Categories
Eclipse

Key takeaways from the IoT Day GrenobleKey takeaways from the IoT Day Grenoble

On Wednesday the Eclipse Foundation together with Grenoble’s Computer Science Lab (LIG) organized an IoT day.

It was a pretty cool event, with 100+ participants and really good presentations. In particular, I liked the mix in the attendance: people with a research background, people coming from the M2M and telco industry, and also a significant number of students who are very enthusiastic about IoT.

Ian Skerrett opens the IoT Day Grenoble

There was a perfect mix of technical talks and feedback from industrials, with of course great conversations during the breaks.

For me, the 3 key takeaways of the day are:

1 Security. Lots of connected objects of our daily life are running on outdated Linux kernels, or secured via “credentials” like admin/admin. While some security issues are to be addressed at the human level, the true challenge of bringing security to IoT will necessarily involve open-source initiatives and open collaboration.
As Pierre Dubois explained in his talk, having access to the code that our objects run is crucial, and not just in an ideological/idealistic way: the inherent complexity of IoT makes it mandatory to be able to know how the technologies involved really work.

2 LWM2M and CoAP are getting traction. I was surprised to see that several attendees are evaluating very seriously, or even already started building solutions based on LWM2M for device management.
Fortunately, we will have very soon two projects at Eclipse for doing LWM2M as well as pure CoAP, respectively the Wakaama and Californium projects.

3 OSGi and modularity. We had several presentations during the day that were focusing on home automation use cases.
Such use cases illustrate in a very tangible way the need for modular and dynamic architectures: as sensors, lightbulbs, etc. come and go on your local network, you very likely want your application to adapt accordingly. At Eclipse, projects like Kura and SmartHome leverage OSGi for easing the development of IoT gateways.

All in all it was a great event, and I am looking forward to having more of those in the future. If you are interested in co-organizing a similar event please let me know!

Check out the Flickr set for more pictures of the event. Videos of all the talks will be available shortly.

Header image is Creative Commons License Laurent Espitallier via Compfight.

On Wednesday the Eclipse Foundation together with Grenoble’s Computer Science Lab (LIG) organized an IoT day.

It was a pretty cool event, with 100+ participants and really good presentations. In particular, I liked the mix in the attendance: people with a research background, people coming from the M2M and telco industry, and also a significant number of students who are very enthusiastic about IoT.

Ian Skerrett opens the IoT Day Grenoble

There was a perfect mix of technical talks and feedback from industrials, with of course great conversations during the breaks.

For me, the 3 key takeaways of the day are:

1 Security. Lots of connected objects of our daily life are running on outdated Linux kernels, or secured via “credentials” like admin/admin. While some security issues are to be addressed at the human level, the true challenge of bringing security to IoT will necessarily involve open-source initiatives and open collaboration.
As Pierre Dubois explained in his talk, having access to the code that our objects run is crucial, and not just in an ideological/idealistic way: the inherent complexity of IoT makes it mandatory to be able to know how the technologies involved really work.

2 LWM2M and CoAP are getting traction. I was surprised to see that several attendees are evaluating very seriously, or even already started building solutions based on LWM2M for device management.
Fortunately, we will have very soon two projects at Eclipse for doing LWM2M as well as pure CoAP, respectively the Wakaama and Californium projects.

3 OSGi and modularity. We had several presentations during the day that were focusing on home automation use cases.
Such use cases illustrate in a very tangible way the need for modular and dynamic architectures: as sensors, lightbulbs, etc. come and go on your local network, you very likely want your application to adapt accordingly. At Eclipse, projects like Kura and SmartHome leverage OSGi for easing the development of IoT gateways.

All in all it was a great event, and I am looking forward to having more of those in the future. If you are interested in co-organizing a similar event please let me know!

Check out the Flickr set for more pictures of the event. Videos of all the talks will be available shortly.

Header image is Creative Commons License Laurent Espitallier via Compfight.

Categories
Eclipse

Moving on!

I very well remember my first day at Sierra Wireless, when it was still a different company named Anyware Technologies.

Logo Anyware Technologies

That day I wrote my very first Eclipse plug-in to customize the Console view, and I was almost immediately and genuinely amazed by the versatility of the Eclipse platform.

Later on, I had the chance to work on many projects involving a great deal of Eclipse technologies (eRCP, EMF, Xtext, …), and to work on very different kinds of projects: developing an Eclipse workbench for scientists, a mobile app for doctors and nurses, or training dozens of people to Eclipse RCP and Modeling technologies, etc.

Slide_Sierra

When Sierra Wireless started to get really serious about Machine-to-Machine we soon realized that the Eclipse Foundation would be the perfect place to start establishing an open consortium around the core technologies that are needed for building M2M solutions.
I drafted a charter for an M2M Industry Working Group, and in November 2011 the Working Group was officially created with Sierra Wireless, IBM and Eurotech as founding partners.

Two years and a half later, we have gone from 3 to 13 Eclipse projects, from 3 to 9 members of the Working Group, and the community is thriving.

Today, after more than 7 years working at Sierra Wireless, it is time for me to move on.

Eclipse logo

I am joining the Eclipse Foundation next week, to continue growing the already great community of Internet of Things projects and playing the role of technology evangelist I’ve been having for the last couple years.I am very thankful to all my colleagues & friends at Sierra Wireless with whom I learnt a lot, and I am very excited to soon becoming a part of the Eclipse Foundation family!  :)I very well remember my first day at Sierra Wireless, when it was still a different company named Anyware Technologies.

Logo Anyware Technologies

That day I wrote my very first Eclipse plug-in to customize the Console view, and I was almost immediately and genuinely amazed by the versatility of the Eclipse platform.

Later on, I had the chance to work on many projects involving a great deal of Eclipse technologies (eRCP, EMF, Xtext, …), and to work on very different kinds of projects: developing an Eclipse workbench for scientists, a mobile app for doctors and nurses, or training dozens of people to Eclipse RCP and Modeling technologies, etc.

Slide_Sierra

When Sierra Wireless started to get really serious about Machine-to-Machine we soon realized that the Eclipse Foundation would be the perfect place to start establishing an open consortium around the core technologies that are needed for building M2M solutions.
I drafted a charter for an M2M Industry Working Group, and in November 2011 the Working Group was officially created with Sierra Wireless, IBM and Eurotech as founding partners.

Two years and a half later, we have gone from 3 to 13 Eclipse projects, from 3 to 9 members of the Working Group, and the community is thriving.

Today, after more than 7 years working at Sierra Wireless, it is time for me to move on.

Categories
Eclipse

Eclipse IoT demo at FOSDEMEclipse IoT demo at FOSDEM

During the weekend of February 1st, I had the opportunity to attend FOSDEM in Brussels.

It was only my second year but it’s definitely one of the events I enjoy attending the most: the crowd is very diverse and very curious, there are tons of talks that you can attend (if you can get a seat in the room – most of them are simply overcrowded), and the Belgian food is yummy!

I spent most of the weekend on the Eclipse Foundation booth where together with Mike and Julien, we were showing Eclipse IoT technologies live.

Greenhouse demo at FOSDEM
Photo credit: Julien Vermillard (@vrmvrm)

We’ve been asked several times what were the details of the setup and where one could find the source code, so here they are, with links to Github repos and gists:

  • A bunch of sensors attached to an Arduino, with a very basic sketch dumping sensor data to the serial port,
  • A BeagleBone Black running  Eclipse Orion and a very simple NodeJS app that uses MQTT.js for communicating with the Mosquitto broker that is hosted on iot.eclipse.org,
  • And last but not least, an Android Nexus 10 tablet that runs an augmented-reality app for displaying real sensor values in a pretty cool way 😉

Check out this cool 3-min video by 101blog (thanks again for the impromptu interview!) of the aforementioned setup in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfgAxV3z6ksDuring the weekend of February 1st, I had the opportunity to attend FOSDEM in Brussels.

It was only my second year but it’s definitely one of the events I enjoy attending the most: the crowd is very diverse and very curious, there are tons of talks that you can attend (if you can get a seat in the room – most of them are simply overcrowded), and the Belgian food is yummy!

I spent most of the weekend on the Eclipse Foundation booth where together with Mike and Julien, we were showing Eclipse IoT technologies live.

Greenhouse demo at FOSDEM
Photo credit: Julien Vermillard (@vrmvrm)

We’ve been asked several times what were the details of the setup and where one could find the source code, so here they are, with links to Github repos and gists:

  • A bunch of sensors attached to an Arduino, with a very basic sketch dumping sensor data to the serial port,
  • A BeagleBone Black running  Eclipse Orion and a very simple NodeJS app that uses MQTT.js for communicating with the Mosquitto broker that is hosted on iot.eclipse.org,
  • And last but not least, an Android Nexus 10 tablet that runs an augmented-reality app for displaying real sensor values in a pretty cool way 😉

Check out this cool 3-min video by 101blog (thanks again for the impromptu interview!) of the aforementioned setup in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfgAxV3z6ks