A new buzzword to learn: Internet of Things or IOT for short
It was the “cloud” a few years ago. Now the latest tech word is IOT or Internet of Things. It describes a world where every device is online and can be “talked to” directly. Today this is largely the domain of computers and our mobile computing devices. After many years of talking about “smart fridges” and “washing machines,” all of a sudden these things are becoming real.
Why would you want to have a device online that way? Well, for one thing you can get people invest in your company and hope to sell it for a billion dollars to a company like Google which did so for Nest thermostats
. That has created a gold rush of people creating companies left and right with the hopes of getting rich quick. As a result, there is and will be a lot of silly devices that have no business being built.
Worthy examples of IOT are hard to come by due to above syndrome. But there are a few. For example I recently bought a new sprinkler controller/timer from a company called Rachio: https://www.rach.io/. The controller has WiFi built-in and connects to their cloud service. What this means is that you can control the operation of the device from anywhere through their Apps for iOS and Android. Why would you want to do that? When I am home and see that we are going to break temp records, I have used the app to fire off the sprinklers that day so that the plants don’t die. The machine also has automatic detection of rain based on your zip code but you can buy non-IOT controllers that do the same.
Perhaps the coolest thing is set up of the device. You walk around with your phone in your yard, turn on the zones and see which one comes on and proceed to name them. Our sprinkler controller is in our basement equipment room which would make this task super frustrating if I had to go back and forth.
Another cool aspect of the device, and a solution to a nasty problem with IOTs is how you configure WiFi on the device. As you know, we safeguard our WiFi networks with SSID (name of the network) and password. On a device with no keyboard or touchscreen, how do you enter such info? A clumsy solution is to have a USB connection, hook it up to the PC, configure it and then let it run by itself. Many home routers to do this. This is not a good solution for IOT as many devices may be in locations where you can’t hook up cables and such.
The solution here is from another company called “electricimp” http://electricimp.com/. It is started by an ex-Apple, ex-Nest guy who wanted, don’t laugh, a light that would go green when Apple stock went up and down when it well, went down. When you are sitting on a ton of stock options, such things become important. Wifi modules exist at very low cost to pair them up with also low cost microprocessors to do this. But they come with no software. You have to figure out how to set the SSID/password. Importantly if you wanted it to talk to the cloud, you also had to teach it all of those complicated protocols. Say you are a water alarm and want to twit if it went off. The (security) protocol to talk to Twitter service is a pain to implement from scratch.
Electricimp solves both of these problems. They have a cloud service that is able to translate whatever is needed for their little WiFi module to understand. Instead of talking to the device, your service such as the sprinkler above, talks to electricimp service. It in turn talks to the Wifi module. The electricimp takes care of such things as updating firmware in the device to keep it current.
The way elecricimp solves the SSID/password is an old clever solution: light pulses like Morse code! You download the app, stay on your home network in your phone so that it can fetch this info, and then hold it in front of a little photocell. The app then flashes to communicate the message, i.e. the SSID and password to the electricimp module and you are on air!
Rachio uses electricimp module for all of this functionality. As such programming it to go online was a delight. It was hard to imagine it working so easily.
Electricimp has received $23 million dollars in venture and strategic investments! I said there was a gold rush here, did I not? Why the demand? Because WiFi is such a poor system for such devices. Requirement for SSID/password for example is something you don’t want. When I plug in my Ethernet wire, I am automatically connected to the network. That is the type of simplicity you want with IOT devices. Unfortunately WiFi is the only universal connection in the home to the Internet so we have to deal with its issues.
Other problems are lack of standards and security. On the former, if Rachio goes out of business (good chance of that given the $250 cost of the sprinkler), my sprinkler controller becomes a door stop. It only works as long as the Rachio service is there. If it shuts down, there is no way to emulate that service or control the device locally. Likewise the electricimp protocols are proprietary and if they go away, all of their licensees such as Rachio would be out of business too. The Internet is built on open standards but we are building IOTs out of islands of darkness.
Security is a problem too. It is very tempting for developers to use an operating system like Linux on their devices. Linux is an open-source operating system which means everyone knows how it works. As such any of its security holes can be easily exploited. This is already going on in traffic security cameras that are hijacked by people. Most IOTs do not play a mission critical role so security is not top of mind. But if the future is right, that everything in our homes will be online, security will become important. I don’t want the kid next door to turn my lights on and off in the middle of the night just to have fun!
Anyway, expect to hear more and more about IOTs. It is the next big thing…
It was the “cloud” a few years ago. Now the latest tech word is IOT or Internet of Things. It describes a world where every device is online and can be “talked to” directly. Today this is largely the domain of computers and our mobile computing devices. After many years of talking about “smart fridges” and “washing machines,” all of a sudden these things are becoming real.
Why would you want to have a device online that way? Well, for one thing you can get people invest in your company and hope to sell it for a billion dollars to a company like Google which did so for Nest thermostats
. That has created a gold rush of people creating companies left and right with the hopes of getting rich quick. As a result, there is and will be a lot of silly devices that have no business being built.Worthy examples of IOT are hard to come by due to above syndrome. But there are a few. For example I recently bought a new sprinkler controller/timer from a company called Rachio: https://www.rach.io/. The controller has WiFi built-in and connects to their cloud service. What this means is that you can control the operation of the device from anywhere through their Apps for iOS and Android. Why would you want to do that? When I am home and see that we are going to break temp records, I have used the app to fire off the sprinklers that day so that the plants don’t die. The machine also has automatic detection of rain based on your zip code but you can buy non-IOT controllers that do the same.
Perhaps the coolest thing is set up of the device. You walk around with your phone in your yard, turn on the zones and see which one comes on and proceed to name them. Our sprinkler controller is in our basement equipment room which would make this task super frustrating if I had to go back and forth.
Another cool aspect of the device, and a solution to a nasty problem with IOTs is how you configure WiFi on the device. As you know, we safeguard our WiFi networks with SSID (name of the network) and password. On a device with no keyboard or touchscreen, how do you enter such info? A clumsy solution is to have a USB connection, hook it up to the PC, configure it and then let it run by itself. Many home routers to do this. This is not a good solution for IOT as many devices may be in locations where you can’t hook up cables and such.
The solution here is from another company called “electricimp” http://electricimp.com/. It is started by an ex-Apple, ex-Nest guy who wanted, don’t laugh, a light that would go green when Apple stock went up and down when it well, went down. When you are sitting on a ton of stock options, such things become important
. Wifi modules exist at very low cost to pair them up with also low cost microprocessors to do this. But they come with no software. You have to figure out how to set the SSID/password. Importantly if you wanted it to talk to the cloud, you also had to teach it all of those complicated protocols. Say you are a water alarm and want to twit if it went off. The (security) protocol to talk to Twitter service is a pain to implement from scratch.Electricimp solves both of these problems. They have a cloud service that is able to translate whatever is needed for their little WiFi module to understand. Instead of talking to the device, your service such as the sprinkler above, talks to electricimp service. It in turn talks to the Wifi module. The electricimp takes care of such things as updating firmware in the device to keep it current.
The way elecricimp solves the SSID/password is an old clever solution: light pulses like Morse code! You download the app, stay on your home network in your phone so that it can fetch this info, and then hold it in front of a little photocell. The app then flashes to communicate the message, i.e. the SSID and password to the electricimp module and you are on air!
Rachio uses electricimp module for all of this functionality. As such programming it to go online was a delight. It was hard to imagine it working so easily.
Electricimp has received $23 million dollars in venture and strategic investments! I said there was a gold rush here, did I not? Why the demand? Because WiFi is such a poor system for such devices. Requirement for SSID/password for example is something you don’t want. When I plug in my Ethernet wire, I am automatically connected to the network. That is the type of simplicity you want with IOT devices. Unfortunately WiFi is the only universal connection in the home to the Internet so we have to deal with its issues.
Other problems are lack of standards and security. On the former, if Rachio goes out of business (good chance of that given the $250 cost of the sprinkler), my sprinkler controller becomes a door stop. It only works as long as the Rachio service is there. If it shuts down, there is no way to emulate that service or control the device locally. Likewise the electricimp protocols are proprietary and if they go away, all of their licensees such as Rachio would be out of business too. The Internet is built on open standards but we are building IOTs out of islands of darkness.
Security is a problem too. It is very tempting for developers to use an operating system like Linux on their devices. Linux is an open-source operating system which means everyone knows how it works. As such any of its security holes can be easily exploited. This is already going on in traffic security cameras that are hijacked by people. Most IOTs do not play a mission critical role so security is not top of mind. But if the future is right, that everything in our homes will be online, security will become important. I don’t want the kid next door to turn my lights on and off in the middle of the night just to have fun!
Anyway, expect to hear more and more about IOTs. It is the next big thing…
