your Open IoT Challenge project.

Security is one key aspect of IoT. Blockchain might be a way for you to secure communications or data exchanges, but it is also interesting to think about using distributed ledgers as a way to enable a sharing economy.

What if you could “share” some of your IoT devices’ processing or networking power and get compensated, in a secure way, using a blockchain? And how about true “pay-per-use” scenarios, where e.g construction companies share a pool of high-value power tools for which actual usage is tracked, logged, and billed accordingly, through a blockchain?

Of particular interest, in my opinion, is IOTA, an open source distributed ledger which, by design, has no transaction fees (it has no miners, as the 2,779,530,283,277,761 (!) tokens that form the ‘tangle’ were all generated in the so-called genesis transaction).

This means that you can leverage the IOTA tangle to implement secured micro-transactions in your IoT solution, e.g to expose (and monetize) sensor data to the world. I would be particularly curious to see how IOTA performs on constrained devices, and how well it scales.

Low-power, long-life

MangOH RedOne of our sponsors this year, Sierra Wireless, will be providing the 10 best proposals with a MangOH Red IoT board. This board is perfectly suited for low-power IoT applications and would be the ideal partner in crime if running for years out of a small battery is important to you.

It is often an afterthought in IoT to think about the maintenance of the equipment. I am interested in seeing how your proposal will highlight how you plan on making your solution easy to operate, including things like over-the-air updates, energy consumption optimization, etc.


If you are not sure if your idea would make for a cool project, feel free to ping me, I will be happy to give you some feedback 🙂

I am looking forward to reviewing your proposals, and seeing all the cool projects you will be building over the next few months!

Submit by Nov. 13 for the IoT Challenge

And last but not least, big thanks to Bitreactive, CONTACT Software, Eurotech, Intel, Red Hat, and Sierra Wireless for sponsoring the Open IoT Challenge this year.

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Announcing the Open IoT Challenge 3.0 scholars

The third edition of the Open IoT Challenge officially started one week ago. More than 80 teams have submitted their entries and are now in the running to win the Open IoT Challenge 3.0!

Participants have about three months to complete their solution and show the world how open source and open standards can help build innovative IoT solutions. On February 27, they will have to submit their final project report and hope that their work ends up in the top 3 winning solutions.

For now, the judges have reviewed all submissions and we have awarded  a “starter kit” to the most promising solutions. We hope this will help them bootstrap their project. The kit comes in the form of $150 gift card to buy IoT hardware, as well as access to special offers from our sponsors.

The lucky teams/participants are (in no particular order):

  • Tom Morocz – Residential home diagnostics
  • Bilal Al-Saeedi – Water management for farms
  • Benjamin Lassillour – Fish farming management
  • Siva Prasad Katru – Agriculture app to manage a farm
  • Sergey Vasiliev – Environmental monitoring
  • Mark Lidd – build a secured device that can scan and detect IoT objects that could be compromised
  • Nedko Nedkov – Domestic intrusion detection system
  • Amarendra Sahoo – Retail food storage management
  • Deepak Sharma – Smart traffic lights and controller
  • Celso Mangueira – Breeding monitor
  • Vinayan H – MPulse: machine health monitor
  • Tien Cao-hoang – Sensor network to monitor fish farms
  • Anupam Datta – Factory equipment maintenance
  • Ettore Verrecchia – Intelligent monitored garbage collection system
  • Juan Pizarro – Greenhouse automation/smart farming platform
  • Marcos OAP – Low cost connected homes smart city system
  • Didier Donsez / i-greenhouse: monitor greenhouses for organic and auto-production agriculture with LoRa and Sigfox endpoints

As you see, all the submissions have very specific use cases in mind, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the solutions that will be built.

If you entered the challenge and your name does not come up in this list, it doesn’t mean you’re out – not at all! There were only so many entries we could select (and you may have noticed we selected more than initially planned), and unfortunately we had to draw a line somewhere. If you haven’t been awarded the “starter kit”, we still very much hope you will work on the project you’ve submitted.

All the participants will be sharing their journey on their blogs and on social media, so stay tuned to see what they will be up to! I will also be relaying some of the cool stuff being built on Twitter as well, of course.

Categories
Eclipse IoT

Announcing the 16 winners of the Open IoT Challenge starter kit!

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.

sponsors iot challenge

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!