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Interview: Contiki OS Creator On Building the Internet of Things

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the atari-jaguar-power-meter dept.

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."

13 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. What Are His Thoughts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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'?

    1. Re:What Are His Thoughts by Zerth · · Score: 2

      For most "Things", you don't need tons of bandwidth and the extra cost of a WiFi capable microcontroller or expensive daughterboard.

      Consider a low bandwidth, low power transceiver on 915 MHz or 433/434 MHz(depending on region) that only costs a couple of bucks.

    2. Re:What Are His Thoughts by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:What Are His Thoughts by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

  2. What IoT is supposed to mean by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    The impression I get from reading the featured article is that "Internet of things" refers to giving each electrical appliance a microcontroller to connect to the Internet so that the appliance's owner can manage it remotely. This has applications in street lighting and traffic signal automation, industrial automation, and smart distribution and metering of electric power. So what's a better buzzword for that?

    1. Re:What IoT is supposed to mean by Thanshin · · Score: 4, Funny

      So what's a better buzzword for that?

      Thingternet!

    2. Re:What IoT is supposed to mean by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      The impression I get from reading the featured article is that "Internet of things" refers to giving each electrical appliance a microcontroller to connect to the Internet so that the appliance's owner can manage it remotely. This has applications in street lighting and traffic signal automation, industrial automation, and smart distribution and metering of electric power. So what's a better buzzword for that?

      'The Internet of Things' is basically a polite way of saying "Hey, SCADA is so easy that it should be a consumer product!".

    3. Re:What IoT is supposed to mean by LoRdTAW · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Internet of things is yet another buzzword applied to an older term: home automation. Similar to how cloud computing is a throwback to mainframe computing. Street lighting, traffic signal automation, industrial automation, smart distribution and metering of electric power falls under automation and SCADA. I don't see a point to remotely control a washer or toaster over the internet. Though a local system might be helpful with remote reporting.

      Though there are some appealing ideas that can come of connected home appliances, the most obvious being text alerts of status. I would love it if my washer and dryer could text me when they are finished. Nothing sucks more then forgetting to dry your work clothes and then finding the wet, wrinkled, mildew smelling mess in the washer the next morning. Same with the dryer, wrinkled dry clothes are just as useless as wrinkled wet clothes. Those are the only two good examples I can come up with. Connected refrigerators aren't as appealing. I know how many eggs I have left and how much milk I have left as I open my refrigerator daily. Microwaves and toasters aren't that necessary either as they spend little time doing the cooking. Maybe oven or stoves could be timed and send an alert that they are done. Thermostats and AC units could be monitored for usage and remotely turned on/off. That is another good use.

      Home monitoring of power usage might be useful for people looking to cut their usage. If you had solar it would be good if you could compare your home load to your banked kw/h and see the usage in real time. "Your solar system generated 50 kW/h today. Your current load is 10kW, you have 5 hours of free power left." Then you could look at your current appliance load and see what uses the most power. A breakdown chart of appliances and their monthly power consumption could help people determine if they could use that appliance less. Clothes dryers suck up a lot of power, maybe during the warmer months they could use a clothesline. Hell I dry my clothes indoors during the winter too, the dry air helps.

      Instead of wireless, which makes integration easier, powerline networking would be just as appropriate. Most of those appliances are either hard wired in or plugged in. A router would need a wall plug adapter and ethernet cable or better yet, the routers power cable could pass through to an internal power line networking adapter. That or use Zigbee on the lower frequency ISM bands.

    4. Re:What IoT is supposed to mean by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      The benefits? Well, er... I guess it lets the Boys' Toys mob show off their IP-enabled, iPod app-controllable nasal hair trimmer to their mates until they get bored of it five minutes later and lose it down the back of the sofa.

      Electrical systems suck. They suck because they are dumb. Your car might tell you that you've got a signal light out, but it won't tell you which one (front or back.) This is because it's cheap. But at some point each light will have its own microcontroller and its own relay (solid state, whatever, bear with me) and it will know how it is performing and be able to estimate its future failure, like a hard disk. Well, hopefully better than that. And in your house, wouldn't it be nice if your light switches could be relocated or remapped without making major wiring changes, and if they could be located anywhere in the house without needing the wiring run to even hit them at all?

      The average person isn't going to pay the premium for this kind of functionality in their house yet, but it will happen eventually. And it will happen because some people will pay now.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Re:please stop the term by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3

    How am I supposed to hack your coffeemaker if you don't put it online?

  4. still just a dream by green+is+the+enemy · · Score: 2

    It'll probably remain a dream, since it will be impossible to keep all these little internet-connected devices secure. Or do they have a good plan for keeping these devices updated when vulnerabilities are inevitably discovered?

  5. Internet of Crap by soccerisgod · · Score: 2

    'nuff said.

    --
    If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
  6. Re:content free summary by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not worth clicking the link, because the article is content-free. It gives no specifics beyond names of people and companies. It has no technical information whatsoever.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"