I am really excited that we are having a second edition of the Open IoT Challenge. Last year, more than 60 teams entered and we ended up with some seriously cool projects being built!

So we are back, with more prizes, more sponsors, and more importantly even more cool ideas of what you could build if you decide to participate. You will find below some project ideas that you may want to explore, but I am pretty sure many of you will just surprise the jury by coming up with even cooler ideas! 🙂

Hardware integration

I would really like to see integrations of your projects with new kinds of sensors. Measuring temperature and humidity is so mainstream now, is it not? 🙂 How about solutions for health monitoring, using blood pressure monitors, or even EKG?

Last year we’ve seen integrations with cars, over OBD-II, and I’m sure there is still a lot to do in that area (how about a solution to help people drive more efficiently by allowing them to compare their gas consumption with others on a given road?).

Another interesting idea would be to explore how to improve the User Experience (UX) for IoT, by providing new ways to interact with IoT devices: gesture interactions, sound control (look at e.g. Amazon Alexa), etc.

Wireless technologies

• LoRa? Sigfox, anyone? Those wireless technologies definitely get lots of traction these days and I am looking forward to seeing projects that will highlight how they can be combined with existing open source technologies. It would for example be interesting to see teams adding LoRaWAN support in Eclipse Kura.
• Bluetooth Smart/BLE is becoming more and more mainstream, and lots of IoT starter kits now include BLE (TI’s SensorTag obviously comes to mind). Not only will BLE provide wireless sensing capabilities to your project, but you can certainly get more creative and start building solutions that use beacons to do indoor positioning…

Data Analytics

What if you could predict when an event is going to occur by analyzing your IoT data stream?

I am hoping that some of you will be using technology like Apache Spark and process IoT Data to extract patterns that can be used to predict when e.g the battery of a device is going to depleted. You probably want to look at things like at the Apache Spark Streaming API, the MLlib machine learning engine, and this code example for doing Apache Spark Streaming with MQTT.

Enter now!

You have 10 days left to submit your application, so don’t wait any longer and let us know what you will be building.  If your proposal is particularly cool, you will be awarded a $150 gift card that you will be able to use to buy the hardware parts needed for building your project.
You can find more details on the challenge on the dedicated web page.

Thanks to our sponsors bitreactive, Eurotech, IS2T, Red Hat and Zolertia for supporting the challenge by providing prizes for the winners, as well as access to special offers for all the challengers.

Oh boy, this has been a difficult call, but we are happy to finally be able to announce the three winners of our Open IoT Challenge!
The challenge has been keeping our participants busy for two months, and I’ve already blogged about the ten awesome projects that actually completed their projects.

Our jury (Andrea Ceiner from Eurotech, Fred Rivard from IS2T, Ian Skerrett and myself) has selected the following winners:

Grand Winner: Davide de Cesaris, for the Carracho project

Davide has been blogging like crazy about his Carracho project, and it’s really no surprise: he really implemented lots of interesting features in his cloud-based vehicle monitoring solution, so he had a lot to share!

Here are some of the features implemented in Carracho:

• Read vehicle ECU parameters via Bluetooth exploiting the OBD-II standard protocol
• Capture GPS data with a USB dongle and parse them
• Scan for nearby Bluetooth devices to check enabled drivers
• Detect security issues like flames or gas leaks

Davide’s project is very complete, and a great demonstration of how Kura can help Java developers to quickly build IoT applications. On the server side, Carracho is leveraging the Solair Cloud Platform. It looks like Davide has lots of ideas for the future of Carracho, so I hope he will continue blogging about his experiences 🙂

Davide wins $750, a full MicroEJ license ($5500) and 3 Cortex-M4 development boards! Congratulations!

Runner-up: Emir Ercan Ayar and team, for the IoNeeds project

IoNeeds allows to turn your jar (yes, that antique device used to store rice, flour, and what not) into a connected object able to automatically let you know when it is empty, and possibly place online orders for you. You should really have a look at what they did – they even documented how to create your own PCB for the jar monitoring device!

This is a very complete project and I think I will probably try to replicate it myself :smile:. I do hope Emir and Utku will take the idea further, and maybe do a Kickstarter some day!

Emir and his team win $500, a full MicroEJ license and 2 Cortex-M4 development boards.

Third place: Lotte Steenbrink and team for the watr.li project

It’s hard to describe watr.li in a better way than the awesome demo that Lotte and her team in their wrap-up video below. Long story short: watr.li is very cool, and you should really have a look at RIOT if you are interested in wireless sensor networks!

The code for the project is on Github.

Lotte and her team win $250, a full MicroEJ license and 1 Cortex-M4 development boards.

---

Finally, we would like to acknowledge the quality of all the projects that entered the challenge. The jury wanted to give a special mention to Franz Schnyder’s home automation project. Franz integrated MQTT-SN in Kura, and I really encourage you to have a look at his project, and the source code that he’s made available.

Thanks to all the participants for their hard work, and thanks to our sponsors Eurotech and IS2T for the fantastic prize pool. I really hope we will have other challenges like this in the future: developers really are the people who will make IoT a reality!

The Open IoT challenge ended earlier this week, and it was pretty exciting to see the final submissions coming in the form of blog posts and video during the last hours before the deadline.

Below are the 10 projects who validated their participation to the challenge, together with the links to learn more about what they have built during the 2 months the challenge lasted. Exciting stuff!

Carracho

The project aims to build an advanced monitoring car system, integrating the huge amount of sensors data from the car ECU (read by standard OBD-II interface) with smartphone sensors data (like GPS). A gateway (a Raspberry Pi with Kura OSGi framework) can collect the data, wrap them in a MQTT packet and finally send them to a remote MQTT server exploiting the 3G connection provided by the smartphone (the latter could be connected to the Raspberry Pi with bluetooth interface).

→ Read more: http://diyapps.blogspot.com/2015/03/eclipse-open-iot-challenge-final-post.html

IoNeeds

IoNeeds basically measures fullness, light, temperature and humidity of storage boxes and jars continuously. It stores the data on cloud and when it encounters with extreme values, it applies the rules which previously configured on control panel such as sending SMS, Android/iOS notifications. Also it can be configured with e-commerce web sites’ order APIs. So it enables auto-order scenarios like “Automatically order the product from web if fullness value is under 50%”

→ Read more : http://ioneeds.com/2015/03/final-ioneeds-is-working-now/

DIY Home Automation

A DIY “home automation” solution based on MQTT-SN, Node-RED, Arduino, Raspberry Pi and nRF24L01+ RF transceivers.

→ Read more: http://openiotchallenge.tumblr.com/post/114361695760/project-wrap-up

Raspberry Pi R/C car

Program a remote controlled Raspberry Pi Robot car using Reactive Blocks.

→ Read more: http://www.bitreactive.com/remote-controlled-raspberry-pi-car-part-3-2/

watr.li, Internet of Plants

Keeping plants alive in an office without regular hours is hard: Either everybody thinks their colleagues have already watered the plants or multiple people water the same plant, resulting in either drought or overhydration.

→ Read more: http://watr.li/wrapup.html

Hot Desking Dilemma

More and more companies offer their employees the possibility to work remote from home instead of working in the office. Hot desking – multiple employees share one desk over a week – is a common practice for such companies in order to reduce costs. People who know this setting also know the downsides of this model: it is just pretty hard to get a desk when you need one.

→ Read more: http://icanseedeadcats.com/2015/03/24/eclipse-iot-challenge-mqtt-communication-for-hot-desks-featuring-kura-mosquitto-and-paho-and-project-wrapup

LwM2M over MQTT

The current stack for LWM2M relies on CoAP as the protocol. Along with CoAP, MQTT is another standard which is being very widely used in M2M scenarios. Our solution involves development of an LWM2M server prototype, as well as, a client prototype, which make use of MQTT as the underlying M2M protocol. Thus LWM2M can be used for both CoAP, as well as, MQTT.

→ Read more: http://openiotchallenge.tumblr.com/post/112230693320/lwm2m-over-mqtt

Monitoring industrial automation

This project realizes a device that monitors a set of defined parameters (mapped to MODBUS registers on a device) and based on defined rule take action (store in internal memory, show as value or graph on local LCD or send using MQTT protocol to defined server). User is able to freely define mapping to MODBUS registers, poling interval, monitoring rules and actions).

→ Read more: https://tobiddev.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/summary-of-open-iot-challenge-monitoring-industrial-automation-equipment/

Smart Helmet

According to a survey, in India, 139,091 persons were killed in road accidents during the year 2012, out of which 23% constituted for Two-wheeler related incidents. The objective of the solution is to detect impact of the accident or fall occurred using the accelerometer mounted on the helmet.

→ Read more: http://byrebg.blogspot.in/2015/03/smart-helmet-using-eclipse-kura.html

Monitoring snow and ice falling down of roofs

In Norway it is the responsibility of building owners to warn people of risk of snow and ice falling down from the roofs of buildings. It is a serious liability. Some years ago in Oslo, a pedestrian got paralyzed after a iceblock fell from a building and hit his head.

→ Read more: http://openiotchallenge.tumblr.com/post/114484170515/warning-system-for-snow-ice-falling-from-roofs