According to Intel IoT is expected to be a multi-trillion-dollar market, with 50 billion devices creating 44 zettabytes (or 44 trillion gigabytes) of data annually by 2020. But that widely cited 50 billion IoT devices in 2020 number is clearly not correct! Forecast of 50 Billion Devices by 2020 Is Outdated. In 2017 we should be talking about about some sensible numbers. The current count is somewhere between Gartner’s estimate of 6.4 billion (which doesn’t include smartphones, tablets, and computers), International Data Corporation’s estimate of 9 billion (which also excludes those devices), and IHS’s estimate of 17.6 billion (with all such devices included). Both Ericsson and Evans have lowered their expectations from 50 billion for 2020: Evans, who is now CTO of Stringify, says he expects to see 30 billion connected devices by then, while Ericsson figures on 28 billion by 2021.
Connectivity and security will be key features for Internet of Things processors in 2017. Microcontroller (MCU) makers will continue to target their products at the Internet of Things (IoT) in 2017 by giving more focus on battery life, more connectivity of various types, and greater security. The new architectures are almost sure to spawn a multitude of IoT MCUs in 2017 from manufacturers who adopt ARM’s core designs.
ARM will be big. Last year, ARM’s partners shipped 15 billion chips based on its architectures. The trend toward IoT processors will go well beyond ARM licensees. Intel rolled out the Intel Atom E3900 Series for IoT applications. And do not forget MIPS an RISC-V.
FPGA manufacturers are pushing their products to IoT market. They promise that FPGAs solve challenges at the core of IoT implementation: making IoT devices power efficient, handling incompatible interfaces, and providing a processing growth path to handle the inevitable increase in device performance requirement.
Energy harvesting field will become interesting in 2017 as it is more broadly adopted. Energy harvesting is becoming the way forward to help supplement battery power or lose the need for it altogether. Generally researchers are eyeing energy-harvesting to power ultra-low-power devices, wearable technology, and other things that don’t need a lot of power or don’t come in a battery-friendly form factor.
Low power wide area networks (LPWA) networks (also known as NarrowBand IoT) will be hot in 2017. There is hope that f LPWA nets will act as a catalyst, changing the nature of the embedded and machine-to-machine markets as NB-IoT focuses specifically on indoor coverage, low cost, long battery life, and enabling a large number of connected devices. The markets will become a kind of do-it-yourselfers paradise of modules and services, blurring the lines between vendors, users and partners. At the same time for years to come, the market for low power wide area networks (LPWA) will be as fragmented and is already in a race to the bottom (Sigfox, said to be promising costs approaching $1 per node per year). Competing technologies include Sigfox, LoRa Alliance, LTE Cat 1, LTE Cat M1 (eMTC), LTE Cat NB1 (NB-IoT) and other sub-gigahertz options almost too numerous to enumerate.
We are starting to see a battle between different IoT technologies, and in few years to come we will see which are winners and which technologies will be lost in the fight. Sigfox and Lora are currently starting well, but telecom operators with mobile networks NB-IoT will try hit the race heavily in 2017. Vendors prep Cat M1, NB1 for 2017: The Cat M1 standard delivers up to 380 Kbits/second over a 1.4 MHz channel. NB-1 handles up to 40 Kbits/s over 200 kHz channels. Vendors hope the 7-billion-unit installed base of cellular M2M modules expands. It’s too early to tell which technologies will be mainstream and which niche. It could be that cellular NB-IOT was too late, it will fail in the short term, it can win in the long term, and the industry will struggle to make any money from it. At $2 a year, 20 billion devices will contribute around 4% of current global mobile subscription revenues.
New versions of communication standards will be taken into use in 2017. For example Bluetooth 5 that adds more speed and IoT functionality. In 2017, we will see an increase in the number of devices with the new Bluetooth 5 standard.
Industrial IoT to gain traction in 2017. Industrial applications ultimately have the greater transformative potential than consumer products, offering users real returns on investment (ROI) rather than just enhanced convenience or “cool factor”. But the industrial sector is conservative and has been slow to embrace an industrial IoT (IIoT), but is seems that they are getting interested now. During the past year there has been considerable progress in removing many of the barriers to IIoT adoption. A global wide implementation of an IIoT is many years away, of course. The issues of standards and interoperability will most likely remain unresolved for several years to come, but progress is being made. The Industrial Internet Consortium released a framework to support development of standards and best practices for IIoT security.
The IIoT market is certainly poised to grow. A Genpact research study, for instance, indicates that more than 80% of large companies believe that the IIoT will be essential to their future success. In a recent market analysis by Industry ARC, for instance, the projected value of the IIoT market will reach more than $120 billion by 2021. Research firm Markets and Markets is even more optimistic, pegging IIoT growth at a CAGR of 8% to more than $150 billion by 2020. And the benefits will follow. By GE’s estimate, the IIoT will stimulate an increase in the global GDP of $10 to $15 trillion over the next 20 years.
Systems integrators are seeking a quick way to enter the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. So expect to see many plug and play IoT sensor systems unveiled. There were many releses in 2016, and expect to see more in 2017. Expect to see device, connectivity and cloud service to be marketed as one packet.
IoT analytics will be talked a lot in 2017. Many companies will promise to turn Big Data insights into bigger solutions. For industrial customers Big Data analytics is promised to drive operational efficiencies, cut costs, boosting production, and improving worker productivity. There are many IIoT analytic solution and platform suppliers already on the market and a growing number of companies are now addressing industrial analytics use.
In 2016 it was all bout getting the IoT devices connected to cloud. In 2017 we will see increased talk about fog computing. Fog computing is new IoT trend pushed by Cisco and many other companies. As the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves, decentralized, distributed-intelligence concepts such as “fog computing” are taking hold to address the need for lower latencies, improved security, lower power consumption, and higher reliability. The basic premise of fog computing is classic decentralization whereby some processing and storage functions are better performed locally instead of sending data all the way from the sensor, to the cloud, and back again to an actuator. This demands smarter sensors and new wireless sensor network architectures. Groups such as the Open Fog Consortium have formed to define how it should best be done. You might start to want to be able to run the same code in cloud and your IoT device.
The situation in IoT security in 2016 was already Hacking the IoT: As Bad As I Feared It’d Be and there is nothing that would indicate that the situation will not get any better in 2017. A veritable army of Internet-connected equipment has been circumvented of late, due to vulnerabilities in its hardware, software or both … “smart” TVs, set-top boxes and PVRs, along with IP cameras, routers, DSL, fiber and cable modems, printers and standalone print servers, NASs, cellular hot spots, and probably plenty of other gear. IoT world at the moment is full of vulnerable devices, and it will take years to get then replaces with more secure devices. Those vulnerable devices can be used to make huge DDoS attacks against Internet services. The 2016 October 21 cyberattacks on Dyn brought to light how easily many IoT devices can be compromised. I expect that kind of incidents will happen more in 2017 as DDoS botnets are pretty easy to build with tools available on-line. There’s no question that everyone in the chain – manufacturers, retailers and consumers – have to do a better job securing connected devices.When it comes to IoT, more security is needed.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
The Trojan horse enters the land of lighting
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2017/01/the-trojan-horse-enters-the-land-of-lighting.html?cmpid=enl_leds_ledsmagazine_2017-02-01
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Internet of Things and LED lighting lately and found some confusion in the marketplace. First, not all devices or fixtures actually use the “Internet” in the Internet of Things (IoT). Many are controlled wirelessly via Bluetooth, RF, etc., but get lumped in as an IoT device. I also think people don’t like the term “Things.” They would much rather call items or devices by what they are or what they are designed to do.
So how does this apply to IoT and lighting? The premise of IoT is probably the most welcomed and misunderstood concept in the 21st century lighting business. We as an industry should quickly and intelligently embrace the power we currently hold. It distills down to illumination, data, power, and control(s). We (lighting people) have the potential to be the conduit or collectors of information to provide it neatly and concisely to the rest of the world. It makes sense to have all of the impending amassed data do something important, rather than collect data for data collection sake. The lighting industry is poised to be the gatekeeper of this information — and with great power comes great responsibility. Simply put, we have been handed a powerful genie that is still amiable to live within the bottle…our bottle. Fixture manufacturers should responsibly embrace this task and not get sidelined due to the lack of forethought or future proofing the business. In the rush to be part of the IoT rage, the lighting industry appears to be giving up too much control.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Smart Cities: New Tech Built on Ancient Needs
Advances in Smart Cities technology are satisfying age-old needs for connected communities.
https://www.designnews.com/content/smart-cities-new-tech-built-on-ancient-needs/31077561647379?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170201.tst004t
The concept is Smart Cities is not new. Communities have been working to create connected infrastructure systems that increase comfort and safety as well as resiliance and responsiveness. “Our point of view is that the idea behind Smart Cities is not novel. The kind of drivers that drive the need for Smart Cities have been in existence for centuries,” Aniruddha Deodhar, a principal for IoT Solutions at ARM , told Design News. “That includes integrated waterways to make the community more resilient. “eople want an integrfor example, people have also always wanted an integrated city of information and resources.”
“The idea of Smart Cities is not even limited to humans. These networks exchange information to make the community more resilient, responsive, and comfortable.”
Cities Are a Conglomeration of Interests and Stakeholders
The technology for connected cities is improving, but the deployment of the technology is still just beginning. “My view is that the Smart Cities is still in the nascent stage. That’s partly because a city is not a homogenous entity,” said Deodhar. “Cities have airports, homes, and factories. They are different stakeholders with different value chains and incentives. The city is a collection of all those smaller ecosystems.”
Connecting a city requires the coordination of multiple technology vendors all pulling in the same direction. “In smart lighting, it’s often done for the city by a vendor. It’s connected to cloud storage and other vendors, and it’s connected to other infrastructure such as traffic lights,” said Deodhar. “You can’t deploy that without including other entities. All of them need to be brought into a Smart Cities solution.”
The Roadblocks Are Technology and Community
If the technology exists, what’s keeping cities from becoming fully connected ecosystems? For one, all of the smaller ecosystems have to be coordinated. “The barriers are a mixture of technology and community,” said Deodhar. “Having high speed infrastructure, and security is a concern. Managing assets around the city is a big problem, so there is a need for a platform to manage these assets.”
While Europe initially took the lead on developing Smart Cities, the growth now comes from Asia. “Generally, the number of projects coming out of Asia now dwarfs the number in Europe and the US. Asia is leapfrogging the regular city infrastructure with modernization since they’re creating new cities by scratch,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Trinamic Surfing ‘Automation’ Wave
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331287&
“Automation is a mega trend,” whether applied the factory floor or the smart home, drones, security cameras or 3D printers, Michael Randt, founder and CEO of Trinamic Motion Control, told us recently.
Sensors and connectivity – represented in the Internet of Things (IoT) – are key enablers for automation, making it easy for users to remotely collect data and control devices.
But what about actuators and motors?
Often overlooked in the automation wave is the role motion-control technologies play in “connecting the physical and digital worlds,” Randt explained. As important as sensing, data collection and analysis in the cloud are for automation, “the physical control of the real world isn’t going away.” Behind every smart IoT device, there is a motion-control chip or module that must work efficiently and quietly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
33C3: Hunz Deconstructs the Amazon Dash Button
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/02/33c3-hunz-deconstructs-the-amazon-dash-button/
The Amazon Dash button is now in its second hardware revision, and in a talk at the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress, [Hunz] not only tears it apart and illuminates the differences with the first version, but he also manages to reverse engineer it enough to get his own code running. This opens up a whole raft of possibilities that go beyond the simple “intercept the IP traffic” style hacks that we’ve seen.
Just getting into the Dash is a bit of work, so buy two: one to cut apart and locate the parts that you have to avoid next time. Once you get in, everything is tiny!
Shining some light on the Amazon Dash button
https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8398-shining_some_light_on_the_amazon_dash_button
Tomi Engdahl says:
RF Outlet to Light Switch Hack 2.0
Convert an off the shelf RF control outlet into a RF light switch.
https://hackaday.io/project/19403-rf-outlet-to-light-switch-hack-20
https://hackaday.io/project/19280-2017-a-year-of-hacking
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Security Ratings Needed
Companies are now focused on security, but so far there is no simple way to sell it.
http://semiengineering.com/iot-security-ratings-needed/
Concerns about security have been growing alongside adoption of the IoT, and it seems to be making some headway. This is good news, if it continues, because one of the biggest concerns about buying connected devices is that they can provide inroads into personal data.
Data security has been a persistent annoyance for several years.
IoT is being dragged into this, as well, even though the market for connected things is really just beginning. A good sign of this segment’s growth is that the debate about what to call it—IoT, IoE, Iox—has simmered down. Translation: People are finally getting to work on real products. Sales are up in many IoT segments, although the initial rush to develop connected watches and home appliances seems to have fizzled. Just adding an I/O subsystem into a washing machine is no guarantee that consumers will pay more for it, particularly if there is no accompanying literature about how secure it will be.
Two years ago, there was almost no security being added into these devices. Much has changed since then.
There are several measures of this.
First, startups in this area—which generally pass under the radar of financial analysts—are selling their technology to systems companies these days.
Second, established companies that sell IP are also beginning to sell secure versions of that IP. ARM has been particularly active in this space, building out its TrustZone concept into all of its IP to establish a chain of trust.
And third, anyone who has been attending security conferences lately can see that attendance is booming.
These are all good signs, but what’s missing is a standardized way of measuring all of this. If consumers could look at a device and figure out how secure it is, similar to the way Energy Star rates how much electricity an appliance will consume over a year, security would begin to determine buying decisions. Reporting a list of secure acronyms means nothing to most people. Numbering security from 1 to 10 would boost sales across the scale, and provide the impetus to close up any remaining security holes.
This would require an independent security agency to test devices, of course, but the impact on connected electronics would be enormous. Technology companies already recognize the need for security, and there is plenty of work underway to make devices more secure. But rating these devices would accelerate this process significantly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fixing Security Holes
Why chipmakers need to pay attention to side-channel attacks.
http://semiengineering.com/fixing-security-holes/
Connected devices can do everything from save lives to improve the quality of life. They also destroy that quality or cause harm if these things or systems of things are not secure.
Security is a complex multi-level problem. It spans the entire seven-layer OSI communication stack, as well as the software that is used to run, manage and operate hardware. And it needs to be dealt with from multiple angles, from the smallest IP block and memory to the bus that connects them together.
The goal in most cases isn’t to make devices impenetrable. Given enough time and resources, and enough incentive, even the most sophisticated security systems can be hacked. As hardware engineers, though, what we should be worrying about is slowing down the hackers, minimizing the damage, and making it unprofitable for them to hack into devices.
The best known of these approaches uses power analysis—whether simple or differential—to create what is known as a side-channel attack.
The time has come to close the loopholes, and the best way to do that is by providing incentives for companies to invest in this technology, and disincentives for those that do not.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Ransomware Threatens Unsecured Systems
Ransomware payments hit $1 billion in 2016, and that number will only increase.
http://semiengineering.com/how-ransomware-threatens-unsecured-systems/
Cyber criminals typically use ransomware to lock systems and encrypt files, effectively denying access to data until payment is remitted. Unsurprisingly, ransomware payments for 2016 were estimated to hit a billion dollars, with some businesses paying considerable sums to unlock their data. Cyber criminals continue to set their sights on a wide range of targets, including CCTV cameras, schools, hotels and even hospitals.
Instances of ransomware are only expected to increase in 2017, as more and more vulnerable systems and “things” connect to the Internet. According to Beazley, organizations appear to be particularly vulnerable to attacks during IT system freezes, at the end of financial quarters and during busy shopping periods.
Perhaps most importantly, unprotected endpoints allow attackers to remotely access everyday physical features that are critical to maintaining routine business operations.
Although it is difficult to prevent, the frequency of successful malware attacks can be reduced by understanding that any endpoint, which may have originally been designed to work offline, is exposed to attack once it is connected to the Internet. Unfortunately, there is a common misconception that only critical infrastructure and big businesses are prone to remote attacks. Nevertheless, with connectivity and automation becoming ever more common, implementing effective security solutions should be a top priority for mid-size and small businesses.
In conclusion, simple and affordable solutions require a comprehensive solution that implements security at the transistor level (as per DHS recommendations), while protecting vulnerable endpoints and services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5G & IoT
The next-generation wireless communications tech will boost IoT deployment.
http://semiengineering.com/5g-iot/
“Designing to Evolving 4G and Pre-5G Requirements” was the title of a Tuesday morning tutorial at DesignCon 2017 in Santa Clara, Calif. Talk of 5G naturally segued into Internet of Things discussion during the session.
Enhanced mobile broadband access, massive machine-type communications, and ultra-reliable and low-latency communications will be aspects of 5G, he noted. These attributes will be especially useful in autonomous vehicles, drones, and remote robotics for medical applications.
As is usual with an emerging technology, “commercial 5G” will be available ahead of “official 5G” standards, he commented. “We can’t wait around for these standards to be finalized,” Yegani asserted.
Between 2017 and 2020, there will be “announcements and hype,” he predicted. The years from 2020 to 2025 will see “pilot deployment and tech winners emerge,” he added. For 2025 and beyond, 5G will experience “mass deployment,” he said.
“There’s a lot of noise in the market,” Yegani asserted. “It will take a while to get 5G up and running.” Low latency, a higher data rate and capacity, and more mobility uses, such as connected cars and drones, will drive 5G adoption, he added.
While many industry observers were expecting Ethernet over radio to be a key 5G technology, the reality will be a mix of old and new. The existing Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) “is here to stay,” Snyder said, noting that it will work with Ethernet as eCPRI.
Another new wrinkle is Antenna Integrated Radio (AIR), a concept realized in new products from Ericsson and Nokia, according to Snyder.
For Cisco to fully realize its 5G ambitions, it needs to acquire Ericsson, according to market rumors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Well Being over Ethernet
https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/blog/post/well-being-over-ethernet-eef5f6d4-4a4e-4e3c-bebf-9e4f6112e9b3?contactid=1&PC=L&c=2017_02_02_embedded_technical_news
One of the larger commercial vehicles present at CES 2017 was the NXP® Smarter World Truck – an 18-wheeler parked right outside the Convention Center. It contained over 100 demonstrations making use of NXP products showing some of the latest innovations in home-automation, medical, industrial and other fields.
Mentor Embedded, together with RTI, worked with NXP to set up a medical demonstration that showed data aggregation in real-time from medical sensors.
Mentor Embedded’s aggregation gateway made use of the multicore NXP i.MX6, a well-established platform, running our own secure Mentor Embedded Linux®. The technology we specifically wanted to highlight in this example was DDS (Data Distribution Service), implemented by RTI’s Connext® DDS Professional. The DDS communication protocol, based on a physical Ethernet network, allows multiple sensor nodes to link to a hub or gateway, so it is appropriate for many medical and industrial applications where multi-node data needs to be collected securely and reliably.
Traditional patient monitoring systems have made use of client/server architectures
DDS uses a “publisher” and “subscriber” concept – it is easy to add new publishers and subscribers to the network without any other architecture changes, so the system is scalable.
In the publish-subscribe model there is no central data server – data flows directly from the patient monitor source to the gateway destination.
DDS provides a range of communication data services to support a variety of application needs, ranging from guaranteed command and control, to real-time data transmission.
The NXP i.MX6 quad core system was linked to a 10” touch-screen display, showing patient graphs. The Mentor Embedded Linux operating system included the RTI Connext DDS protocol stack, the necessary drivers for high-performance graphics, and the Ethernet network connections. Other options include a fastboot capability and wireless communication links for cloud-connectivity.
https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/linux/
Tomi Engdahl says:
IIoT arrives; It’s time to get started
Implementation is not only practical, but now is a competitive necessity.
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/iiot-arrives-its-time-to-get-started/5fc5b345759be75ec8a5249ec04dc5bc.html
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has progressed from dream to hype to reality. Today, the basic deployment scenarios of the IIoT solutions we implement for our end user manufacturing customers include:
Greenfield deployments, which are primarily found in “smart” solutions related to advanced monitoring and visibility
Brownfield upgrades, which are the introduction of IIoT technologies and approaches to existing facilities to expand asset and process visibility and analytics
New asset-monitoring services from vendors who are leveraging IIoT to provide remote predictive analytics capabilities for their assets installed at customer sites.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Six ways to lower IIoT network costs
One consequence of the IIoT trend is that purchasing devices for your network isn’t the end of your expenditure.
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/six-ways-to-lower-iiot-network-costs/87d8da24e9237e6e36ca97b6b2a48ff2.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bridge the IT, OT gap by bringing IT into acceptance testing
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/bridge-the-it-ot-gap-by-bringing-it-into-acceptance-testing/4c1fff78070ee7caa9a05c5924c482c5.html
A key part of a new industrial control system (ICS) or manufacturing application is the acceptance test and information technology (IT) resources can be involved by bringing them into the acceptance test and help ensure a successful implementation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
System integrators helping manufacturers prepare and adopt IIoT
http://www.controleng.com/single-article/system-integrators-helping-manufacturers-prepare-and-adopt-iiot/2397c73ce4ad1e8da517b854d20e3efc.html?OCVALIDATE&[email protected]&ocid=101781
Do you think the cloud has been one of the game changers here around the IIoT and what are the potential risks?
Jog: “The cloud is the game changer, but the concerns are around the IIoT devices that people are putting out. In the manufacturing environment, it’s not some website going down. We have people who depend on us for the infrastructure, for the electricity and it’s important for us to protect and it’s our responsibility to do so.”
There are external security threats, but there are also some internal threats to security that happen with the IIoT with so many smart devices and so many tablets available whether they come from the company or from the outside. There’s a lot of security risk there.
Jog: “Yes, and are the devices themselves secure? With all these manufacturers putting IIoT devices out, even if one device in your network field has the potential to bring down the whole networking and in the manufacturing industry, that would result in disastrous consequences.”
Get tips on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), what it means for manufacturing as a whole, and how system integrators can help in the process from CFE Media’s interviews of three representatives from the 2017 System Integrators of the Year. See video.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Is Adding a Slice of AI to the Raspberry Pi
Google is taking a survey of the maker community and bringing its AI tools to the Raspberry Pi.
https://www.designnews.com/design-hardware-software/google-adding-slice-ai-raspberry-pi/108172781647411?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170202.tst004t
Good news for makers. Google is finally lending more of its support to the DIY community.
The company recently rolled out a survey targeted at makers. “We at Google are interested in creating smart tools for makers, and want to hear from you about what would be most helpful,” the company said in a statement, also promising that it would share its survey results with the the wider community.
First on the agenda – Google will be bringing its library of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to the popular Raspberry Pi computer.
First on the agenda – Google will be bringing its library of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to the popular Raspberry Pi computer.
Powerful AI will surely prove to be popular among Raspberry Pi users, already well known as being a cornerstone of homebrew gadget projects ranging from robots to Internet of Things devices.
Google is not the only big name looking to bring AI into the DIY community. In November 2016, IBM announced Project Intu , its own effort to bring cognitive computing capabilities, supplied by its Watson supercomputer, to Raspberry Pi users and other makers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dash With Arduino
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/02/dash-with-arduino/
Amazon Dash is a handy service, and when Amazon released their AWS IoT platform, [Brian Carbonette] felt that it left out all the hardware hackers from the tinkering fun. Seeking justice, he put together a guide for an Arduino Dash button aimed at hardware hackers and those who are still easing into the world.
For his build, [Carbonette] used an Arduino MKR1000, laying out a few different configuration options for building your button. He has also gone to great lengths to help all comers tackle the Arduino-Dash API communication process by building an AmazonDRS Arduino Library, which handles all the “boring details,”
Amazon Dash Button for Arduino!
https://hackaday.io/project/19351-amazon-dash-button-for-arduino
A project using the AmazonDRS library for WiFi101 connected Arduinos. Just like the AWS IoT button, but completely open source!
You can consider this project a how-to or getting started guide for using Amazon’s Dash Replenishment service API with Arduino. It’s targeted at hardware hackers and Arduino aficionados looking to add frictionless Amazon purchases to their prototypes. After following along you’ll have a working dash button prototype that’s completely open source.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Product Design: Don’t Make it Easy for the Hackers
https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=reg20.jsp&code=UM_020717_WS_ED&utm_rid=CPG05000002750211&utm_campaign=9484&utm_medium=email&elq2=3a0d98d3d08c41d6a43fa57381be1298&eventid=1344232&sessionid=1&key=18AA6B6B500F802B6A08B57ACD82D8F4®Tag=&sourcepage=register
Inherent to connected products is their ability to work with other connected products, providing increased functionality to the user. But as more products are connected within the ecosystem along with adding remote functionality, the risk to leaving your IoT product vulnerable to cyber-attacks is compounded.
It is incumbent on all manufacturers of IoT products to ensure they are not the weakest link in the ecosystem; allowing unsecured entries to breach into other connected products in the system. Hackers may not want the data your product collects, but they may desperately want the data that your product is connected to.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CIOs: The time to prepare for the Internet of Things is now
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2017/2/cios-time-prepare-internet-things-now
CIOs plan for IoT
“As a technological turning point, the Internet of Things ranks with the advent of the Internet itself and mobile computing,” writes Hugo Moreno in an article for Forbes. Moreno suggests that the time for businesses to plan for IoT is now. Although he points out “the torrent of data generated by the IoT will make big data look like a trickle in comparison,” he says data science today is mature enough to allow organizations to apply lessons from IoT data to other parts of their business. He writes, “Early adopters stand to reap rewards from this data approach, using it to guide development of next-generation consumer devices and even open up entirely new market segments.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Quick and Easy IoT Prototyping with Involt
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/04/quick-and-easy-iot-prototyping-with-involt/
IoT, web apps, and connected devices are all becoming increasingly popular. But, the market still resembles a wild west apothecary, and no single IoT ecosystem or architecture seems to be the one bottle of snake oil we’ll all end up using. As such, we hackers are keen to build our own devices, instead of risking being locked into an IoT system that could become obsolete at any time. But, building an IoT device and interface takes a wide range of skills, and those who are lacking skill in the dark art of programming might have trouble creating a control app for their shiny new connected-thing.
Enter Involt, which is a framework for building hardware control interfaces using HTML and CSS. The framework is built on Node-Webkit, which means the conventions should be familiar to those with a bit of web development background. Hardware interactions (on Arduinos) are handled with simple CSS classes. For example, a button might contain a CSS class which changes an Arduino pin from high to low.
Involt – prototyping framework
HTML/CSS based prototyping framework with build-in hardware interactions for desktop and mobile.
https://hackaday.io/project/11615-involt-prototyping-framework
Involt website: http://involt.github.io/
Involt translates CSS classes into functions. You only need to specify UI element, target pin and variables like desired values or their range.
Sounds trivial? Maybe. Creating layouts with CSS sounds like something banal but have you ever thought about adding hardware interactions with it, without any online controled services? With Involt, combining interactions is easy as never before and opens new ways in prototyping and further development. Calling this way of designing “tangible css” is something well describing what actually happens when you use Involt.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Week In Review: IoT
NXP financials; blockchain security for IoT; Joule adds Android Things.
http://semiengineering.com/the-week-in-review-iot-38/
NXP Semiconductors reported its Secure Connected Devices group posted revenue of $569 million in the fourth quarter, a gain of 10% from a year earlier.
Bosch, Cisco Systems, Foxconn, Gemalto, and other companies, including Bank of New York Mellon, have established a consortium to improve Internet of Things security through blockchain technology.
Google’s Android Things operating system will be incorporated in Intel’s Joule 570x single-board computer for development of gadgets and smart devices, including wearable electronics.
BI Intelligence estimates the market for IoT platforms will be worth more than $300 billion in 2021.
An ON World survey found that nearly half of wireless sensor network adopters are employing cloud infrastructure for their industrial IoT deployments. IoT platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Watson are the choice of 48% of respondents. Almost two-thirds of respondents have deployed wireless mesh nodes, according to the survey, while approximately one-third have deployed more than 1,000 nodes, two times more than a 2014 survey found.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Uncovering Unintended Behavior
http://semiengineering.com/uncovering-unintended-behavior/
First of two parts. Does your design contain a Trojan? Most people would never know, and do not have the ability to find the answer.
Very few companies ever had to worry about security until recently. Over the past couple of years, we have seen increasing evidence that our connected systems are vulnerable. The recent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which made many Internet sites unavailable, has focused attention on Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as digital video recorders and cameras that have Internet access.
One chip manufacturer, Hangzhou XiongMai Technologies, was singled out as the source of last year’s cyber attack that blocked access to some of the biggest web sites in the world. The company recalled 10,000 webcams in the wake of that attack.
XiongMai is hardly the only company making vulnerable products. Many chipmakers and device makers never update their software to fix even known problems. As such, they represent a huge ongoing risk, and there is mounting pressure to make the companies producing these products liable for the damages.
“Historically, the embedded market was technology that was limited in its connectivity to the outside world or in its ability to download and update code,”
Software is indeed part of the problem. “In the past, a company worried about the quality of their product in terms of RTL and verification, but it was in a constrained environment,” says Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas. “In the software world you build a device and it will typically sit connected to other devices and the world can attack it”
But software isn’t the whole problem. “When you design hardware, you need to make sure that other things are not put in there,”
At the same time that systems are becoming connected, the SoCs powering the products are also changing. “When we put more functions together onto the same die, and considering the cost to design one, people tend to know the primary functions they wish to support,” says Drew Wingard, CTO at Sonics. “But there may be other behaviors that might be interesting to add later. That results in an architecture where things are pretty connected even though the fundamental use cases may not value those. It is cheap to make things more connected, and you are betting that you may find something useful for it later. But the goal to make the systems open and extensible really goes opposite the direction of making them limited to only their intended purposes.”
Today we are also seeing another type of flexibility being added to some SoCs. “FPGA are used a lot in aeronautical designs,”
“Mil/aero is getting increasingly concerned about FPGAs, where there are many gates that can be programmed and you can get a snippet of a program added to that. You may not know it is getting burned into the FPGA. One thing they do is that for every gate that is not being used, they put into a known state so it can be tested for that to see that no gate has been used for another purpose.”
Kelf says that other companies are looking to go further. “One company wants to make sure that no Trojan could be loaded into a RAM that gets loaded into an FPGA.”
“There are some things that the verification team can do from a safety standpoint to make sure that it won’t do some things that you didn’t intend,”
Many immediately look to formal to solve this problem. “Formal is ideal for this problem because you can ask things such as, ‘Will X ever happen?’”
But not everyone buys this answer. “Formal is a flawed approach because you are looking for something such as a particular kind of exploit,”
Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director for product management and marketing at Cadence, believes that a tiered approach is necessary. “There are layers. Portable Stimulus sits at the highest layer and enables you to verify pure functionality. As you go down you get to formal where you can act on assertions.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will this collaborative venture push IIoT forward?
http://www.electropages.com/2017/02/will-this-collaborative-venture-push-iiot-forward/?utm_campaign=&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=article&utm_content=Will+this+collaborative+venture+push+IIoT+forward%3F
Advances in networking mean that Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology is fast approaching a situation where it becomes a practical reality.
However, the application of IIoT still has a number of practical hoops to jump through. These operational challenges are to be found in areas such as sensing, automation, and security Japanese technology company Yokogowa Electric Corporation is hoping to push IIoT technology forward following a collaborative agreement it as reached with four companies.
It will work with Microsoft, FogHorn Systems, Bayshore Networks, and Telit IoT Platforms, LLC in a plan to integrate their technology into an IIoT architecture.
It is hoped that via such an architecture process applications will be configured to enable the use of plug-and-play sensors. This will be achieved by enabling the automatic detection of sensors and other instruments connected to the network, by making appropriate settings that work immediately
The plan is that Yokogawa’s IIoT architecture will integrate the cloud-based Microsoft Azure IoT Suite, FogHorn’s fog computing software, Bayshore’s layer 7 security technology
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Open Sourcing Made Apache Kafka A Dominant Streaming Platform
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/02/05/2235238/how-open-sourcing-made-apache-kafka-a-dominant-streaming-platform
Open sourced in 2010, the Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform is now used at more than a third of Fortune 500 companies (as well as seven of the world’s top 10 banks).
Co-creator Neha Narkhede says “We saw the need for a distributed architecture with microservices that we could scale quickly and robustly. The legacy systems couldn’t help us anymore.”
[T]hough Kafka started off as a very scalable messaging system, it grew to complete our vision of being a distributed streaming platform.”
An inside look at why Apache Kafka adoption is exploding
Apache Kafka is booming for several reasons, but developers are perhaps the biggest.
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/an-inside-look-at-why-apache-kafka-adoption-is-exploding/
Apache Kafka, the open source distributed streaming platform, is making an increasingly vocal claim for stream data “world domination” (to coin Linus Torvald’s whimsical initial modest goals with Linux). Last summer I wrote about Kafka and the company behind its enterprise rise, Confluent. Kafka adoption was accelerating as the central platform for managing streaming data in organizations, with production deployments of Kafka claiming six of the top 10 travel companies, seven of the top 10 global banks, eight of the top 10 insurance companies, and nine of the top 10 US telecom companies.
I asked Confluent CTO and co-founder Neha Narkhede what was behind these numbers.
Hadoop is too slow
Fitting the needs of modern business
Making money while making friends
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reverse Engineering Ikea’s New Smart Bulbs
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/06/reverse-engineering-ikeas-new-smart-bulbs/
Over in Sweden, Czech, Italy, and Belgium, Ikea is launching a new line of ‘smart’ light bulbs. These countries are apparently the test market for these bulbs, and they’ll soon be landing on American shores. This means smart Ikea bulbs will be everywhere soon, and an Internet of Light Bulbs is a neat thing to explore. [Markus] got his hands on a few of these bulbs, and is now digging into their inner workings (German Make Magazine, with a Google Translate that includes the phrase, ‘capering the pear’).
Inside these bulbs is a Silicon Labs microcontroller with ZigBee support, twelve chip LEDs, and associated electronics that look like they might pass the bigclivedotcom smoke test.
As with all Internet of Things, we must ask an important question: will it become part of Skynet and shut down the Internet, like webcams did last summer?
https://www.heise.de/make/artikel/Ikea-Tradfri-Das-steckt-im-Smart-Home-aus-dem-Moebelhaus-3597295.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Multi Zone Wireless Thermostat
Replace the bimetallic thermostat with a few microcontroller based thermostats to control the combi boiler
https://hackaday.io/project/19365-multi-zone-wireless-thermostat
The current combi boiler control bases the home heating in the living room bimetallic thermostat, this is not convenient nor confortable when we are mostly in other rooms, e.g, sleeping.
The project aims to:
- Replace the bimetallic thermostat with a micro controller based thermostat (remote unit) capable of commanding the boiler, logging temperature and receiving commands from the controller unit.
- Add mobile micro controller (remote units) to report temperatures to the controller unit.
- Build the controller unit to receive temperatures from the remote units and command the boiler consequently.
By publishing ON to boiler/onoff the boiler is turned on.
All the ESP8266 are going to be names Remote Units. All the remote units will report temperature and support an output connection.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Guide helps designers of cabling systems for 60W PoE lighting applications
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2017/02/siemon-60w-poe-lighting-cabling-guide.html?cmpid=enl_cim_cimdatacenternewsletter_2017-02-06
Siemon recently made available the document “Zone Cabling and Coverage Area Planning Guide: 60W PoE Lighting Applications.” The company says it produced the document “to provide guidance to infrastructure designers on the selection, design and deployment of a structured cabling system optimized to support a wide range of Power over Ethernet (PoE) lighting applications.”
Further, Siemon explained: “PoE lighting systems are becoming increasingly popular due to the ease and benefits of using Ethernet communication for control and balanced twisted-pair cabling to deliver reliable and cost-effective DC power. PoE lighting solutions already illuminate over one billion square feet of commercial space globally, and it is estimated the number of smart lighting deployments will grow from 46 million units in 2015 to 2.54 billion in 2020. PoE lighting luminaires typically use light-emitting diode (LED) technology, which offers the benefits of lower power consumption and less heat generation than other luminaire design alternatives, while lowering capital investment, improving safety and comfort, and integrating with building automation systems.
“PoE lighting systems rely on a well-designed infrastructure of high-performance balanced twisted-pair cabling, network electronics, and software connecting and communication with Internet Protocol (IP) addressable luminaires, dimmers, sensors, and controllers to deliver maximum performance, comfort, and energy savings benefits.
Zone Cabling and Coverage Area Planning Guide: 60W PoE Lighting Applications
http://www.siemon.com/poelighting/
Considered an integral component of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart or intelligent lighting solutions consist of a system of lighting fixtures, commonly called luminaires (surfaced mounted or recessed) or troffers (designed to fit into a modular dropped ceiling grid), which can be controlled, monitored, and powered over one centralized network.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Using SDR to Take Control of Your Home Security System
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/06/using-sdr-to-take-control-of-your-home-security-system/
[Dan Englender] was working on implementing a home automation and security system, and while his house was teeming with sensors, they used a proprietary protocol which was not supported by the open source system he was trying to implement. The problem with home automation and security systems is the lack of standardization – or rather, the large number of (often incompatible) standards used to ensure consumers get tied in to one specific system. He has shared the result of his efforts at getting the two to talk to each other via his project decode345.
The result enabled him to receive signals from Honeywell’s 5800 series of wireless products and interface them with OpenHAB — a vendor and technology agnostic open source automation software.
The hardware used is plain vanilla – a cheap SDR dongle connected to a Raspberry Pi 3. His code, available on Github, along with OpenHAB, are lightweight enough to run comfortably on the Pi 3.
Despite trying a lot, he could not get gnuradio to demodulate the transmissions received from his sensors, so he rolled out his own decoder in Python, which makes for some interesting reading about how he reverse-engineered the protocol. Once over the hill, the final part of sending the received data via the Paho MQTT broker to OpenHAB was pretty simple.
Honeywell 345 Mhz decoding
https://github.com/denglend/decode345
This project decodes the 345 Mhz signals used by Honeywell 5800 series wireless security system components. See the decode345 project writeup for more background and technical operation of the project.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Motion Detecting Camera Recognizes Humans Using The Cloud
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/06/motion-detecting-camera-recognizes-humans-using-the-cloud/
[Mark West] and his wife had a problem, they’d been getting unwanted guests in their garden. Mark’s solution was to come up with a motion activated security camera system that emails him when a human moves in the garden. That’s right, only a human. And to make things more interesting from a technical standpoint, he does much of the processing in the cloud. He sends the cloud a photo with something moving in it, and he’s sent an email only if it has a human in it.
[Mark]’s first iteration, described very well on his website, involved putting together all off-the-shelf components including a Raspberry Pi Zero, the Pi NoIR camera and the ZeroView Camera Mount that let him easily mount it all on the inside of his window looking out to the garden. He used Motion to examine the camera’s images and look for any frames with movement. His code sent him an email with a photo every time motion was detected. The problem was that on some days he got email alerts with as many as 50 false positives: moving shadows, the neighbor’s cat, even rain on the window.
That lead him to his next iteration, checking for humans in the photos. For that he chose to pass the photos on to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Rekognition online tool to check for humans.
Smarten up your Pi Zero Web Camera with Image Analysis and Amazon Web Services (Part 1)
https://utbrudd.bouvet.no/2017/01/10/smarten-up-your-pi-zero-web-camera-with-image-analysis-and-amazon-web-services-part-1/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish manufacturer sells sensor – searching for the growth of on-line applications
Elektro Active ferroelectric sensors and sheets manufacturer Emfit focus resources on the measurement of operating over the Internet vibrations and forces.
Enfitin flexible sensor material is used, for example, paper machines, sports equipment and buildings. The company is well-known, particularly concerning the bed in a non-contact measuring bio-signals. The company sells the sensor membrane to the other device manufacturers.
The company’s core competencies are electro-active sensors, and including over the Internet real-time measurement of vibrations and forces.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/02/07/suomalainen-anturivalmistaja-myy-hakee-kasvua-nettisovelluksista/
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Control Center
IoT Control Center using MQTT/JS/AdminLTE
https://hackaday.io/project/19704-iot-control-center
IoT JSON comunication protocol via MQTT broker.
In november 2016 I wanted to remote control and automate some tasks like watering my greenhouse, turn off/on lights/heating on a country house.
I was playing with Arduino/ESP8266/Raspberry Pi for some time now and I started thinking and researching a way to do it. After a few days I decided to use a combination of Raspberry Pi as a server with a MQTT broker and NodeMCU.
I had in mind a JSON based protocol for communication via MQTT. Then I searched the net to see it this was done before and I found IoT Manager. I tried it for a few days for night heating my two dogs. I had a few problems with it and decided to build my own control center.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nokia will be the power of IoT race – MWC 2017 is approaching
Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress will open again in a few weeks. Nokia is preparing the event a strong presence of 5G technology, in addition to the Internet of Things IoT solutions.
Nokia’s network presents a half February 27, beginning at MWC: based in the cloud act on the core network (Cloud Packet Core) to respond to the increased amount of usage needs. Nokia shows a cloud solution that is suitable for a wide range of services incl. broadband and mobile traffic between machines (IoT / MTC).
In addition to other support services to Nokia’s cloud service also supports 3GPP Release 13′s according to the mobile communications IoT as a CIoT, or functionalities, such CIoT Gateway Serving Node and with it a new narrow-band IoT mode NB-IoT.
Nokia competitor Ericsson has been active in 5G-, IOT and cloud fronts.
China’s Huawei is presenting the latest trendy products and IOT 5G-fronts.
Keysight, Rohde & Schwarz and Anritsu present new topics 5G is in addition to the new Internet of Things IoT measurements.
Source: http://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2017/02/08/nokia-tulee-voimalla-iot-kisaan-mwc-2017-lahestyy/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Smart home startup Brilliant launches Control, a $199 5-inch wall-mounted hub for controlling appliances, available for pre-order today
Do you feel like you need to upgrade your light switches to touchscreens?
http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/2/8/14540220/brilliant-control-smart-home-light-switch-touch-screen
One of the biggest challenges facing smart home gadgets is the light switch. Light switches are dead simple. They work instantly. And everyone knows how to use them. No smart home gadget can make all of those claims — and so far, there’s no object as dead simple as the light switch to control all of our smart devices.
The company Brilliant has sprung up to fill that gap. Brilliant CEO and co-founder Aaron Emigh, who was previously CTO of Shopkick and a VP at Six Apart, says he started the company so that he could make a device for his own home. “I realized pretty quickly I was going to hate having to use my smartphone all the time in my house,” he says. “It’s just the wrong interaction paradigm.”
His answer is the Brilliant Control — a small touchscreen tablet that replaces a light switch and is meant to control everything from lights (smart or otherwise) to music to smart ovens and sprinklers and whatever else you can hook up.
The device has a 5-inch screen and is just a bit bigger than a traditional light switch.
Brilliant Control also includes Amazon’s Alexa, so that you can use voice control instead of touch.
But Control focuses on touch, rather than voice, because Emigh thinks the immediacy of a light switch-like response is critical in the home.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Role of the Network in Preventing Dyn 2.0
http://www.securityweek.com/role-network-preventing-dyn-20
Much has been said about the DDoS attacks on Dyn and the subsequent security issues surrounding IoT devices. In late 2016, hackers exploited hundreds of thousands of IoT devices, such as security cameras and DVRs, to cause massive internet outages over a prolonged period of time.
While this attack has resulted in an uproar of conversation about how we can enhance IoT security, the truth of the matter is that there are fundamental security issues that simply cannot be fixed with the industry’s current approach. DDoS attacks and the like are really just a symptom of the larger issues we are facing as an industry when it comes to botnets and securing IoT devices.
The current approach towards preventing botnets and securing IoT devices has serious limitations. As we saw with the Dyn attack, many IoT devices in the market are inherently insecure. Why? Simple business priorities. The margins on these consumer devices are very small and many of the smaller manufacturers who produce these devices are unable or unwilling to invest enough in security. Simple security fixes like not relying on default passwords may seem like an obvious mitigation, but many smaller companies struggle to implement it.
Even when devices do integrate some form of security, consumers rarely act on these capabilities. Many consumers are either unaware that there are measures they have to take to secure their devices – such as changing the default password or performing software updates – or, they are unwilling to apply these measures. This also adds to the perpetual issue of insecure devices being able to be used for botnets.
These examples indicate that there is no perfect solution currently being implemented that enables truly secure IoT. Instead of putting the onus on the devices, consumers or cloud providers, these attacks need to be stopped at the network level – any further out and they become almost impossible to contain. Every attack, no matter where it originates or where it is headed, has to traverse the network at one point or another. Stopping these attacks and bad traffic at the network level, by placing enforcement points in more parts of the network, directly addresses the problem without relying on the endpoints themselves to be secure.
For enterprises, this means ensuring you have a fully secure network, with security capabilities woven throughout the network to stop attacks at any point.
For consumers, this shifts the responsibility away from these other parties and directly onto those who have the best ability to fix the issue: the service providers. Service providers have always faced a certain level of liability when it comes to keeping their customers up and running. They have service level agreements (SLAs) for availability, so why not have SLAs for security? As a matter of fact, the aggregation of IoT devices is what allowed the DDoS to overwhelm Dyn. What if you could have stopped it earlier in the network before it built up momentum at an aggregation point? This is valid not only from a liability perspective, but also because SPs have a real opportunity to provide a necessary service to their customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LoRaWAN And Raspberry Pi Compute Module For A Remote Display
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/08/lorawan-and-raspberry-pi-compute-module-for-a-remote-display/
We see a lot of Raspberry Pi projects on these pages featuring all variants of the little board from Cambridge, but with one notable exception. Surprisingly few of them have featured its industrial embedded cousin, the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. The Pi-on-a-SODIMM form factor is a neat idea, but we are guessing that the high price of the development board relative to that of a Model B or a Pi Zero has pushed most people in our community towards the latter choice.
[Andrew Back] has put up a straightforward demonstration project on the RS DesignSpark site that provides an introduction to the Compute Module 3, using it to run a remotely operated display. In addition it uses an RN2483 LoRaWan radio module and The Things Network for communication, which makes it worth a look even if the Compute Module wasn’t of interest.
Making a remotely updated display with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 and Microchip RN2483
https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/making-a-remotely-updated-display-with-the-raspberry-pi-compute-module-3-and-microchip-rn2483
A LoRaWAN enabled HDMI display that can be updated from up to 15km away.
Using The Things Network for connectivity, the Raspberry Pi Compute Module IO Board and Microchip RN2483 PICTail for hardware prototyping, and some simple Python scripts.
The following connections were made between the IO Board and RN2483 PICTail module:
3v3 →26
GND → 28
14 (UART 0 Tx) → 17 (RN2483 Rx)
15 (UART 0 Rx) → 21 (RN2483 tx)
Since there is no wired or wireless LAN connectivity — there will be many applications with no need for either — a USB Ethernet adapter was used to provide network access for development.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Things Network
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/
Building a global internet of things network together.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5G & IoT
The next-generation wireless communications tech will boost IoT deployment.
http://semiengineering.com/5g-iot/
Yegani described the timeline for specifying 5G standards between now and 2020.
As is usual with an emerging technology, “commercial 5G” will be available ahead of “official 5G” standards, he commented. “We can’t wait around for these standards to be finalized,” Yegani asserted.
Between 2017 and 2020, there will be “announcements and hype,” he predicted. The years from 2020 to 2025 will see “pilot deployment and tech winners emerge,” he added. For 2025 and beyond, 5G will experience “mass deployment,” he said.
“There’s a lot of noise in the market,” Yegani asserted. “It will take a while to get 5G up and running.” Low latency, a higher data rate and capacity, and more mobility uses, such as connected cars and drones, will drive 5G adoption, he added.
Tomi Engdahl says:
8.4 billion devices online
this year a total of 8.4 billion connected devices. The amount is 31 per cent higher than last year. In 2020, the number will grow 20.4 billion for the unit, estimates Gartner. The world has 7.5 billion people, so the number of connected devices will grow into larger this year. Two-thirds, or 67 per cent of IoT devices are China, North America and Europe.
IoT devices including 5.2 billion consumers and 3.1 billion for companies in various industries.
The most common consumer IoT devices are smart TVs and digital terminals (in addition to smart phones). Enterprises are most common smart meters as well as various security cameras.
This year, the money for various end products will return to nearly $ 1.7 billion.
In 2020, the sum will grow to 2.9 trillion.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5799&via=n&datum=2017-02-07_16:04:09&mottagare=30929
Tomi Engdahl says:
LISTEN TO MACHINES TALK
http://machineconversations.kone.com/
Now elevators can speak their minds. Thanks to KONE 24/7 Connected Services, with Watson IoT, you can for the first time listen to intelligent real-time machine conversations.
KONE has made elevator services truly intelligent. To demonstrate the capabilities we translate data in real-time to voice format in selected locations – so that you can tune into real conversations between machines. Choose a location and listen.
Listen in as our elevators and IoT Cloud talk to each other across the globe, in a human voice. We translated their raw data into a language you can understand. So now you can see and hear how we monitor and analyze the messages from our elevators. In real-time.
http://machineconversations.kone.com/for-the-press/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Devices Threatened By Analog Content?
http://semiengineering.com/devices-threatened-by-analog-content/
With few measurable methods to assess analog quality, it’s not clear how that can impact safety-critical applications.
As the amount of analog content in connected devices explodes, ensuring that the analog portion works properly has taken on a new level of urgency.
Analog circuitry is required for interpreting the physical world and for moving data to other parts of the system, while digital circuitry is the fastest way to process it. So a sensor that gives a faulty reading in a car moving at high speed or a medical device, for example, could be dangerous. The problem is that analog test is nowhere even close to the maturity of digital test, and analog designs are so unique that establishing that kind of consistency is difficult.
In a recent blog, Stephen Pateras, product marketing director within the Silicon Test Solutions group of Mentor Graphics, talked about the wide gap between the quality of digital parts on an SoC and the analog mixed-signal content. “The majority of field failures in automotive ICs now occur within the mixed-signal portion of the chip.”
Moving Automotive Test Into The Analog Domain
Automotive test solutions risk overlooking the majority of field failures in automotive ICs.
http://semiengineering.com/moving-automotive-test-into-the-analog-domain/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Internet Of Things Could Finally Get The Common Language It Needs
https://www.fastcompany.com/3067229/innovation-agents/the-internet-of-things-is-finally-getting-the-common-language-it-needs
In the home and beyond, it’s more important than ever that gadgets get standard ways to talk to each other. And there are signs of progress.
Jared Newman 01.16.17 6:00 AM
Smart home gadgets were everywhere at the CES trade show in January, from useful iterations on connected light bulbs and door locks to odder endeavors such as fridge cams and connected trash cans. But one theme was constant: They’re not all going to work together.
While some of these devices can communicate with others, no universal language yet exists for the “Internet of Things”—the industry catch-all term for ordinary devices made more powerful through connectivity. Device makers must instead choose between disparate frameworks such as Apple’s HomeKit, Samsung’s SmartThings, Works with Nest, Android’s Things, and Amazon’s Alexa. The burden then falls on users to determine whether the products they want are compatible with the system they bought into.
The good news is that standardization is under way, with meaningful progress toward a common language for all these devices. But it’ll probably be another CES or two until consumers start to notice.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bluetooth at CES – An IoT for Everyone
https://blog.bluetooth.com/bluetooth-at-ces-iot-for-everyone
This year, we had the privilege to host some of the top leaders from the associations, companies, standards, and technologies that are building the Internet of Things (IoT) in a three-panel speaking track at CES 2017. As the IoT continues to grow (and rapidly!), the fight to win the consumer is building un-scalable walls between use cases, crippling adoption, and limiting innovation. In our sessions, we focused on how to overcome these challenges by working together to put the consumer first. We wanted to know: how can we make the IoT accessible to everyone?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Networking is Not Something to Lose Sleep Over
http://www.rockwellautomation.com/global/news/blog/detail.page?pagetitle=Networking-is-Not-Something-to-Lose-Sleep-Over-%7C-Blog-%7C-Rockwell-Automation&content_type=blog&docid=c46d34e96e198dc6386170b1f324dab9
The world is more networked than ever. Some of you may be reading this very post on LinkedIn or after following a tweet.
If you are, I heartily recommend looking up our company blog on the website for more from me and other Rockwell Automation leaders on a range of topics at the heart of industry today!
For industry, as it takes its first steps into the world of IIoT, becoming more networked also brings risks. But industry is arguably much less mature than social media in the best approaches to mitigating those risks and achieving the benefit of connectivity without the vulnerability.
Cybersecurity is the subject of eye-opening (and sleep inhibiting) studies, such as this one from PwC that suggests that three in four industrial manufacturers in Europe (76%) reported security incidents being detected in their company over the previous 12 months.
Of the remaining quarter of respondents, 14% reported no security incidents but a staggering 10% did not know if, or how many times, their security had been breached.
The ray of hope here is that the same research states a significant shift toward an understanding that cybersecurity solutions can also facilitate business growth, create market advantages and build brand trust.
I believe this is a massive step forward.
In a separate study by McAfee, 71% of respondents reported that a shortage in cybersecurity skills does direct and measurable damage. Similarly though, there is a positive observation that leaders are no longer burying their heads in the sand. Nine out of ten think that technology could help compensate for this skills shortage, and that outsourcing cybersecurity is considered an option to overcome this.
Skilled teams of Network Security Service Consultants check our customers’ networks and give recommendations. It’s by working closely with our own network of Strategic Alliance Partners at Cisco and Microsoft that we are able to offer these services, because no one company or product can meet the security requirements of industry’s huge variety of unique applications and installed architecture. We advocate a defense-in-depth approach to security that adds layers of security on top of each other to reduce risk.
Tomi Engdahl says:
I Have Motor Data: Now What?
http://www.rockwellautomation.com/global/news/blog/detail.page?pagetitle=I-Have-Motor-Data%3A-Now-What%3F-%7C-Blog&content_type=blog&docid=d5d8a1bf410245a0fee1c4f9f48fd4b5
All intelligent motor control and protection devices produce a lot of data.
They can produce so much that it can be overwhelming.
You bought these products to help you reduce unplanned downtime for your company, but where do you begin? How can you use this data to justify your investment?
The key to using intelligent motor control data is to understand what the data represents, how to properly display it, and how to properly use it to create meaningful information that will minimize unplanned motor downtime.
There are five types of data, and each data type is collected, displayed, and analyzed differently.
Real-time Data
Projected Data
Operational Data
Historical Data
Energy Data
Tomi Engdahl says:
Unlock the Potential of Smart Machines
http://www.rockwellautomation.com/global/news/blog/detail.page?pagetitle=Unlock-the-Potential-of-Smart-Machines-%7C-Blog&content_type=blog&docid=086915039a20eb50bd4d3c59598e5590
They are the unexpected situations that every car owner dreads: a breakdown on a rural road, a blown tire on your evening commute, a dead battery in the middle of winter.
But events like these usually aren’t the result of a sudden development in our vehicles. Rather, they are due to standard wear and tear that occurs over time, with factors like temperature, road conditions and component degradation all playing a role. The problem is, we can’t see any of this – so it all goes undetected until it manifests into a breakdown.
Today, however, the emergence of smarter and more connected cars is helping make breakdowns and other headaches a thing of the past.
For example, smart-car predictive services can monitor key components and, if an issue is detected, proactively alert the driver to take the vehicle in for servicing. Some smart cars can even receive firmware updates that improve vehicle performance or address known issues – all without the owner needing to bring the vehicle into a dealership.
A similar phenomenon is happening in the industrial world – only instead of smart cars, it’s smart machines.
Pushing Performance to a New Level
Smart machines harness the power of connected technologies, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, cloud computing, and information and analytics tools.
Using these technologies, smart machines can collect data that has long been trapped inside machines and contextualize it into actionable information.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Innovation: a sensor which does not consume power
IoT will all over the set of sensors, which measure a variety of environmental conditions. at the University of Bristol have developed a technique for such a sensor will be implemented in practice without power. Sensor operating time of a battery can grow to 10 times longer than the current.
University of Bristol is a separate electrical control of the research team that has developed a new type of voltage detector. The circuit needs just a few trillionth of a watt or picowatteja to activate other circuits.
Scientists have already sent samples UB20M-district to original equipment manufacturers. It allows the standby power consumption of different systems can be cut to virtually zero.
IoT applications UB20M circuit enables the system environment sniffs decades a small battery.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5816&via=n&datum=2017-02-09_14:41:49&mottagare=30929
Tomi Engdahl says:
WiFi Pioneer Cees Links Sets His Sights on the Smart Home
Winner of Design News’ 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award says the IoT will be much bigger than the WiFi revolution.
https://www.designnews.com/content/wifi-pioneer-cees-links-sets-his-sights-on-smart-home/155126479047447?cid=nl.x.dn14.edt.aud.dn.20170209.tst004t
Cees Links believes the Internet of Things (IoT) is waiting for the next “Steve Jobs moment.”
Thus was born the era of WiFi’s worldwide success. Jobs launched Links’ wireless radio technology in the Apple iBook a year later under the name Apple Airport , igniting the spread of WiFi throughout the computing landscape.
The irony of the moment was that, by then, Links had already been working on the radio technology for a decade.
“We had our first wireless product in 1991, and I had been pushing and evangelizing for almost a decade by the time I met Jobs,” Links told us. “People kept saying WiFi was not needed, it was risky for your health, and it would create reliability problems. We tried to sell it to Apple before Steve Jobs saw it and nobody was interested. We tried to sell it to Dell, and Michael Dell pooh-poohed the idea.”
But in a matter of 10 minutes, Jobs changed all that. Today, WiFi provides internet access to hundreds of millions of computer users. It also serves in video game consoles, smartphones, digital cameras, audio players, computer printers, factory automation systems, and thousands of other products.
As big as WiFi is today, however, Links believes the IoT will be bigger — much bigger. In 2004, he founded GreenPeak Technologies , a fabless semiconductor company that works on sense-and-control networks that can be employed by the IoT.
Links foresees a day in the near future when homes will incorporate hundreds of IoT devices, including motion sensors, door locks, window locks, lighting systems, curtain controls, thermostats, and smart appliances.
“We’re living at the start of the Internet of Things world, in which every device in your house will be connected to the Internet,” he said.
Links believes homes should be equipped with the same levels of wireless connectivity as cars. Today’s vehicles, he points out, have smart wireless capabilities in engines, phones, windows, tires, and door locks. Yet homes are virtually without wireless, sensor-based systems. “Why can’t I just push one button, like I do for my car, and know that all the doors are locked?” he asked. “Cars have had remote door-locking for 20 years, and homes are still without central door locks.”
One key barrier is the lack of a universally accepted standard wireless technology, he said. He believes an open communications standard, such as Zigbee, is the answer.
“When we talk about the IoT, it feels like we’re living in the same fog that we were living in in 1997, ’98, and ’99,” he said. “The IoT is way bigger than the WiFi space was, and the gridlock needs to be broken.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT Convergence Is Coming
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1331309&
Soon after the New Year, I noted the convergence of protocols, alliances and methods for the Internet of Things was underway.
I know, stop laughing. Industry watchers have predicted this convergence for years, and yet the proliferation of standards and proprietary solutions proceeded each year.
However, in 2016 we saw HomePlug declare victory and transit remaining work to Wi-Sun. Similarly, the Connected Lighting Alliance declared it has accomplished its mission and closed down. The Open Interconnect Consortium and AllSeen Alliance merged to create the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF).
Companies and alliances will continue to work on many different standards and protocols, but the market is harsh and will sort out winners and losers. Those alliances that do not get sufficient traction can drag on for a long time but become irrelevant to the larger market growth.
Beyond the convergence of some alliances, I see a convergence in the wireless protocols used for low-power devices. The market has been converging on IP-based solutions around UDP, CoAP and JSON objects with CBOR compression. This set of protocols is used in Lightweight M2M, IPSO Smart Objects, OCF as well as the ZigBee Alliances’ new dotdot language for IoT. Alliances like Fairhair are working to provide commonality in the network infrastructure and device bootstrapping for commercial buildings.
Convergence of these protocols is the first step for the market. It’s recognized that for lower power networks and battery-operated devices, existing protocols such as TCP, HTTP and XML needed some optimizations, and the Internet Engineering Task Force has been working for a number of years on these alternatives.
It helps to agree on what protocols and object models have some actual mindshare in the connected home market. Today shipments in this market are using the following technologies:
ZigBee has been shipping since 2006, and volumes really grew in 2008-2009 and onward.
ZWave is used in many home automation systems. ZWave announced in 2016 they had shipped 50 million devices, which is a respectable number.
Apple HomeKit provides connectivity through iOS but is not widely deployed in the home today. Shipment volumes are hard to determine.
OCF has been announced, and an open-source implementation and downloadable specification for their home automation solution are available. There is no real use of this protocol in products yet.
IPSO Smart Objects and Lightweight M2M have been around for several years, but we don’t see large use of the protocols in products yet.
Thread has been announced, but there are no Thread-enabled products in the market. Thread is a networking stack, and the industry has not agreed upon an application layer to run on it.
Wi-Fi is used in many products but generally not with a standard application layer that can be used between devices.
Bluetooth is used in many products but generally not with a standard application layer that can be used between devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nokia wheels out a complete MVNO package. Makes a change from WinPho
Taking ‘mobile operators are our customers’ a bit too far?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/10/nokia_iot_mvno/
Nokia has wheeled out a worldwide IoT network grid (WING) that sounds remarkably like an all-in-one mobile virtual network operators offering.
The WING will, according to a Nokia announcement, “manage the IoT connectivity and services needs of a client’s assets – such as connected cars or connected freight containers – as they move around the globe, reducing the complexity for enterprises who would otherwise be required to work with multiple technology providers.”
It will “offer a full service model including provisioning, operations, security, billing and dedicated enterprise customer services from key operations command centers,” and also comes with a proprietary device management platform.
In other words, Nokia has launched an IoT MVNO.
“It sounds like a global IoT MVNO – so an enterprise can buy global connectivity from one provider (ie, Nokia).”
The move is part of Nokia’s efforts to reduce its dependence on telecoms operators as their clients.
“IoT connectivity as a managed service is an answer for enterprises to the current IoT deployments that are hampered by the patchwork of business agreements to connect devices around the world.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Quick and Easy IoT Prototyping with Involt
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/04/quick-and-easy-iot-prototyping-with-involt/
Enter Involt, which is a framework for building hardware control interfaces using HTML and CSS. The framework is built on Node-Webkit, which means the conventions should be familiar to those with a bit of web development background. Hardware interactions (on Arduinos) are handled with simple CSS classes. For example, a button might contain a CSS class which changes an Arduino pin from high to low.
Involt can take that CSS and convert it into a function, which is then sent to the Arduino via serial or Bluetooth communication. For more advanced functionality, Javascript (or really any other language) can be used to define what functions are generated — and, in turn, sent to the Arduino. But, all that is needed for the basic functionality necessary for many IoT devices (which might only need to be turned on and off, or set to a certain value) is a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge. You’ll create both the interface and the underlying hardware interactions all within an HTML layout with CSS styling and functionality.
https://hackaday.io/project/11615-involt-prototyping-framework
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Ultimate FPV Cleans House
http://hackaday.com/2017/02/03/the-ultimate-fpv-cleans-house/
With much of the world in the doldrums of the winter, hackers are getting a bit stir crazy. [Notamed Closed] would much rather be outside flying his First Person View (FPV) quadcopters. Sure there are indoor drones, but [Notamed] wanted to keep grounded. He grabbed his R/C equipment, his Roomba, and of course an Arduino to build the ultimate FPV experience.
He’s using a standard R/C transmitter and receiver. Instead of driving servos, the receiver plugs into an Arduino Uno. The Uno translates the PPM R/C signals to serial commands. Most Roomba’s include a serial port made especially for hackers.
https://vimeo.com/129404075