It’s undeniable: 2014 was the year when the electronics industry decidedly and collectively moved forward to push the Internet of Things (IoT). In year 2015 IoT markets will continue to grow. I think we’re going to see some critical mass on corralling the IoT in 2015. IoT is a young market – no one seems to be clearly leading. Communications are the key here. Over the last 10 years the world has done a remarkably good job of connecting the global wireless world. The last decade has radically changed the way we live. The smartphone and its cousin, the tablet, was the final link to ubiquitous wireless coverage, globally. The fantasy of the IoT is quite grand: everything on the planet can be smart and communicate. The idea is both powerful and impractical.
IoT is entering peak of inflated expectations: The Internet of Things is at that stage when the efforts of various companies involved in it, along with research, are proving to have a lot of promise. At this stage, the Internet of Things should not have too many difficulties attracting developers and researchers into the fold. As we turn to 2015 and beyond, however, wearables becomes an explosive hardware design opportunity. Tie the common threads of IoT and wearables together, and an unstoppable market movement emerges. There seems to be a lack of public appreciation of the extent to which the Internet of Things is going to fundamentally change how people interact with the world around them.
On the other hand, the Internet of Things is getting poised to enter the trough of disillusionment, which means that there is more room for failure now. There are issues of security, privacy, and sharing of information across vertical implementations that still need to be worked out. Until they are, the IoT will not be able to fulfill all its promises.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is beginning to grow significantly, as consumers, businesses, and governments recognize the benefit of connecting inert devices to the internet. The ‘Internet of Things’ Will Be The World’s Most Massive Device Market And Save Companies Billions Of Dollars in few years. BI Intelligence expects that the IoT will result in $1.7 trillion in value added to the global economy in 2019. This includes hardware, software, installation costs, management services, and economic value added from realized IoT efficiencies. The main benefit of growth in the IoT will be increased efficiency and lower costs: increased efficiency within the home, city, and workplace. The enterprise sector will lead the IoT, accounting for 46% of device shipments this year, but that share will decline as the government and home sectors gain momentum. I expect that home, government, and enterprise sectors use the IoT differently.
The IoT is only enabled because of two things: the ability of networks to reach countless nodes, and the availability of cost-effective embedded processors to attach to a multitude of devices. The prices for components and devices continues to decline while the skyrocketing global demand for 24/7 Internet access grows exponentially. The Internet of Things growth will benefit mostly from the autonomous machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity that will make up the bulk of the objects of the IoT. This is the main driver for double-digit growth across verticals in the electronics, and especially the semiconductor industry well into the next decade. The IoT will connect places, such as manufacturing platforms, energy grids, health-care facilities, transportation systems, retail outlets, sports and music venues, and countless other entities to the Internet.
Internet of Things can become Engineering for Everyone. The emergence of open-source development platforms, developed and maintained by dedicated volunteers, has effectively raised the level of abstraction to a point where nonexperts can now use these platforms. The availability of open-source software and, more recently, hardware targeting embedded applications means that access to high-quality engineering resources has never been greater. This has effectively raised the level of abstraction to a point where nonexperts can now use these platforms to turn their own abstract concepts into real products. With the potential to launch a successful commercial venture off the back of tinkering with some low-cost hardware in your spare time, it’s no wonder that open-source hardware is fuelling an entirely new movement. A new generation of manufacturer is embracing the open-source ethos and actually allowing customers to modify the product post-sale.
Exact size predictions for IoT market next few years vary greatly, but all of the firms making these predictions agree on one thing—it’s going to be very big.
In year 2014 very many chip vendors and sensor algorithm companies also jumped on the IoT bandwagon, in hopes of laying the groundwork for more useful and cost-effective IoT devices. Sensors, MCUs, and wireless connectivity are three obvious building blocks for IoT end-node devices. Wireless connectivity and software (algorithms) are the two most sought-after technologies. Brimming with excitement, and with Europe already ahead of the pack, a maturing semiconductor industry looks expectantly to the Internet of Things (IoT) for yet another facelift. The IC sales generated by the connectivity and sensor subsystems to enabled this IoT will amount $57.7 billion in 2015.
Chips for IoT market to grow 36% in 2015, says Gartner as automotive V2X, LED lighting and smart domestic objects are set to drive semiconductor market growth through the year 2020, according to market analysis firm Gartner. The move to create billions of smart, autonomously communicating objects known as the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving the need for low-power sensors, processors and communications chips. By 2018, the market value of IoT subsystems in equipment and Internet-connected things is projected to reach $103.6 billion worldwide, which represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.0 percent from $39.8 billion in 2013.
BI Intelligence expects that by 2019 IoT market will be more than double the size of the smartphone, PC, tablet, connected car, and the wearable market combined. A new report by Yole Developpement pegs the market size in the $70 billion range by 2018, with the next five years presenting a golden opportunity for device makers as the IoT enters the growth stage. Device shipments will reach 6.7 billion in 2019 for a five-year CAGR of 61%.
Number of connected devices is expected to to reach 36 billion units by 2020, cautions that “all of this new market opportunity is under threat.” Other estimate according to market research firm Radiant Insights of San Francisco is that the number of Internet connections will grow from 9 billion devices in 2014 to 100 billion by 2020 (twice as many as the estimate from Cisco Systems Inc). IC Insights forecasts that web-connected things will account for 85 percent of 29.5 billion Internet connections worldwide by 2020. Currently fragmented market, the number of cellular M2M connections could rise from 478 million today to 639 million in 2020.
By 2024, the report predicts that overall market value for components will exceed of $400 billion, of which more than 10% will come from hardware alone. Revenue from hardware sales will be only $50 billion or 8% of the total revenue from IoT-specific efforts, as software makers and infrastructure companies will earn the lion’s share. As the Internet of Things grows to a projected 212 billion items by 2020, the question of regulation looms increasingly large.
The growth of the IoT will present some very interesting issues in a variety of areas. You will see some very fast activity because unless it gets resolved there will be no IoT as it is envisioned.
General consensus is that the interconnect protocol of the IoT will be IP (Internet Protocol). As it stands today, the deployment of the billions of IoT objects can’t happen, simply because there just aren’t enough IP addresses with IPv4. While there is still some discussion about how to connect the IoT, most are in agreement that the IoT protocol will be IPv6. The first step will be to convert all proprietary networks to an IP-base. Then, the implementation of IPv6 can begin. Because direct interoperability between IPv4 and iPv6 protocols is not possible, this will add some some complications to the development, resulting in a bit of obfuscation to the transition for IPv6.
Is There Any Way to Avoid Standards Wars in the Emerging Internet of Things? I don’t see that possible. IoT will be in serious protocol war in 2015. There is a wide selection of protocols, but no clear set of winners at the moment. The real IoT standardization is just starting – There are currently few standards (or regulations) for what is needed to run an IoT device. There is no single standard for connecting devices on the Internet of Thing, instead are a handful of competing standards run by different coalitions of companies: The Thread Group (Qualcomm, The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Panasonic), The Industrial Internet Consortium (Intel, Cisco, AT&T, IBM, Microsoft), Open Interconnect Consortium (Samsung, Intel, Dell), Physical Web (Google), AllSeen Alliance (Samsung, Intel, Dell) and huge number of smaller non-standardized protocols in use. Each of the standards vary how they do things.
Anyone who tries to build a physical layer and drive a software stack based on it all the way up to the application layer is a fool. But many companies try to do it this year. Today Zigbee is the most cost effective, but tomorrow WiFi will figure it out. On networking field in every few years there’s a new management protocol – what will happen in IoT, it will keep moving, and people will need open APIs.
Currently the IoT lacks a common set of standards and technologies that would allow for compatibility and ease-of-use. The IoT needs a set of open APIs and protocols that work with a variety of physical-layer networks. The IP and network layer should have nothing to do with the media. The fundamental issue here is that at the moment the Internet of Things will not have a standard set of open APIs for consumers. IoT, it will keep moving, and people will need open APIs. I suspect that at some point, after the first wave of the Internet of Things, open APIs and root access will become a selling point.
It is not just technical protocol details that are problem: One problem with IoT is that it is a vague definition. Do we simply mean ‘connected devices? Or something else? One of the main issues, which will only get worse as the IoT evolves, is how are we going to categorize all the different objects.
Early in 2015, the Industrial Internet Consortium plans to wrap up work on a broad reference architecture for the Internet of Things, ramp up three test beds, and start identifying gaps where new standards may be needed. The group, formed by AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM, and Intel, now has about 115 members and aims to make it easier to build commercial IoT systems. The IIC hopes to finish a first draft of its reference architecture by the end of January and have it ratified by March. It will define functional areas and the technologies and standards for them, from sensors to data analytics and business applications. The framework includes versions for vertical markets including aerospace, healthcare, manufacturing, smart cities, and transportation. A breakout section on security also is in the works. Hopefully the reference architecture could be used to help people construct industrial IoT systems quickly and easily.
With the emergence of the Internet of Things, smart cars are beginning to garner more attention. Smart cars are different than connected cars, which are simply smartphones on wheels. Even though the technology has been on the evolutionary fast track, integration has been slow. For car manufacturers, it is a little tricky to accept driverless cars because it disrupts their fundamental business model: Private resources will evolve to shared resources, centrally controlled, since autonomous vehicles can be controlled remotely.
Over the next few years, we’ll see a torrent of new devices emerge that are connected to the Internet and each other through a wide range of different wireless networking protocols. As a result, there’s a race on, not just to get those devices connected, but also to provide the network infrastructure necessary to managing all of them at scale. WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular networks are nowadays widely used, nut new alternatives are coming to solve applications were those technologies are not most suitable. There are different plans for wide area wireless networks that use licensed or unlicensed wireless bandwidth to transmit small amounts of data from various connected device – this could create its own connection to them in a cost effective manner without relying on existing cellular or WiFi networks.
Recently we have developed a pressing need, or desire to put our refrigerators, and everything we have access to while mobile, on the net, morphing the brave new world of the Internet of Things, into the Internet of Everything (IoE). And that will make that last 100 meters—that final frontier of interconnect—a reality. Today, only about 10% of the last 100 meter devices that will make up the IoT are connected. As the IoT evolves, other small cells such as businesses, city centers, malls, theaters, stadiums, event centers, and the like, will connect much of what they have on premise (soda or popcorn machines, vending machines, restaurants, parking garages, ticket kiosks, seat assignments, and a very long list of others). And, there are a very large number of devices that are short-range in all of these various cells. What was once the last mile for connectivity is now the last 100 meters.
Plenty of people and companies in the technology world tend to come at the Internet of Things by dwelling on the “Internet.” But what if, instead, we started with the “Things?” Knowing intimately what “things” are supposed to do and how they think and behave will be the key to solving one of the IoT’s most pressing issues: application layers. Over the past 18 months, the industry has launched numerous consortia, from Qualcomm’s AllSeen and Intel’s Open Interconnect Consortium to Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Thread. Every entity says it’s targeting the “interoperability” of things at home, but each is obviously concentrating primarily on its own interests, and making their “layer” specifications slightly different from those pursued by others.
It seems that no industry consortium is particularly interested in defining — in gory detail — the specific functions of, say, what a door lock is supposed to do. The library of commands for each function already exists, but someone, or some group, has to translate those already determined commands into an IP-friendly format. One of the standards organizations will take up the challenge in 2015. This will be the first step to “knock barriers down for IoT” in 2015.
Missing today in the IoT are reliability and robustness. Consumers expect their light switched and other gadgets to be infinitely reliable. In many today’s products we seem to be far from reliable and robust operation. Today’s routers can relay traffic between networks, but they have no idea how to translate what functions each device attached to them wants to do, and how to communicate that to other devices. The network needs to be able to discover who else is on the network. Devices connected to network need to be able to discover what resources are available and what new devices are being added. The network needs to be extensible.
Despite the oft-mocked naming scheme, the Internet of Things (IoT) has an incredibly practical goal: connecting classically “dumb” objects—toasters, doorknobs, light switches—to the Internet, thereby unlocking a world of potential. Imagine what it means to interact with your home the same way you would a website, accessing it without geographic restriction. But there is one missing piece of the smart home revolution: smart home operating system. So what will be the system that capitalizes on the smart home in the same way, the enabler of all the applications and actions we want our homes to run and do? There are no ready answers for that yet. And there might not be a singular, cohesive operating system for your home, that this stuff isn’t one-size-fits-all. It might be that the real potential for home automation lies not in local software running on a home device but in the cloud. I think that the cloud is going to be more important over time, but there will always be also need for some local functionality in case the connection to cloud is lost. Right now the Internet of Things is rather disjointed compared to Internet and computers.
When everything will be connected, how about security? In the path to IoT, the issue of data and device security looms large. Security for the ‘Internet of Things’ will be talked about very much in 2015 for a good reason. As Internet of Thigs becomes more and more used, it will be more hacked. Thus security of Internet of Things will be more and more talked about. Virtually anything connected to the Internet has the potential of being hacked, no matter how unlikely. Internet of Things devices often lack systematic protections against viruses or spam. Nowadays most security breaches are software-based, when an application can be compromised. Counter-measures for such attacks range from basic antivirus scanning software, to embedded hypervisors to hardware-bound secure applications tying their execution to uniquely identifiable hardware. There is emerging customer demand for silicon authentication. But the threats extend way beyond software and some hackers will put a lot of effort into compromising a system’s security at silicon-level. Individual devices can get hacked, but all systems should have some way of self-checking and redundancy. Those IoT systems can be very complex at device and system level. The problem with complexity is that you create more attack points and make it easier for hackers to find flaws.
Experts recommend far more layers of cyberprotection than manufacturers have thought necessary. Because many of the devices will often be practically inaccessible, the “patch and pray” strategy used for many desktop software packages is unlikely to be an effective strategy for many forms of IoT devices. Right now, there are hundreds of companies churning out “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices as fast as they can, without thinking too much on the security issues they can cause in the future. The imperative is clear: Do your homework on the specific security features of any IoT device you might consider bringing into the home. What steps are IoT companies taking to keep us safe from others online, and what constitutes a truly “safe” smart appliance?
What we’re opening up is a whole new subject not just of security but of safety. That safety depends on devices to be constantly connected to the Internet the same way they’re connected to the power grid. That’s a whole new area that deserves its own consideration. Keep in mind that IoT is one field where cyber security flaws can kill in the worst case. Connecting unrelated devices in the IoT means many more pieces now affect reliability and security. More devices are now considered critical, such as a connected baby monitor or a smart smoke detector, because wrong information can injure or kill people. The Internet of Things is coming no matter what happens. The people in charge of keeping the public safe and the industry healthy need to be ready.
The European Police Office (Europol) said governments are ill-equipped to counter the menace of “injury and possible deaths” spurred by hacking attacks on critical safety equipment. There are many potential dangers are in transportation: many new cars are Internet connected and potentially vulnerable, SCADA Systems in Railways Vulnerable to Attack and Airline bosses ignore cyber security concerns at their peril. With industrial control systems becoming network-connected, security risks rise and will need a long-term solution. In light of the trend toward the Industrial Internet of Things, development teams must start thinking hard about network security and planning for its long-term viability.
You have to accept the fact that at each point in the IoT there are vulnerabilities to malicious attacks and interception of vital information. Soon, almost every network will soon have some IoT-hacking in it. IDC predicts that in two years from 90 per cent of the global IT networks have met IoT data theft. In a report, cybersecurity firm Fortinet expects greater threats from “denial of service attacks on assembly line, factory, industrial control systems, and healthcare and building management…resulting in revenue losses and reputation damages for organizations globally.” This opens new doors of risks in the areas of corporate extortion, altering of corporate business operations, and the extension of cyberattacks to include physical threats of harm to civilians.
There are lessons to be learned to keep the cyber security in control in the IoT era. There will be lessons to be learned for all the parties of the IoT ecosystem. The companies that figure out how to make security available on multi-stakeholder platforms will be the most successful ones. Figuring out a secure platform is important, but having different levels of security is still important. Different uses have different bars. Security is a self-regulating system to some extent because it is supply and demand. That is the Holy Grail for technology right now, which is how to build systems with enough security—not 100% protection right now—from a unified platform point of view for multiple applications.
The data generated by the Internet of Things has the potential to reveal far more about users than any technology in history: These devices can make our lives much easier … The Internet of Things however, can also reveal intimate details about the doings and goings of their owners through the sensors they contain. As the Internet of Things grows to a projected 212 billion items by 2020, the question of regulation looms increasingly large. There is a lot of effort is going today at the government level. They’re not thinking about whether the Internet goes down. They’re worried about what happens if the Internet gets compromised.
When we have devices on the field, there is question how to analyze the data coming from them. This is easily a “big data” problem because of the huge amount of data that comes from very large number of sensors. Being able to monitor and use the data that comes from the Internet of Things is a huge potential challenge with different providers using different architectures and approaches, and different chip and equipment vendors teaming up in a range of different ways. Many large and smaller companies are active on the field: Intel, IBM, Lantronix+Google, Microchip+Amazon, Freescale+Oracle, Xively, Jasper, Keen.io, Eurotech, and many other.
The huge increase of data is coming. Radiant predicts that wireless sensor networks will be used to monitor and control very many domestic, urban, and industrial systems. This promises to produce an explosion of data, much of which will be discarded as users are overwhelmed by the volume. As a result, analysis of the data within the wireless sensor network will become necessary so that alerts and meaningful information are generated at the leaf nodes. This year has seen the software at the very highest point in the Internet of Things stack — analytics — becoming tightly coupled with the embedded devices at the edge of the network, leading to many different approaches and providers.
Integrating data from one IoT cloud to another will have it’s challenges. Automation services make big steps by cutting corners. Sites like IFTTT, Zapier, bip.io, CloudWork, and elastic.io allow users to connect applications with links that go beyond a simple synch. Check what is happening with integration and related services like IFTTT, ItDuzzit, Amazon Lambda. For example IFTTT is quietly becoming a smart home powerhouse.
Most important sources of information for this article:
With $16M In Funding, Helium Wants To Provide The Connective Tissue For The Internet Of Things
IFTTT, other automation services make big steps by cutting corners
Internet of Things: Engineering for Everyone
IoT in Protocol War, Says Startup – Zigbee fortunes dim in building control
Analysts Predict CES Hotspots – Corralling the Internet of Things
What’s Holding Back The IoT – Device market opportunities will explode, but only after some fundamental changes
Apps Layer: ’800lb Gorilla’ in IoT Nobody Talks About
Analysts Predict CES Hotspots – IoT, robots, 4K to dominate CES
10 Reasons Why Analytics Are Vital to the Internet of Things
Tech More: Mobile Internet of Things BI Intelligence Consumer Electronics – Most Massive Device Market
Wearables make hardware the new software
Zigbee Opens Umbrella 3.0 Spec
IoT Will Give ‘Embedded’ a Shot in the Arm - Connected cities to be largest IoT market
Chips for IoT market to grow 36% in 2015, says Gartner
Apps Layer: ’800lb Gorilla’ in IoT Nobody Talks About
Short-Range, Low-Power Sensors – once the last mile for connectivity is now the last 100 meters
The one problem the Internet of Things hasn’t solved
Plan Long Term for Industrial Internet Security
To Foil Cyberattacks, Connected Cars Need Overlapping Shields
IoT cybersecurity: is EDA ready to deliver?
More Things Are Critical Systems
Silicon, Security, and the Internet of Things
The missing piece of the smart home revolution
Hackers will soon be targeting your refrigerator
10 Reasons Why Analytics Are Vital to the Internet of Things
1,316 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
LTE IoT Specs Anticipated in Chips
Altair aims to get jump on 4G MTC standard
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325762&
Altair Semiconductor hopes to drive the machine-to-machine (M2M) market toward 4G LTE with two chip sets coming out ahead of expected 3GPP standards for the Internet of Things.
“The vision behind our move to IoT was the notion that there are many use cases out there that require some kind of long-range connectivity. So far M2M has been mostly addressed by 2G technology,” Altair Co-Founder and Vice President of Marketing Eran Eshed told EE Times. “These networks are going to be sunset in the not-so-distant future. Carriers really need some upgrade paths and way to address the needs of next billion devices.”
Sometimes referred to as machine-type communications (MTC), these cellular communications face a variety of design challenges to fit a breadth of Internet of Things devices. Altair’s 1160 CAT-1 and 1150 CAT-0 chip sets use older, “disregarded” modems to provide low power, low cost communications at high data rates.
“LTE is about much more than high speed, as evidenced by the inclusion of CAT-1 in the original 3GPP LTE specification. And there’s a move by 3GPP to define even lower-cost, lower-throughput CAT-0 in next year’s Release 12,”
“There are some who see this road map as accelerating the trend for operators to shutter 2G and 3G networks and migrate to the more efficient 4G LTE technology.”
Altair’s CAT-1 modules are about half the cost of a CAT-4, which is equivalent to the price of 3G. The CAT-0 chips are priced similar to 2G modules, but would require “painful changes” to a carrier’s network.
“If carriers wait until 2018 when [LTE MTC standards should be complete and] extra low power, low size comes on board, they will have missed an extremely important window,” Eshed said, adding that Altair’s chips are ahead of industry estimates for the emergence of CAT-1 and CAT-0 by a year or two. “People are designing products without having seen the chip. To me that means the market needs this technology.”
Still, there is debate about what the LTE MTC standards will look like, whether they will be based on CAT-0 or CAT-1, and whether the Internet of Things needs 4G cellular communications at all.
Still, there are a number of companies with a vested interest in MTC communications. MediaTek has its own wireless modems and “is really seriously looking at getting into IoT and embedded applications,” while others such as Intel, Spreadtrum, and Marvell could also benefit from a new market for cellular modems. Likewise, microcontroller companies from Freescale to TI and Atmel stand to win by supplying MCUs specifically designed for MTC.
“The embedded world is accustomed to using custom solutions, but it’s easier to leverage mobile ecosystem as much as possible,” McGregor said. “I would imagine we’re going to see a variety of solutions probably through the end of this decade before we get to 5G, and they say we need a little bit better standards.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Semitech’s Bright Future
http://www.eeweb.com/blog/eeweb/semitechs-bright-future
Semitech, an Australian-based semiconductor company that specializes in power line communication (PLC) devices. The company recent developed a line of PLC platform devices that dramatically increase the efficiency of solar arrays, lighting systems, and smart meters.
The vision for smart grids has been around for a while now, but what exactly does a smart grid entail? For one thing, it means going from grid to grids—microgrids, that is. Through a network of integrated microgrids, a smart grid of the future would be able to manage power demands while simultaneously monitoring and healing itself. In order to achieve this, in-grid, machine-to-machine communication needs to take place.
The premise behind Semitech’s new line of PLC devices—the SM2400, SM2480, and SM2200—is to create a highly programmable grid that will in turn make it very flexible while maintaining cost and power efficiency. One of the areas of the smart grid that has gained the most attention in recent years has been solar.
Higher efficiency can be achieved through management of micro-inverters on each panel of the array, meaning that each panel will become an independent generator of power that can all be injected to the grid.
The PLC modem also allows for network connectivity, which is an inherent part of the micro-inverter. As Collin explained, “One of the biggest benefits of a connected grid is remote management.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stacked image sensor enables ‘Internet of Things’ fire sensing
http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/print/volume-51/issue-01/newsbreaks/stacked-image-sensor-enables-internet-of-things-fire-sensing.html?cmpid=EnlLFWFebruary252015
As the number of devices connected to the Internet is expected to grow to more than 50 billion devices by 2020, this interconnected network of sensors—described as the Internet of Things (IoT)—has become the focus of a number of leading technology companies. Recognizing the growing demand for image capture and video streaming capability for these devices within a number of market applications (industrial, medical, automotive, and consumer), Forza Silicon (Pasadena, CA) has developed a reconfigurable image sensor technology platform to enable and accelerate new-product development within these markets; specifically, an initial application is for in-home fire detection.
The proof-of-concept 3D stacked-sensor platform uses a small-profile/low-power imaging array (0.18 μm CMOS image-sensor process) stacked on top of a low-power field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device from Lattice Semiconductor (Portland, OR) that is reconfigurable for different system interfaces, image-processing tasks, frame rates, power levels, and noise levels, for example.
Tomi Engdahl says:
#OktoberfestOfThings
Internet-connected Masskrug
http://hackaday.io/project/264-oktoberfestofthings
#OktoberfestOfThings
http://oktoberfestofthings.tumblr.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Opinions vary widely on IoT security concern
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/systems-interface/4413081/Opinions-vary-widely-on-IoT-security-concern
Will the IoT (Internet of Things) become a hacker’s paradise? Or is concern over security for the embedded systems that define the IoT overblown?
Opinions about IoT security are as varied as the systems that will make the IoT, according to a study released last week at DESIGN West by UBM Tech (EDN’s parent company) and VDC Research, an M2M market intelligence firm. Study participants represented a broad base of industry segments from industrial automation to general-purpose systems. A full 50% indicated they’re currently using IoT/M2M in current projects – and 69% said they expect to be using IoT/M2M in three years.
27% of survey participants indicated the industry is not very vulnerable or not vulnerable at all to attacks on IoT/M2M devices.
I’m having a hard time with the “somewhat worried” category: If there’s a basic acknowledgement of a security problem, we all should be very worried. Even under the assumption that the IoT will comprise billions of smart sensors with hardwired operation that can’t be modified remotely, there are too many opportunities for corrupting the data stream – make that deluge – of information flowing through the IoT. As soon as someone introduces corrupt data into the IoT (by hacking an “impenetrable” IoT device to steal “protected” crypto keys, say), the concept of the IoT is at risk. You can imagine the havoc if modified data are introduced into highway traffic systems to route traffic at the bad actors’ discretion or emergency response systems are flooded with misleading data.
Recognition about specific points of IoT device vulnerability comes through in participants’ response to a question about the security solutions expected to add value to next-generation devices (Figure 2). Here, participants cite traditional security issues including data encryption, authentication, and separation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Spark Goes Cellular With The Electron
http://hackaday.com/2015/02/25/spark-goes-cellular-with-the-electron/
A few years ago, small and cheap WiFi modules burst onto the scene and with that the Spark was born. It’s a tiny dev board with a TI CC3000 WiFi module, capable of turning any device into an Internet-connected device. It’s only the very beginning of the Internet of Things, yes, but an important step in the right direction. Now, Spark is unshackling itself from WiFi networks with the Spark Electron, a dev kit that comes with a cellular radio and data plan.
As far as we can tell, Spark is the first company to fix this gaping hole in what cellular can do by offering their own service – 20,000 messages for $3/month and no contracts. Officially, that’s 1MB of data spread over 20k messages that are about 50 bytes in length.
There are a few dozen companies and organizations working on the next generation of The Internet Of Things, but these require completely new silicon and spectrum allocations or base stations. Right now, there’s exactly one way of getting a Thing on the Internet without WiFi, and that’s with cellular data.
Spark Electron: Cellular dev kit with a simple data plan
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sparkdevices/spark-electron-cellular-dev-kit-with-a-simple-data
Tomi Engdahl says:
LTE IoT Specs Anticipated in Chips
Altair aims to get jump on 4G MTC standard
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325762&
Altair Semiconductor hopes to drive the machine-to-machine (M2M) market toward 4G LTE with two chip sets coming out ahead of expected 3GPP standards for the Internet of Things.
Tomi Engdahl says:
TechInsights: Non-Stop Innovation in Chip Packaging
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325656&
The semiconductor industry is entering the era of Internet of Things (IoT), where integration of sensing and actuation systems along with low power radio devices must be combined in a single package. For a large number of applications, the control of the devices will probably be done by handheld devices, so the overall footprint of the package is critical. The need for high performance multifunctional devices in a single package is pushing the industry to innovate in multi-chip packaging. This high level of integration has presented an enormous challenge, because all the individual components in the package must contact between their respective bond pads and the external board.
To adapt to the needs of multifunctional devices, the packaging industry has attempted several approaches like package on package, silicon interposers and embedded package. Percolation of these varieties of packages into the market is indicating that the packaging industry is getting ready for the era of IoT where its contribution will be enormous, especially from the sector of multi-chip packaging.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Meet the Electron — an Amazing Arduino-like Cellular Dev Kit
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=216&doc_id=1325819&
How can you take non-engineers and give them the resources they need to create cellular IoT products? The answer is the Sparc Electron.
Do you remember the Sparc Core Kickstarter project from 2013? If not, just to set the scene, the Spark Core is an Arduino-compatible, Wi-Fi enabled, cloud-powered development platform that makes creating Internet-connected hardware a breeze.
After shipping 10,000 Spark Cores to their Kickstarter backers, the folks at Sparc IO shipped another 30,000+ to other designers who couldn’t wait to get their hands on these little beauties. This past fall, the folks at Sparc IO announced the sequel to the Spark Core — the Photon — for which they’ve been taking pre-orders (they’ve already pre-sold more than 10,000).
Sparc IO have grown a phenomenal user community. In fact, they currently boast “The largest and most engaged community of engineers and developers in the Internet of Things (IoT).”
Just a few hours ago as I pen these words, Sparc IO launched this new Electron Kickstarter project (I just bounced over to take a peak — they’ve already raised almost $90,000, which is three times their $30,000 goal, and they’ve still got 34 days to go!)
Below is a front and back view of the Electron, which — at 2.0″ x 0.8″ x 0.3″ (0.5″ including headers) is about the size of your thumb
The Electron is a tiny, Arduino-like cellular development kit comprising a microcontroller, a cellular modem, and a great big bunch of other useful stuff.
The Electron works like an Arduino. It runs a single application that you can create using Wiring (Arduino’s programming language), or C/C++, or ARM assembly, or whatever — it’s open source, it’s easy, and it’s fun.
Electron boasts an STM32F205 ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller with 1MB Flash and 128K RAM coupled with a U-Blox SARA U-series (3G) or G-series (2G) cellular modem. It also boasts 36 pins total: 28 GPIOs (D0-D13, A0-A13), plus TX/RX, 2 GNDs, VIN, VBAT, WKP, 3V3, and RST.
The key thing about the Electron is that it give you access to an incredibly low-cost cellular capability. Included with the Electron will be a SIM card that will work in the USA, Canada, and Europe, with other countries coming online soon.
Sparc IO has negotiated global low-cost data plans for low-bandwidth products. How low-cost? Well, we’re talking about $2.99 a month for 1MB of data ($0.99 for each additional MB). Although 1MB may not seem to be much if you’re thinking of streaming video on your smartphone, it’s not at all bad for a tremendous range of IoT applications
All I can say is that this is HUGE! The Sparc Core is really clever, but it does require access to a Wi-Fi network in order to communicate with the Internet and the Sparc Cloud. By comparison, the Electron will be able to perform its magic wherever there’s cellular service.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Global research from element14 reveals the importance of the Internet of Things to developing economies
http://releasd.com/7a5c
the research highlights a notable thirst for increased internet connectivity in developing economies, hinting that IoT has the potential to continue the trend for increased access to the internet in developing economies that mobile has created.
On average, 31 percent of consumers in Australia, France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. agree that the more devices in their home that connect to the internet, the better. This figure more than doubles to 71 percent for consumers in both China and India, newly industrialised countries with lower percentages of population with internet connectivity
Other findings from the study include:
Respondents in China and India are also more likely to agree with the statement “The more of the world that is connected to the internet, the better,” indicating that desire for connectivity extends beyond their homes. On this statement, 73 percent and 86 percent concurred for each country respectively, compared to just a 55 percent average across Australia, France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.
People in China and India are much more open to wearing a connected device such as a smartwatch or smartglasses, with 66 percent and 63 percent agreeing, compared to 26 percent on average in the other countries surveyed.
In the U.S., more than two thirds (68 percent) are concerned about notification overload as an effect of connected devices, highlighting the need for intelligent automation and minimal interaction in IoT technology
With regards to the privacy implications of IoT, France was revealed to be the most concerned nation with 81 percent agreeing this was an issue for them. The average number was only marginally lower (77 percent), showing IoT technologies must be transparent and address privacy concerns.
Aside from India and China (which were 59 percent and 63 percent respectively), Brits and Germans are the most gadget-obsessed nations, with 50 percent of both agreeing that they cannot live without their gadgets and technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kevin C. Tofel / Gigaom:
Broadcom has an Android Wear platform with 3G, NFC and more
https://gigaom.com/2015/02/25/broadcom-has-an-android-wear-platform-with-3g-nfc-and-more/
Broadcom wants to make it easier for hardware makers to build an Android Wear smartwatch, complete with features that Google’s software doesn’t even support yet
The new Broadcom platform for Android Wear is available to hardware makers to sample, and the company will be showing off its platform focused on smartwatches at next week’s Mobile World Congress.
Broadcom Smartwatch Platform Improves Battery Life for Android Wear Devices
Integrated Platform Adds GPS and Wireless Charging Support
http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=s898227
Broadcom will showcase its innovations for the mobile and carrier ecosystem at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, March 2-5.
In addition to an advanced application processor (AP) and Broadcom’s leading Wi-Fi and Bluetooth combo chip in the new platform, OEMs can choose to integrate GPS with sensor hub processing, near field communication (NFC), wireless charging support and camera support based on their product needs1. With smartwatches expected to account for more than half of wearable shipments in 20152, there is a significant opportunity for companies to integrate a variety of features and quickly bring products to market.
By providing a complete smartwatch reference design including hardware, Android Wear-enabled software, an optimized bill of materials (BOM) and a rich set of features, Broadcom empowers OEMs to quickly develop robust consumer products to capture the growing market.
Broadcom’s Smartwatch Platform includes:
Broadcom wearable system-on-a-chip (SoC) including 4x Cortex-A7 application processor and 2G/3G modem support
BCM4343: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2/Bluetooth Smart combo chip
BCM4773: GPS SoC with integrated sensor hub
BCM20795: NFC and secure element support
BCM59350: Wireless charging support
Camera support
Support for Android Wear OS
Tomi Engdahl says:
Powering the Internet of Stuff – by sucking electricity from TREES
Where are my generating wellies?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/29/energy_harvesting_the_power_of_touch_internet_of_things/
Despite regular headlines about self-powered gadgets and a deluge of stories claiming that any day now we should expect our smart phones to start gathering power from the environment around us, the promise of harvested energy always seems just out of reach. Or is it?
We may not be charging our gadgets in our Wellington boots any time soon, but thousands of sensors and switches are already casting off their batteries and going it alone.
In 2011 we brought you the news that t-shirts could collect power from sound waves, in 2010 it was wellies with a charger built into the heel, 2009 predicted tiny windmills everywhere, and in 2008 we would be charging phones through the power of interpretive dance. Yet, despite all of that, we’re still lugging mains-powered chargers around the place.
The limiting factor, on the sensors, is the life of the battery which has to constantly transmit the measured current to a receiver up to a kilometre away. Awesense is, therefore, about to announce a new sensor which can induce voltage from the monitored line, harvesting energy from the very thing being monitored.
Tomi Engdahl says:
I’m the wire starter: ARM, IBM tout plug ‘n’ play Internet of Stuff kit
Hook board to the router, control it from other side of the planet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/24/arm_ibm_internet_of_things_starter_kit/
ARM and IBM today hope to lure a few more engineers, tinkerers and the like into their Internet of Things (IoT) world with a cloud-connected development kit bundle.
The new Ethernet IoT Starter Kit combines the gizmo-laden mbed Application Shield with a Cortex-M4-powered board from Freescale. You plug the two together, hook the Ethernet port to an internet-connected router and the USB port to your computer, and (all being well) the kit connects to IBM’s BlueMix cloud.
Within the BlueMix cloud, you can use your web browser and Big Blue’s Node-RED Node.js-based tool to write scripts to control the hardware from afar, process sensor readings and button pushes, and output stuff to LEDs, Twitter, email, and so on.
http://nodered.org/
The hardware bundle is to go on sale “soon.”
There are plenty, nay, countless embedded sensor gadgets and dev kits out there already, but the focus here is plug’n’play with a management system in your web browser. All you need is the starter kit’s MAC address.
The second is to lay the ground work for processor core designer ARM’s upcoming mbed OS. Right now, the starter kit uses ARM’s existing collection of low-level mbed code and some glue to connect it to BlueMix. But the plan is to eventually run the one-ring-to-rule-them-all OS, due for release this year, on the kit.
The mbed operating system is aimed at a wide collection of IoT gadgets, and talks over IP to management tools on backend systems running ARM’s Device Server software. Those servers talk to web apps and applications running in the cloud; it’s all supposed to provide a consistent interface between analytics and control programs and underlying hordes of hardware, which may be miles away at the edge of the network.
mbed OS is in alpha at the moment
The “shield” on top of the starter kit has a load of stuff to interact with: a 128×32 LCD screen, a five-way joystick, two potentiometers you can rotate, a speaker, a three-axis accelerometer, a multicolored LED, a temperature sensor, and a socket for a ZigBee or Wi-Fi module.
“The goal here is to allow an embedded engineer to unbox a device, connect it to the cloud, and get it going in 10 minutes – with no need to enter a credit card or sign up for things,” said Zach Shelby, ARM’s veep of marketing for IoT.
“By giving people a choice, by supporting public and private clouds with data centers all over the world, specific regulatory issues are catered for,” Shelby said.
“At ARM, we need to work with a wide range of clouds, and we think that’ll solve a lot of issues.
“TLS encryption is a good start, and IPv6 randomization means someone can’t track devices. We’re very strict with authentication, controlling what services a device can talk to, and what data that service can access and when.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Canonical partners with Amazon, Microsoft, and others on Internet of Things
http://www.zdnet.com/article/canonical-partners-with-amazon-microsoft-and-others-on-internet-of-things/
Summary:Ubuntu Linux aims to become the glue that holds the Internet of Things together with its new partnerships.
Maybe Microsoft does love Linux! Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced this week that both Microsoft and Amazon have agreed to publish their Internet of Things (IoT) application programming interfaces (APIs) on Ubuntu Core.
Canonical Announces New Partnerships for Industrial and Telecoms IoT
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/02/19/canonical-announces-new-partnerships-for-industrial-and-telecoms-iot/
Canonical is pleased to announce key partnerships for industrial and telecoms IoT, underscoring the importance of security for critical infrastructure by investing in fast, automated, reliable updates for the machines that drive networking and industrial systems.
Critical infrastructure systems are now an attack vector for espionage and disruption. Canonical and partners are working to deliver certified Ubuntu Core devices that are automatically updated to address systemic vulnerabilities fast. Ubuntu Core also provides best-in-class application isolation based on kernel containers, minimising the impact of errors and vulnerabilities in third-party applications.
“Certified and supported Ubuntu platforms set the standard for safety and security in connected devices” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu. “Device manufacturers who choose Ubuntu Core on certified platforms now have a popular platform that meets corporate and government requirements for security updates and management.”
Software-defined appliances simplify telco customer-premises equipment (CPE) provisioning
“Snappy Ubuntu Core is a valuable and powerful IoT enabler for talented developers and inventors. Our mission is to support them with Deutsche Telekom’s resources and business knowledge.”
Ubuntu is already the leading platform for telco OpenStack deployments. Ubuntu Core is well placed to extend that lead into the customer premises equipment market.
Network switches and routers gain apps and updates
Next-generation switches are capable of running Ubuntu Core and a collection of network-centric applications. Cavium, one of the world’s leaders in network silicon, will support Ubuntu Core for its switch and router solutions, accelerating the development of next-generation smart networking infrastructure by a wide range of OEM manufacturers.
Cloud connectivity with Azure and AWS
Both Microsoft and Amazon have agreed to publish their IoT developer APIs on Ubuntu Core for snappy developers.
“Smart industrial systems need secure cloud back-ends for data storage and analysis. Microsoft and Canonical are partnering to deliver developer APIs to enable Ubuntu Core for snappy developers. This partnership will simplify cloud-backed device development,” says John Shewchuk, Technical Fellow at Microsoft.
Raise the bar for security and certainty
Revelations of software and hardware tampering by intelligence agencies have focused attention on institutional ability to verify the integrity of appliances and systems. The system and application update mechanisms in Ubuntu Core also provide certainty for enterprises of the source and validity of the software installed on an Ubuntu Core device, contributing substantially to overall system assurance.
“The industrial IoT needs foundational building blocks that are secure, reliable and easy to use. Collaboration between the Eclipse Foundation and Canonical will dramatically accelerate time to market for developers, building on one of the truly open platforms,” says Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director at the Eclipse Foundation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
News & Analysis
IoT Starter Kit Connects Developer to Cloud in Moments
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325828&
ARM, working in conjunction with Freescale and IBM, has created an IoT Starter Kit that provides developers with complete end-to-end secure connectivity from the device to a cloud service. The kit hardware is based on the mbed development platform, and includes an MCU board with preloaded software and a sensor IO application shield. The software pre-loaded on the MCU board includes full Ethernet connectivity to the IBM Bluemix cloud platform, which provides data storage, web page hosting, analytics, and mobile resources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Separately EEMBC is working on several other benchmarks including a processor-agnostic suite for servers and an update of its existing benchmark for low power controllers.
In addition, the group hopes to release later this year a systems-level benchmark for IoT end nodes. It will simulate and measure sensor input and communications output as well as MCU performance.
Source: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325752&page_number=2
Tomi Engdahl says:
18 Views of ISSCC
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325829&
You don’t have to go to the cloud for analytics, said Chris van Hook, a medical electronics specialist at the Imec institute outside Brussels. More self-learning algorithms are getting embedded at node-level chips in papers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google open-sources HTTP/2-based RPC framework
Chocolate Factory’s microservices code is yours to coddle
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/27/google_opensources_http2based_rpc_framework/
Google has open-sourced something called “gRPC” that it says represents “a brand new framework for handling remote procedure calls” using HTTP/2.
The Chocolate Factory says it has dogfooded gRPC on its own microservices and that it “enables easy creation of highly performant, scalable APIs and microservices” and offers “bandwidth and CPU efficient, low latency way to create massively distributed systems that span data centers, as well as power mobile apps, real-time communications, IoT devices and APIs.”
HTTP/2′s inclusion is important, Google reckons, because the newly-signed-off standard can pack more jobs into a single TCP connection, which means less work for a mobile device’s innards to perform and therefore helps battery life.
Developers wielding C, C++, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, and Ruby can put the package to work. Objective-C, PHP and C# users have a yet-to-be-defined amount of time to wait before unleasing their preferred syntax.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The same circuit all radio communications
If you want to develop a low-power radio communication with the embedded device, the circuit substrate has to select the desired radio technology. Bluetooth, ZigBee and other links have had their own radio circle. Texas Instruments’ new platform supports all wireless standards on the same chip, and an identical RF planning.
SimpleLink platform supports Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN-, as well as a variety of customized protocols are less than one-gigahertz frequency. Data transfer SimpleLink chips always manages to up to five megabits per second.
TI: According to SimpleLink is specially designed for the Internet of Things equipment operating in a radio link. Such devices are powered by either a small button-cell batteries, or by collecting the energy they use themselves.
SimpleLink chips processor cores ARM Cortex-M3.
The first SimpleLink circuits are smart to supporting CC2640 Bluetooth, as well as 6LoWPAN- or zigbee link importing CC2630
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2486:sama-piiri-kaikkiin-radioyhteyksiin&catid=13&Itemid=101
More information: http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/wireless_connectivity/simplelink/overview.page
Tomi Engdahl says:
CONTROLLINO
First Software Open-Source PLC
ARDUINO compatible
http://controllino.cc/
CONTROLLINO PLC (ARDUINO compatible)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/24519005/controllino-plc-arduino-compatible
First Software Open-Source PLC (Arduino-Compatible) – CE & UL certificated – to control your Internet of Things
Tomi Engdahl says:
Raspberry Pi GSM Hat
http://hackaday.com/2015/02/28/raspberry-pi-gsm-hat/
The Spark Electron was released a few days ago, giving anyone with the Arduino IDE the ability to send data out over a GSM network. Of course, the Electron is just a GSM module tied to a microcontroller, and you can do the same thing with a Pi, some components, and a bit of wire.
http://hackaday.io/project/4462-raspberry-pi-fona-pihat
Tomi Engdahl says:
ChipWhisperer®: Security Research
ChipWhisperer laughs at your AES-256 implementation. But it laughs with you, not at you.
http://hackaday.io/project/956-chipwhisperer-security-research
ChipWhisperer is the first open-source toolchain for embedded hardware security research including side-channel power analysis and glitching. The innovative synchronous capture technology is unmatched by other tools, even from commercial vendors.
The objective of ChipWhisperer is nothing short of revolutionizing the entire embedded security industry. Every designer who uses encryption in their design should be able to perform a side-channel attack, and understand the ramifications of these attacks on their designs. The open-source nature of the ChipWhisperer makes this possible, and my hope is that it becomes the start of a new era of hardware security research.
Internet of Things: Secure Because Math
It’s useful to point out how critical this field of embedded security has become, and why it’s interesting to see attacks against AES (which I tend to focus on in my demos). The ‘Internet of Things’ requires some wireless communication network – be it IEEE 802.15.4, ZigBee (which uses 802.15.4), or Bluetooth Low Energy. Since these are wireless protocols, security is of paramount importance – and the designers acknowledge that. Attacks against AES are interesting because all three of the previous protocols use AES-128 for security. Unfortunately AES-128 isn’t just a “check box” that indicates your system is secure, despite one document listing that because Bluetooth low energy has 128 bit AES, it’s “secure against attack and hacking” (see page 45). The idea that implementations are secure because the underlying algorithm is secure will cost somebody a lot of money when it blows up in their face, and they have to fix millions of already deployed devices.
Assuming designers aren’t foolish enough to send encryption keys over SPI (see Travis Goodspeed’s attacks), and have actually done the implementation correctly, and haven’t introduced backdoors, we can still break the AES implementation. This isn’t a theoretical attack, but a real-world attack that every embedded designer needs to understand. It’s clear that very few designers are aware of this issue, based on how infrequently it is brought up when looking over datasheets, design specifications, and application notes.
ChipWhisperer won’t secure the internet of things. But it will hopefully jolt people into believing that “secure because math” isn’t a good enough answer. Even these theoretically unbreakable cryptographic algorithms have great weaknesses during implementation, and they may be much easier to break than you ever assumed.
can almost directly infer the Hamming Weight (number of one’s) on a digital bus based on the power consumption.
Glitching is another devious attack on embedded systems. This takes advantage of the fact that at some point in your code you’ll have a test of the input password, signature, or whatever else.
It’s actually possible to manipulate the system to cause that check to fail, or for instructions to be skipped. One method of doing this is inserting a quick glitch into the clock
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish protocol to connect IoT devices elegantly
Finnish companies present at the fair in Barcelona mobile technology to Team Finland departmenta. One company is WIREPAS from Tampere, which has developed a software platform allows for unlimited scalable Internet of Things equipment for low-cost combination.
WIREPAS was born in Tampere University of Technology, a spin-off.
New, progressive short-range radio technologies are in demand.
- When the world is currently about 0.5 billion wired internet slots, in 2020 connected objects is already about 50 billion
WIREPAS developed by Pino software platform allows for unlimited scalable, efficient and secure way to connect the two devices. In the final, reliable, and tested the chassis, each device is an autonomous part of the network.
- Distributed intelligence in our system means that each device connects to autonomously with the neighbors. Our network is extremely scalable and reliable; it is able to use alternative routes if the radio environment is noise or other problems. In addition, it is able to form connections again, whatever the situation, heme-out.
WIREPAS developed by Pino software platform allows for unlimited scalable, efficient and secure way to connect the two devices. In the final, reliable, and tested the chassis, each device is an autonomous part of the network.
- Distributed intelligence in our system means that each device connects to autonomously with the neighbors. Our network is extremely scalable and reliable; it is able to use alternative routes if the radio environment is noise or other problems. In addition, it is able to form connections again, whatever the situation
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2494:suomalaisprotokolla-liittaa-iot-laitteet-elegantisti&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nokia believes in programmable world
5G gives people back to two hours of their time each day.
- Programmable world to improve the well-being and safety. The world is already a lot of examples of what can be done, Suri said.
For example, he raised the water systems who lose as much as 20 percent of the water. Beijing city such as it means two times the size of Finland water consumption, the amount of a waste.
Another example of an autonomous, self-driving car. When accidents caused by, for example, in the US $ 300 billion a year, self-driving cars will bring huge savings, if, for example, half of the crashes will not take place.
Suri is not too closely identified how Nokia is a programmable building in the world. Tips, however, he gave. For example, the self-driving cars are to be networked with very fast, short delays connections.
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2497:nokia-uskoo-ohjelmoitavaan-maailmaan&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 Hot Internet of Things Startups
http://www.cio.com/article/2602467/consumer-technology/10-hot-internet-of-things-startups.html#tk.cross_2cio_intrcpt
As Internet connectivity gets embedded into every aspect of our lives, investors, entrepreneurs and engineers are rushing to cash in. Here are 10 hot startups that are poised to shape the future of the Internet of Things (IoT).
1. AdhereTech
What they do: Provide a connected pill bottle that ensures patients take their medications.
2. Chui
What they do: Combine facial recognition with advanced computer vision and machine learning techniques to turn faces into “universal keys.” Chui refers to its solution as “the world’s most intelligent doorbell.”
3. Enlighted
What they do: Provide a smart lighting system.
4. Heapsylon
What they do: Turn clothes into computers.
5. Humavox
What they do: Create technologies to wirelessly power IoT by using radio frequencies, thus eliminating the need for wires.
6. Neura
What they do: Neura’s goal is to become the “glue connecting the Internet of Things” by developing an open platform that bridges objects, locations, people and the Web.
7. PubNub
What they do: Provide a global real-time network that “solves the problems of large-scale IoT connectivity in the wild, enabling IoT providers to focus on their core businesses.”
8. Revolv
What they do: Unifies control of your smart home via a smartphone or tablet app.
9. TempoDB
What they do: Provide a cloud-based sensor data analytics backend for IoT and M2M.
10. Theatro
What they do: Provide small Wi-Fi based wearable devices intended for indoor communications within the enterprise.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Opinion: I Hate ‘The Internet Of Things’ — But I Love The Internet Of Things
http://www.cio.com/article/2872518/big-data/i-hate-iot-netapp-ciobp.html
The “Internet of Things”—powerful trend, but misunderstood buzzword
As a CIO, your boss or your peers are probably asking you about the Internet of Things (IoT). Or they soon will be.
But what is it?
It’s hard to find a sensible definition of IoT. After all, the Internet has always been made up of things. And if we can’t even define what IoT is, how can we think sensibly about the size and shape of the market?
It’s time to sift the predictions…
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Security Implications of IoT: A Roundtable Discussion With Four Experts
http://www.cio.com/article/2882338/security0/the-security-implications-of-iot-a-roundtable-discussion-with-four-experts.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
(Internet of) Things as a Service (TaaS) – Hype vs. Reality
http://www.cio.com/article/2686197/business-analytics/internet-of-things-as-a-service-taas-hype-vs-reality.html
With all of the excitement around Internet of Things (IoT), it can be difficult to separate hype from reality. IoT is more about disruptive new business models than technology.
Move aside SaaS, IaaS, PaaS (Software, Infrastructure, and Platform as a service) – there is a new kid, TaaS (internet of Things as a Service), in town.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a trend in which the physical world is becoming a type of giant information system—through sensors and telematics embedded in physical objects and linked through wireless networks. As with all new and exciting technologies, it’s difficult to separate hype from reality. Certainly the IoT, with its promise of connecting homes and cars, smart grids and smart manufacturing fit into this category. What is different this time around is the convergence of disruptive technologies such as cloud and mobile, shrinking hardware and ubiquitous connectivity, increasing business use cases that are rewriting traditional business rulebook.
IDC says the number of connected devices will increase to 30 billion this decade. The mix of devices will shift from traditional clients such as tablets, smartphones and wearables to IoT devices ranging from sensors to jet engines, transmission grids, and facilities equipment to assembly line machinery, train switches, even cattle. The things that we expect to connect to the Internet will consists of sensors, actuators with information processing and communication capabilities that will make themselves intelligent.
While consumers eagerly await a new iWatch, Android wearable or a new smart home device from companies such as Nest; for organizations like Ford, FedEx, and GE it is all about IoT-enabled intelligent sensors, machine-to-machine connectivity, and sophisticated back-end data analytics to reap the business benefits of instrumenting, configuring, connecting, contextizing, and analyzing data from equipment, vehicles, physical infrastructure, smart grids and even humans. At the heart of IoT is machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.
The first thing to keep in mind about IoT is the distinction between the consumer and industrial spaces. IoT industrial needs to support a variety of last-mile technologies driven by unique application and environmental requirements as traditional consumer oriented wireless and mobility would not work in all situations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wireless communication standards for the Internet of Things
http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4438747/Wireless-communication-standards-for-the-Internet-of-Things?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150302&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20150302&elq=74dfcfc579b64fb1aa181c8c76088e64&elqCampaignId=21861&elqaid=24545&elqat=1&elqTrackId=44c7cdd15a5d4fbd83bf27e10f589336
This white paper provides an overview of the most important contenders around the IoT Wireless Communication Standards. We are looking at wireless networking technologies.
For the sake of argument and to keep it simple, I have left out the cellular standards, although we do recognize that they do play an important role in the IoT (and the so-called M2M business). I also left out RFID, which can be quite useful for the IoT for security purposes, but is less contentious as it is more an electronic bar code replacement instead of doing real (two-way) communication as such.
Also for simplicity we have left out the proprietary pseudo standards like ANT+, Z-Wave and EnOcean, for the simple reason that, like other “non-standard” proprietary standards, in the long run, they will not be able to survive against industry accepted international standards.
These IoT connectivity solutions can be split up into three horizontal (combinations of) layers:
1. the Physical/Link Layer (“the connector”)
2. the Network/Transport Layer (“the wireless cable”)
3. the Application Layer (“who is doing what to whom”)
Even though the three major IEEE based standards are competing to capture as large as possible application domain, all three seem to have found a core application space and will be around for quite a while – IEEE 802.11/WiFi for content sharing and distribution, 802.15.4/ZigBee for low power sense & control networking, and Bluetooth for cable replacement and wearables.
The battle has moved to the low power sector. With IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) now becoming dominant in the low-power networking market, there is no surprise that two new low power IEEE-based alternatives, WiFi (with “low power WiFi”) and Bluetooth (with Bluetooth Low Energy) are both trying to enter this market to get a piece of the action.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EC: mGuard Secure Cloud
http://www.controleng.com/events-and-awards/engineers-choice-awards/2015/2015-engineers-choice-awards-finalists/finalist/ec-mguard-secure-cloud/c18b37dbaeeb65561c098724fde32ece.html
Control Security: Phoenix Contact’s mGuard Secure Cloud (mSC) is a web-based service that allows FL mGuard users to securely communicate with and support industrial equipment over the Internet. This is a Control Engineering 2015 Engineers’ Choice award winner.
The mGuard Secure Cloud utilizes the IPSec VPN protocol with high-level security. This includes AES-256 bit encryption, two-factor user/technician authentication and X.509 certificates for machine authentication. Backed by dedicated high-speed bandwidth, the mSC performs five times faster than similar services that rely on Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology.
The FL mGuard is a family of industrial security appliances bringing IT technology to the factory floor. Hardware options include DIN rail-mounted models with hazardous location approvals, PCI cards, and portable USB-powered form factors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Save Me From Overbearing IoT Analytics
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1325835&
Will Internet of Things analytics drive us all to drink?
Almost everything we do of significance is becoming electronically enabled and recorded. And with the advent of the Internet of Things that is trickling down to even the most basic things — like opening a bottle.
A printed tag on a bottle that can be read wirelessly to check whether the bottle is sealed or opened, its position in the supply chain and pass the information up to the cloud: is this technology looking for a problem to solve?
I am sure there are legitimate cost- and energy-saving applications for such technology. But the most excited praise from the company developing the technology, Thin Film Electronics ASA (Oslo, Norway), is reserved for the idea that early customer Diageo plc, the vendor of Johnnie Walker Blue Label Scotch Whiskey, can use the information to send texts and emails to consumers
Many people have said that the money to be made in the Internet of Things will be in the data that is analyzed and acted upon. But some of the more frivolous applications of this technology feel like an intrusive waste of energy.
Already we are hearing about consumer distrust of televisions that eavesdrop on all living room conversations and pass them up the cloud to act as training information for better vocal command recognition. Similarly the idea is out there that social media flows are machine-monitored so that when you say you are heading out to eat, some Internet-based service can suggest restaurants close to you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM, Semtech 30-Mile IoT Uses 10-Year AAs
LoRa Alliance hawks M2M at Mobile World Congress
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325890&
BM Corp. and Semtech Corp. have partnered with the open standards LoRa Alliance at the Mobile World Congress (MWC, Barcelona, Spain), along with many other companies wishing to cash-in on the booming machine-to-machine (M2M) market segment of the Internet of Things (IoT). Other companies in LoRa include Actility, Cisco, Eolane, Kerlink, IMST, MultiTech, Sagemcom, and Microchip Technology.
So far, the LoRa Alliance parnership is offering the only end-to-end solution by marrying every possible application of M2M and other IoT applications with its Long Range Signaling and Control (LRSC) that allows users existing telecom resources to feed the information streaming in from billions of sensors up to the cloud where it becomes actionable intelligence.
“LRSC can be installed on any number of servers, including bare-bones xSeries servers or virtualized SoftLayer instances,” IBM Master Inventor Thorsten Kramp told EE Times. “Data from sensors pass through LRSC-enabled gateways via the LRSC network server and application router to IBM’s IoT cloud.”
The 30-mile maximum distance between sensor nodes is attributable to the encoding methods used on the unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical (ISM, 433/868 MHz) band on which the sensor signals ride. Local telecoms concentrating the signals will also be announced at MWC, including Fastnet — a subsidiary of Telkom (South Africa), Bouygues Telecom, KPN, SingTel, Proximus and Swisscom..
The LoRa Alliance claims that its solution solves all the problems holding back the Internet of Things from catching on in the mobile world of M2M — namely short distances between nodes (up to 30 miles with LoRa), short battery times (up to 10-years with LoRa on two AA batteries) and high costs to deploy (plug-and-play with Semtech and other modules managed by local telecoms and IBM software). Users merely need to sign-up at their local telecom — like they do for cell phones — pick up their sensor modules and start accessing the software over the web.
One big difference with low-power wide area networks (LPWANs) like the LoRa standard is that their speed depends on distance — for instance a 30 mile LoRa signal will run at just 300 bits per second (BPS) where as a 1-mile LoRa signal can run in excess of 100kbits per second. Nevertheless, most of the M2M applications will only occasionally be sending data, such as a farmer tracking rainfall, or a city tracking empty parking spaces to a pet’s collar that enables the owner to find his lost dog and wearables of every shape and size. Security is handled by AES128 encryption.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NXP CEO: ‘Security, IoT, Cars’ Drove Freescale Deal
Clemmer on overlapping businesses
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325901&
Clemmer insisted that the planned NXP-Freescale deal is a strategic, not a tactical, acquisition. He explained, “Through the merger, we are adding Freescale’s computing power to our security and [wireless] communication strengths, in order to drive the Internet of Things.”
NXP’s stated focus on “security and connectivity with a smarter world”
Freescale certainly isn’t the first company NXP has studied as an acquisition target.
Asked about if NXP and Freescale are both pushing for security in connected cars, Clemmer said, “Freescale is doing security in software, whereas we’re doing security in hardware” by leveraging NXP’s security chips used in identify and banking cards.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AT&T Integrates Home Security and Automation Controls with the Connected Car – See more at: http://about.att.com/story/att_integrates_home_security_and_automation_controls_with_the_connected_car.html#sthash.n9nTEi9B.dpuf
BARCELONA, Spain, March 2, 2015 — AT&T’s1 innovative connected car platform now has the ability to connect to the company’s home security and automation service. It makes AT&T Digital Life the first and only home management system currently integrated with AT&T Drive. This will enable automakers to integrate home security and automation service and pass the benefit on to their customers, so they can manage their home from the Digital Life app through the dashboard control panel and voice recognition of their car.
- See more at: http://about.att.com/story/att_integrates_home_security_and_automation_controls_with_the_connected_car.html#sthash.n9nTEi9B.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Building Blocks for the Internet of Things
The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) has become widespread in the past couple of years, making it a lucrative playground for engineers, companies and investors. What’s special about the IoT?
http://www.rtcmagazine.com/articles/view/106730
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet of dumb things
This guy’s light bulb performed a DoS attack on his entire smart house
http://fusion.net/story/55026/this-guys-light-bulb-ddosed-his-entire-smart-house/
The challenge of being a futurist pioneer is being Patient Zero for the future’s headaches.
In 2009, Raul Rojas, a computer science professor at the Free University of Berlin (and a robot soccer team coach), built one of Germany’s first “smart homes.” Everything in the house was connected to the Internet so that lights, music, television, heating and cooling could all be turned on and off from afar. Even the stove, oven, and microwave could be turned off with Rojas’s computer, which prevented some potential panic attacks about leaving an appliance on after exiting the house. One of the few things not connected in the house were the locks. Automated locks Rojas bought in 2009 are still sitting in a drawer waiting to be installed. “I was afraid of not being able to open the doors,” Rojas said in a phone interview.
One of the challenges of smart homes as they currently exist is that different manufacturers in the space use different protocols and standards that are not compatible. It’s like Mac vs. Windows or iOS vs. Android—but for many more devices, and with many other players. Rather than commit to one manufacturer, Rojas designed his home so that all of his devices connected to one main hub. “So when you activate a switch, a packet is sent to the hub and then the hub can send off a command to the relevant device,” explains Rojas.
About two years ago, Rojas’s house froze up, and stopped responding to his commands. “Nothing worked. I couldn’t turn the lights on or off. It got stuck,” he says. It was like when the beach ball of death begins spinning on your computer—except it was his entire home.
“I connected my laptop to the network and looked at the traffic and saw that one unit was sending packets continuously,” said Rojas. He realized that his light fixture had burned out, and was trying to tell the hub that it needed attention. To do so, it was sending continuous requests that had overloaded the network and caused it to freeze. “It was a classic denial of service attack,” says Rojas. The light was performing a DoS attack on the smart home to say, ‘Change me.’”
Rojas changed the bulb, which fixed the problem. But his issue points to other potential problems for homeowners who opt for connected devices.
The light fixture is not the only part of Rojas’s house to misbehave.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audi will outfit all 2016 cars with AT&T’s LTE service
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/audi-will-outfit-all-2016-cars-atts-lte-service/2015-03-03?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=rss
BARCELONA, Spain–Audi of America will equip all its 2016 vehicles with AT&T’s (NYSE:T) LTE service. The deal is an expansion of AT&T’s previous arrangement with Audi in which the operator provided LTE connectivity to all Audi A3 cars released in 2014. AT&T will offer Audi drivers the option of adding their car to their Mobile Share data plan for the $10 per month access fee.
AT&T is also adding a new capability to its AT&T Drive connected car platform that will allow the car to connect to the company’s Digital Life home security and automation platform. This means that car makers will be able to embed the Digital Life feature into cars so drivers can control their home from their car dashboard.
The global SIM is also being used in AT&T’s deal with heavy equipment maker Sany America to help it manage and protect its heavy equipment assets remotely.
AT&T and Audi to Wirelessly Connect all 2016 Model Year Vehicles
http://about.att.com/story/att_and_audi_to_wirelessly_connect_all_2016_model_year_vehicles.html
BARCELONA, March 3, 2015 – AT&T* and Audi of America today announced an agreement in which all 2016 model-year Audi vehicles equipped with Audi connect® will come with AT&T 4G LTE or 3G coverage**. AT&T and Audi enabled the first-ever in-vehicle 4G LTE data connection in North America with the all-new Audi A3 models released in 2014.
Under the agreement, all 2016 models with Audi connect will be delivered to customers with an AT&T SIM card providing connectivity to AT&T’s wireless network.
The new A6, A7, and TT models coming this year will feature the most advanced version of Audi connect including up-to-the-minute traffic information, semi-dynamic route guidance, over the air map updates, and internet radio, in addition to picture navigation, social media, personalized RSS news feeds with read-aloud functionality, and more.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Now you can access AT&T’s home security service from your car
http://www.cnet.com/news/now-you-can-access-at-ts-home-security-service-from-your-car/
AT&T’s Digital Life and Drive platforms are joining forces so you can tap into your home security and automation set up straight from your car.
Today at Mobile World Congress, AT&T announced that its Digital Life and Drive platforms now work together.
Digital Life is a dealer-installed, fee-based home security and automation service that provides live monitoring as well as remote access on Android and iOS devices and computers.
AT&T’s Drive initiative has locked down partnerships with Audi, BMW, GM, Ford, Tesla, Nissan, Volvo and Subaru. Its goal is to explore opportunities to inject AT&T tech into the connected feature offerings of these brands.
With this new partnership, Digital Life subscribers (with a compatible car) will be able to access the app on their vehicle’s control panel or via voice control so they can check in on what’s happening at home without having to grab their phone. Theoretically, then, you should be able to tell your car to open the garage door, rather than fishing around for your controller or the AT&T Digital Life app.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Locking Down IoT Security
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1325884&
The Internet of Things is a central to many business plans; securing it is central to the consumers who use it.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been all over the press lately. Cisco has made it a central point of their advertising, the recent U.S. government-sponsored security summit has made grave pronouncements about how important the security of it will be, and in general people are talking about it knowingly, just as they did about the Internet about the time that people figured out what ‘WWW’ meant. The difference is that there is fresh pain in the public consciousness about the importance of security on the Internet, so there is also much more awareness of the potential security implications of the IoT.
This complicates the life of the engineers who are creating these new devices who are, generally, not security experts. The ideal situation from their point of view would be to have a piece of hardware or software that they could simply add to their device that would make it secure. There are a number of such items already available, in fact, but I tend to be skeptical that they will be the silver bullets that they say they are.
For many years Microsoft Windows was the primary security weakness on PCs. When they finally took security seriously and fixed their problems the black hat guys turned their guns on the popular applications. Adobe products have been popular targets for them for a while now. PDF readers and Java have both left open gateways for unwelcome intrusion. What is the lesson in this for embedded folk? Your system is only as strong as its weakest link.
This lesson is being played out for the IoT expansion of the Internet in fast-forward. Several new operating systems are targeting the space, and most of them are concentrating on minimal size or new networking layers.
Snappy was born out of the Ubuntu Phone project, which created a slimmed-down version of Linux which is referred to as Ubuntu Core.
Transactional updates are old news to databases, but relatively new to embedded operating systems. All that it means is that if there is any problem the update can be rolled back. Anyone who has ever had a device bricked by an interrupted update can appreciate that feature. These updates are also incremental, so there is little need to completely rewrite the flash memory.
As nice as this update capability is, the real item of interest in terms of security is the enforced application isolation.
Unfortunately, this still does not ‘solve’ the security problem. There are still a number of attack scenarios that can compromise the hardware, and the application itself must be written robustly to avoid it becoming the weak link in the chain.
Ubuntu Core on Internet Things
http://www.ubuntu.com/things
Snappy Ubuntu Core delivers bullet-proof security, reliable updates and the enormous Ubuntu ecosystem at your fingertips, bringing the developer’s favourite cloud platform to a wide range of internet things, connected devices and autonomous machines. Now available on a wide range of 32 and 64-bit ARM and X86 platforms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
News & Analysis
Low-Power Wireless MCUs Proliferate
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1325917&
Developers of battery-powered, wireless devices now have a host of new MCU choices to work with, thanks to a pair of product announcements made here at Embedded World. Both Silicon Labs and Texas Instruments (TI) have released MCUs with built-in wireless connectivity that target battery-powered and harvested-energy applications. All include a 32-bit Cortex M processor core with integrated RF stage, providing versions for a variety of standards, including sub-GHz, 6LoWPAN, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and ZigBee.
The EZR32 family from Silicon Labs operates in sub-GHz frequency ranges for all geographic regions. The devices support IEEE 802.15.4/4g, Wireless M-Bus, Wi-SUN, and a broad range of proprietary radio protocols, and are available with a variety of transceiver choices to accommodate an array of RF performance requirements.
TI extended its SimpleLink portfolio, announcing an ultra-low power series that begins with the CC2640 for Bluetooth Smart, and the CC2630 for 6LoWPAN and ZigBee. There is also a multi-protocol version, the CC2650 for a range of 2.4 GHz technologies including Bluetooth Smart, 6LoWPAN, ZigBee and RF4CE. The roadmap also includes plans for devices supporting sub-GHz operation as well as a dedicated RF4CE.
Both companies also note that security is an important aspect of IoT designs. They both include AES encryption accelerators in their wireless MCUs and provide support for over-the-air software updates, allowing developers to ensure their designs remain secure during their installed lifetime.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Using Google Cloud Pub/Sub to Connect Applications and Data Streams
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.fi/2015/03/using-Google-Cloud-pubsub-to-Connect-applications-and-data-streams.html
Many applications need to talk to other varied, and often, distributed systems reliably and in real-time. To make sure things aren’t lost in translation, you need a flexible communication model to get messages between multiple systems simultaneously.
That’s why we’re making the beta release of Google Cloud Pub/Sub available today, as a way to connect applications and services, whether they’re hosted on Google Cloud Platform or on-premises. The Google Cloud Pub/Sub API provides:
Scale: offering all customers, by default, up to 10,000 topics and 10,000 messages per second
Global deployment: dedicated resources in every Google Cloud Platform region enhance availability without increasing latency
Performance: sub-second notification even when tested at over 1 million messages per second
https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Freescale battery charger for the Portable IoT
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/other/4438772/Freescale-battery-charger-for-the-Portable-IoT?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_systemsdesign_20150304&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_systemsdesign_20150304&elq=01177e9d5a5c4b41b2ac8e081fe43757&elqCampaignId=21912&elqaid=24604&elqat=1&elqTrackId=0a079ccb36cb4a4e94778c00b88e1eec
Their new BC3770 battery charger is what intrigued me. I had a discussion with Jean-Louis Dolmeta, marketing manager for power management at Freescale and he said there are some problems that customers have with existing battery chargers. One is with proper safety features like heating and overvoltage protection, etc.; The BC3770 has thermal regulation and protection and a 20V tolerant single input USB/DCP adapter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://www.printoo.pt/
Printoo is a printed electronics prototyping platform capable of bringing everyday objects to life. In a world where computers have become an integral part of our lives, Printoo aims to give people the ability to embed computational power into everyday object and devices. Printoo also enables new ways to link the physical and the digital worlds.
Printoo is composed by various hardware modules that can all be connected to each other. At its core is an Atmel ATmega328 microprocessor that is responsible for processing the information it gets from the environment. The platform is fully compatible and programmable with the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
Printoo is extremely thin, lightweight and flexible, being easily embedded in various materials, even on paper! Experiment with new materials and create amazing and innovative interactive devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How many Androids does it take to change a light bulb?
One. But it has to be the right kind of Android. And the right kind of bulb
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/05/breaking_fad_iot_lightbulbs/
For an awfully long time, there have been just two types of lights, more or less. There were ordinary incandescent bulbs and there were fluorescent ones.
Then halogen lights appeared, in their various guises, starting with the 12-volt fitting that’s now known as a G4. After that we had the invasion of the dreaded dingy CFL (compact fluorescent lamp), which was destined to put many off the idea of low-energy bulbs for years. Now, we’re awash with LED bulbs of just about every description.
Not only that, but we’re awash with smart bulbs too. There are LED bulbs that can be controlled from your phone, or even linked up with TV programmes so that you can have the Philips Ambilight effect without needing to buy one of their tellies. There are smart bulbs that have a Wi-Fi repeater built into them, or a speaker for streaming audio.
Then there are starter kits that enable you to spend a small fortune on getting your first two light bulbs connected to the internet, expansion kits to add extra bulbs, and DIY solutions for doing pretty much the same thing. Frankly, it can all be a bit bewildering.
If you don’t want app control, of course, it’s easier – and a lot cheaper – than it used to be to replace ordinary bulbs with LED equivalents.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wolfram embraces IoT with information-hungry Data Drop
What you want, where you want it
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2398211/wolfram-embraces-iot-with-information-hungry-data-drop
STEPHEN WOLFRAM, the man behind the Wolfram Alpha search engine, has turned his attention to the Internet of Things (IoT) and is offering Data Drop as a cloud-based casserole pot for boiling down and serving up IoT data.
Wolfram Data Drop is pitched at firms using connected devices that want to use the information they produce.
Devices will feed information back to the Data Drop, where it is stored in usable format in the cloud and can be interpreted and analysed.
“Where should data from the IoT go? We’ve got great technology in the Wolfram Language for interpreting, visualising, analysing, querying and otherwise doing interesting things with it,” said Wolfram.
“At a functional level, [Data Drop] is a universal accumulator of data set up to get and organise data coming from sensors, devices, programs or, for that matter, humans or anything else, and to store this data in the cloud in a way that makes it completely seamless to compute with.”
Information can come from a range of sources, including Twitter, Raspberry Pi, and the internet, via Wolfram APIs.
“Tell Wolfram/Alpha the name of a data bin and it’ll automatically generate an analysis and a report about the data that’s in it,” he said.
Systems that use “modest amounts of data” will find Data Drop free and open, while more intensive users are expected to have some sort of official status.
Data drops can be open or private. Public use can be taken through the Wolfram Cloud, while enterprises and other users with a Wolfram Private Cloud will “soon” be able to run their own on-premise systems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
level: A New Kind of Radio Module
An agile radio designed for low power and narrow bandwidths over a wide frequency range.
http://hackaday.io/project/1594-level-a-new-kind-of-radio-module
A cheap, flexible, and agile radio module designed for low power, low bandwidth applications. Towards that, it has a frequency range of 30 MHz to 4.4 GHz and 812 kHz of bandwidth, perfect for long range wireless sensors. It runs at 3.3V and only draws 63 mA at its maximum output of 16 dBm. The shape may look familiar, but this board is actually NOT an Arduino shield. Instead, it’s designed to accept Arduino shields.
Level: An Open Platform for Sensor Network Development in TV Whitespace
https://github.com/blueintegral/Level/blob/master/Level%20platform%20paper.pdf
The rapid proliferation of wireless sensors will
require new techniques to handle the corresponding growth in
traffic. One of the ways this growth may be addressed is with
technology like TV Whitespace. This paper presents a new open
source hardware platform to allow students and researchers to
cheaply and easily experiment with sensor networks in the TV
Whitespace bands as well as other frequency bands. It is hoped
that the availability of such a platform will spur innovation in
mesh networking, security, dynamic spectrum access, and related
areas of research.
The Level platform is based on a 16 bit CC430F5137
microcontroller. This microcontroller utilizes a von Neumann
architecture and incorporates an RF transceiver core from the
sub-GHz CC1101.
The CC1101 RF transceiver core is only capable of
operating in the 315/433/868/915 MHz bands. To be capable of
operating in TV Whitespace across 470-700 MHz, a transverter
was implemented.
Currently, the Level platform is able to transmit and
receive from 35 MHz to 1500 GHz.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Remote Controlled Weather Station
http://hackaday.io/project/4525-remote-controlled-weather-station
Raspberry Pi + Temp Sensor + RockBLOCK =
Today we’ll be creating a remote controlled satellite weather station using a Raspberry Pi, a temperature sensor and a RockBLOCK. The envisioned application would be a weather station in a really remote location (i.e. outside of mobile/cellular coverage) – maybe in the middle of the desert, the jungle, or even the arctic – sending its data back to some kind of central weather system.
The weather station application will periodically transmit its sensor readings using the RockBLOCK. For those of you who don’t know the RockBLOCK, it’s an awesome little module that enables small amounts of data to be sent/received via satellite from anywhere in the world.
Satellite communication with RockBLOCK
http://www.makersnake.com/rockblock/
The RockBLOCK Mk2 is one awesome module. It literally houses everything you need to send and receive data from anywhere on the planet (Iridium satellite modem, compact antenna and power circuitry) in a module smaller than the Raspberry Pi (the de facto measuring implement for these kind of things) at an equally micro price of £159/€199/$269 – available to buy online from Rock 7
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wireless Links to Provide Automation & Enhanced Efficiency in Medical Apps
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1325931&
Using FPRF devices, manufacturers can add a cost-effective enhancement to their equipment that will differentiate them from their competitors and improve medical care.
Two recent events led me to write this article. I have written several times about field-programmable radio frequency (FPRF) devices that can become nearly universal wireless devices. I also had a two-week spell in hospital. This allowed me plenty of time to consider wireless applications on the hospital ward.
It struck me that if each patient had their vital signs read, say, six times a day taking ten minutes each time, then this took the nursing staff 60 minutes per day per patient. The addition of a simple wireless link could kick-start the automation.
So I wondered what were the problems preventing this happening? Proprietary instrumentation looks to be an obvious stumbling block. A range of major vendors produce the equipment and they may not think linking machines together is in their interest. Security is another paramount concern.
The particular machine that the hospital actually used was fitted with a data interface connector in the form of a 15-way D-type RS-232 serial port. However, in the cluttered environments of a hospital ward, the thought of connecting cables into wall sockets each time is a non-starter. On the other hand, it does seem to offer the possibility of attaching an external wireless communications module with a bar code scanner as a “second-best” option.
Implementing a wireless link
Modern wireless systems provide reliable links that could connect the hospital equipment to a local computer. Bluetooth low energy (BLE), which is marketed as Bluetooth Smart, is an example where there are existing profiles for certain medical applications. The first major limitation of BLE is the range, which extends to 100 meters (330 feet) in theory, but which may — inside a building — be limited to just a single room in practice. The second issue is the risk of interference in the spectrum that it uses — the crowded 2.4000 to 2.4835 GHz band.
A lower RF frequency, say below 1 GHz, offers a much better penetration of building materials. For this reason, the ISM bands of 915 MHz used in the Americas and 433.920 MHz in EMEA and other VHF/UHF frequencies used in Asia would provide a much superior range.
A newly released FPRF device promises to be an ideal solution for the wireless component of the problem. This chip (part number LMS7002M) is user-programmable over an extensive range, from 100 kHz to 3,800 MHz, so it easily covers the frequencies of interest. In addition to a programmable frequency, the user also has real-time control of the bandwidth and gain.
There are many options for the transmission modulation scheme. The simplest technique uses 2-bits per symbol and quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK)
QPSK supports low data rate transfers and is robust under poor signal
QAM provides a spectrally more efficient modulation scheme, but only under good SNR conditions
The latest transmission scheme, however, is called Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), which is a complex configuration that uses two or more antennas separated physically by a short distance. MIMO techniques improve the spectral efficiency and achieve a diversity gain that improves the link reliability.
MIMO is supported by the LMS7002M and offers the reliability and signal integrity required for medical applications.
The FPRF is controlled by a baseband chip. The primary function of the baseband chip is to accept the data from the vital signs equipment, time stamp it, and packetize it into Ethernet packets ready for transmission. The chip will encode or decode the I and Q data streams and load the LMS7002M via its JESD207 interface. It can program the FPRF via a SPI interface to set transmit and receive frequencies, gain, and bandwidth.
The baseband function is typically achieved using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), such as an Altera Cyclone V SE for cost-sensitive applications. These FPGAs feature a rich mix of logic, memory, and DSP functions, as well as either one or dual embedded ARM processors.
Benefits for the hospital
The reading and recording of vital signs using manual methods takes the nursing staff approximately 60 minutes per day per patient. In the ward where I was a patient, there are a total of 40 beds, meaning this activity consumes around 40 nurse/hours per day. If the automation can save even 25% of this time, then it is the equivalent of freeing up the overall nursing staff from 10 hours of activity per day. In turn, this can be directly translated into monetary savings.
In situations where the vital signs monitor is permanently connected to the patient, such as in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU), the central control can command the equipment to take readings as required. This use model requires the local intelligence to monitor the wireless link for instructions
Benefits for the equipment vendor
Equipment manufacturers can add a cost-effective enhancement to their equipment that will differentiate them from their competitors. They can demonstrate that the innovation will provide boosts in both efficiency and in the standard of medical care provided by the hospital. In addition, any marginal increase in machine costs will be rapidly off-set by savings in nurse-hours.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tired of IoT hype? Internet of SLUGS and SPIDERS is the reality
Kiwi sewer systems shorted by slime shows we’re building nice warm places for things to live
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/06/internet_of_things_taken_over_by_internet_of_slugs_and_spiders/
Internet of Things (IoT) boosters have great stories to tell about “scavenger-class” sensors that use solar panels, tiny turbines or even stray energy gleaned from passing radio waves.
Amid all that excitement we don’t hear much about the fact that sensors in odd places will have other things to contend with, like slugs sliming their circuit boards into short-circuits.
That’s what’s happened in New Zealand, where The Northern Advocate reports Whangarei District Council is trying to figure out how to keep the creatures off circuit boards in sewerage pumps.
Better seals are being installed to keep the slugs out, a solution IoT kit-makers should probably note.
Tomi Engdahl says:
First Fully Digital Radio Transmitter Built Purely From Microprocessor Tech
http://radio.slashdot.org/story/15/03/05/2318257/first-fully-digital-radio-transmitter-built-purely-from-microprocessor-tech
For the first time in history, a prototype radio has been created that is claimed to be completely digital, generating high-frequency radio waves purely through the use of integrated circuits and a set of patented algorithms without using conventional analog radio circuits in any way whatsoever.
First all-digital radio transmitter
http://www.cambridgeconsultants.com/media/press-releases/first-all-digital-radio-transmitter
Cambridge Consultants demonstrates a world first in radio design
Technology innovation firm Cambridge Consultants has successfully completed initial trials of the world’s first fully digital radio transmitter – a turning point in wireless design and a real enabler for the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) and 5G technology. It’s a radio built purely from computing power, using the same familiar digital technology you’d find in a computer microprocessor in your home or office.
Unlike ‘software-defined radio’ (SDR), it’s not a mixture of analogue and digital components – for the first time, the radio is completely digital, which can enable new ways of using spectrum intelligently. The innovation is set to be hugely disruptive, like a previous Cambridge Consultants breakthrough – the development of the first single-chip Bluetooth radio, which led to the spinout of the global short-range wireless and audiovisual giant CSR.
The latest breakthrough – codenamed Pizzicato – unlocks the potential of the IoT. It opens the door to a new dynamic way in which the predicted 100 billion IoT devices can operate together in a crowded radio spectrum. And it will enable the creation of 5G systems, with multiple radios and antennas.
The Pizzicato digital radio transmitter consists of an integrated circuit outputting a single stream of bits, and an antenna – with no conventional radio parts or digital-to-analogue converter. Patented algorithms perform the necessary ultra-fast computations in real time, making it possible for standard digital technology to generate high-frequency radio signals directly.
“Our first trial of the technology has created 14 simultaneous cellular base station signals,”
“If we’re going to get high-speed broadband to every mobile phone in the world, we’ll need lots of tiny, high-performance radios in those phones. The radios will be squashed together in a way that analogue just doesn’t tolerate. Whereas a Pizzicato-like digital radio can follow Moore’s Law to smaller size and lower power consumption.
Good radio spectrum is a scarce resource – only low frequencies (1GHz or lower) propagate well over distance or through walls, so they are in great demand. Greater efficiency requires the use of dynamic or ‘cognitive wireless’ techniques to sense the radio environment and switch parameters on the fly. This could give access to more of the estimated 90% of the allocated spectrum which is not in use at any one time.
Making use of the higher carrier frequencies of 10GHz and beyond, however, will require techniques such as meshing and beamforming to circumvent the inherently poor range – and the analogue parts of radios are becoming an increasing bottleneck.
World’s first fully digital radio transmitter built purely from microprocessor technology
http://www.gizmag.com/digital-radio-transmitter-microprocessor-technology/36380/
For the first time in history, a prototype radio has been created that is claimed to be completely digital, generating high-frequency radio waves purely through the use of integrated circuits and a set of patented algorithms without using conventional analog radio circuits in any way whatsoever. This breakthrough technology promises to vastly improve the wireless communications capabilities of everything from 5G mobile technology to the multitude devices aimed at supporting the Internet of Things (IoT).
“If we’re going to get high-speed broadband to every mobile phone in the world, we’ll need lots of tiny, high-performance radios in those phones,” said Barlow. “The radios will be squashed together in a way that analog just doesn’t tolerate. Whereas a Pizzicato-like digital radio can follow Moore’s Law to smaller size and lower power consumption. It could also be programmed to generate almost any combination of signals at any carrier frequencies, nimbly adapting its behavior in a way that is impossible in conventional radios. It is early days for this technology, but we believe radio design has reached a turning point.”
The Pizzicato digital radio was recently demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.