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Interview: Contiki OS Creator On Building the Internet of Things
angry tapir writes "Last year Adam Dunkels, the creator of the open source Contiki operating system, launched a startup to build tools for the 'Internet of Things'. This week his company, Thingsquare, is releasing an evaluation kit that lets people test drive their IoT system. I caught up with him to talk about Thingsquare's plans and the hype around the IoT."
It's so hipster-ish or New Age-y. You know, and Internet... of Things! /pssst... this internet is already made up of things. Go find some coffee that cost less than $5 and come back to me.
What are his thoughts on the absolute saturation of the 2.4GHz spectrum and the increasing load on the 5GHz spectrum.
The internet of things sounds nice, but the amount of devices pointlessly WiFi enabled and broadcasting in my home is having a very negative effect on the usability of the spectrum for anything of value. Does he have any plan to mitigate this growing issue? Does he care at all about it or is he solely focused on funding and an early exit with a fleeting; 'I'm rich, bitch'?
Obviously, barring a miracle in the ISM band, more stuff chattering isn't going to help; but (some) of these 'internet of things' widgets are forced to confront the problem, albeit because they are too cheap or too power constrained to just shove a full 802.11b/g/n chip in there and scream there little hearts out.
In order to accomodate severely cheap and/or battery powered devices, Contiki provides support for 802.15.4-based networks (through 6LoWPAN), which are both much less resource intensive and rather less chatty than 802.11 devices.
Arguably, the overall effect of 'internet of things' chaff on larger computers trying to use the spectrum probably depends on adoption, with three rough possible trajectories:
1. Apathy: The perceived value of the 'internet of things' is roughly nil, so aside from a few horrid proprietary wireless meter-reader systems and things, field deployments are negligible, and thus so is RF traffic.
2. Partial adoption: This is actually the worst case: Wifi is a terrible mechanism for the purpose; but unlike the dreadful stew of incompatible and often partially or wholly proprietary low-power/low-speed links, it has the distinct virtue of being built into just about all the computing devices you already own, which creates a certain incentive for people building lightbulbs and thermostats and similar stuff to shoehorn it in; because they can't be sure that you'll be able to speak any other wireless protocol unless they provide a dongle (which won't work with your smartphone, and obligates them to be in the 'helping idiots install peripherals' business, which isn't somewhere you want to be). So, multiple-years-on-a-CR2032 type devices won't happen, or will be dongle-to-device; but there will be a whole lot of mains-connected devices abusing a high-throughput, noisy, protocol to dribble tiny amounts of data back to the mothership.
3. Ubiquity: This case is worse in terms of absolute number of devices chattering away; but imagines a sufficient interest and volume of deployment that, say, it becomes expected for home routers and the like to speak some standardized 802.15.4-based protocol, so there are indeed a great many devices; but they aren't forced to speak wifi for compatibility reasons. The ISM band continues to be a mess; but at least devices get to choose a protocol roughly commensurate with their actual throughput requirements.
For most "Things", you don't need tons of bandwidth and the extra cost of a WiFi capable microcontroller or expensive daughterboard.
Unless the device is connecting over a home power network, you also need a display and some kind of touchpad to configure wifi. Like my WiFi printer, if I want to connect my coffeepot to my wifi it needs a means to show me a list of SSIDs it can 'see' (and/or a means to key in a hidden one), then a means to enter a password. It also needs to display connectivity state. I suppose you could put a USB port on the coffeepot and then configure it with your laptop, but that gets annoying, fast.
(Almost, but not quite, as annoying as having your coffeepot online in the first place).