Yesterday, I was in Grenoble for the Eclipse IoT days. It was a great opportunity to listen and learn from some actors of the IoT movement. The day was on the campus where we have been invited to see some student work on home automation and robotic for telepresence (see my twitter photo feed). The day was intensive on conferences with the really good quality and interest.
Most of the discussions / demonstrations were based on Home Automation, Smart house and globally telemetry. Not many industrial applications has been shown but some of the companies are working on industrial domain. Most of what has been shown is applicable on industry.
All the project are separating sensors, based on low cost / low energy devices associated to a local management/administration platform connected to Internet. The technology in use are mostly :
– RF and ZigBee for sensor to management platform
– Java for the management platform running the OSGi platform (Java) (this is also due to the fact Eclipse were organizing the conference and OSGi is Eclipse framework) This OSGi framework integrates management tools to connect / upgrade the platform remotely.
– Mqtt to communicate on Internet
– A custom MDM solution is deployed to manage the platforms (generally based on server management solution instead of MDM solutions) like roboconf.
Regarding the different architectures, some maintain the data on site with a in-house user interface, some export data outside on “cloud” with an on-Internet user interface. As much as I’ve seen the in-house strategy is largely loosing on performance and interface quality due to the limited power of the management platform to perform advanced HTML experience. I assume this is also related to the Java choice to run these applications.
The other interesting learning is that most of the companies are using Raspberry Pi and Arduino to prototype solutions before, I assume, building a more robust platforms. Opensource is also mainly used and presented as the only solution to make the IoT market based on standard to be integrated all-together.
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This year M2M and IoT are two of the most heard keywords in our technological domain. One of these is fresh new, I mean a couple of year old, when the other one is pretty much older. M2M, standing for Machine to Machine is a capability for two machines (or more) to discuss together and take actions. Like a temperature sensor allowing your boiler to decide when to start or stop. In the industry where automatism are in place since many year, M2M is something in place, running, not new. IoT, standing for Internet of Things is part of the M2M technology but actually raising. In IoT the main word is Internet and it stands for the capability of an object to talk over Internet on its own. Why only now ? mostly because now it starts to be possible.