Open IoT Challenge Archives

Last week, we launched the fifth edition of our Open IoT Challenge. It is really exciting to be back, and I am really looking forward to seeing what people will be building! The Open IoT Challenge encourages IoT enthusiasts and developers to build innovative applications for the Internet of Things using open standards and open source technology.

Every year, I try to share with aspiring applicants some ideas that I think would be worth exploring in the context of the challenge.

Here’s my list for this year:

I am always interested in seeing people explore Industrial IoT use cases. We have plenty of Eclipse IoT projects that are relevant in that space, from implementations of industrial protocols like Sparkplug (Eclipse Tahu project) or PPMP (Eclipse Unide) to edge-gateway solutions like Eclipse Kura or Eclipse 4diac.
Blockchain/distributed ledger and IoT anyone? From IoT data monetization to security I think that, beyond all the hype, it is worth exploring how blockchain and DLT can play a role in IoT. Last year, the team from Trusting IoT took the second place in the Open IoT Challenge. They have published an incredible amount of blog posts that are a great read for anyone interested in exploring that space.
The line between edge devices (sensors and gateways) and the cloud is becoming increasingly blurry, and people are looking at fog computing (sometimes referred to as edge computing) as a way to help orchestrate highly distributed IoT architectures. I would really like to see some teams use Eclipse ioFog or Eclipse fog05 in their projects.

Like in previous years, if you are not sure whether your idea is “Open IoT Challenge worthy”, just ping me. I will be happy to give you some feedback before you actually submit your proposal!

As a reminder, the 10 best proposals will be awarded gift certificates that they can use to buy some of the hardware needed for building their project! I am looking forward to reviewing your proposals and seeing all the cool projects you will be building over the next few months.

It’s now been a bit over two months since the participants to the Open IoT Challenge have started to work on their projects, and like every year, I am pretty impressed by the creativity and the technical skills of all the teams.

There are about 12 teams actively participating and blogging about their journey (and probably more that are working in “stealth mode”), and I thought I would take some time to highlight some of the really cool things they are working on.

Trusted indoor positioning system for nursing homes

The Trusted IoT Approach team is not only working on building an indoor geolocation solution (using Bluetooth beacons), but they are also combining it with IOTA (i.e a distributed ledger) to turn it into a trusted indoor positioning system.

Their main use case is nursing homes, and I think it is quite brilliant. What if there could be an immutable ledger of all the current and past positions of patients and nurses within a nursing home? Clearly, this can help with scenarios where for example there are doubts as to whether a patient has properly been checked up on.

They are building their project as Eclipse Kura plugins, and everything is open source – check out their code! https://bitbucket.org/p-iot/jura.

Connected Industry Sensor Solutions

Year after year, I always hope that more participants to the IoT Challenge get into industrial scenarios, vs. simply focusing on building cool IoT gadgets. This year I am really happy to see that a team from Bosch Connected Industry is working on an Industrial IoT scenario and bridging the gap between the physical world of industrial equipment, and the Internet of Things. They are using Eclipse Ditto for building Digital Twins which I find really cool too 🙂

Activ-IoTy: automatic sports timing system

Activ-IoTy aims at enhancing sports timekeeping systems accurately, through IoT low-cost devices.

The project is progressing really fast and the team’s latest blog post contains lots of promising screenshots of the solution in action.

There is a lot going on on Martin’s Github repository so you may want to have a look!

Alya, a DIY open-source smart mirror

Many of the participants are getting their hands really dirty with some hardware hacking, and the Alya team is no exception!

They are building a smart mirror using the UP Squared Grove IoT Development Kit that Intel was kind enough to give to the participants with the most promising ideas. They also use a Microsoft Kinect and a MATRIX creator to do advanced voice and gesture recognition.

Like most of the participants, they are making their work available in open source on their Github repo: https://github.com/alya-mirror.

Of course, there are many other teams participating to the challenge, so I really encourage you to have a look at all the articles that the contestants have put together, and you can also follow the #OpenIoTChallenge hashtag on Twitter.