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Amazon's IoT Hacking Contest Won By Voice-Controlled Drone (thenewstack.io)
An anonymous reader writes: On Thursday, Amazon announced the winners of its first-ever "AWS IoT Mega Contest," a competitive hardware hacking event held in conjunction with Hackster last month which drew nearly a thousand participants. First place went to an RFID, infrared, light and sound sensor system that gathers data about a sleeping baby and to a voice-controlled drone that sends radio signals using a Raspberry Pi board. "IoT is here now," posted an Amazon cloud evangelist, just four months after Amazon released their own Internet of Things platform. "People are building devices, sites, and applications that are sophisticated and useful."
You just say: "hey drone, go hack IoT devices!" and then it does so really well?
Would this entry have won the contest if Amazon wasn't working on a drone delivery program?
Reading both, I can't help but to feel that Amazon services are crammed in, regardless of value.
In the drone case, at least in the US all the AWS and echo do is shamelessly plug Amazon, without providing value. In the US, private flyers must have line of sight anyway, so going over the internet is not exactly that interesting except for gratuitous plug for Amazon. Besides, barking orders to a drone seems like the least fun and least practical approach to operating it (though also showing the least sensitivity to latency, since the latency is so terrible in such a scheme to start with).
In the baby case, again the internet is not actually that relevant for a family wanting to study their own child, since they are actually living with the baby, the round trip out to Amazon and back is again gratuitous use of AWS. I particularly thought it was interesting when they reluctantly mentioned Amazon SNS, but with a disclaimer that effectively says that would be a bad idea compared to a more robust and cheaper local alerting design (i.e. 'not intended to replace a baby monitor'). In this example, one *could* imagine extending the reach of academic research more conveniently into the homes of study participants, but that might be viewed a little more creepy, hence the focus on the mostly useless incorporation of the internet to this use case.
It all highlights what makes me groan about 'Internet of Things', the very wording suggests they aren't sure exactly what they want to do, but they know we can make small enough chips/radios/antennas/sensors/batteries to put them on 'things', and some way or another we are going to find practical applications with that, come hell or high water. It's a technology-first push, rather than focused on nice and productive ways that are enabled by the technology. Of course we've long lived with such things in the industry (e.g. a huge part of supercomputing is a race who can calculate arbitrary linear algebra problems fastest, rather than talking about the real problems addressed), but the open endedness of 'things' is a new low.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Except those directives aren't really adequate for anything but a gimmick. They don't really scale up to an autonomous flying delivery drone, nor would it accurately show how a remote operator would really be operating if not autonomous (it's tons more efficient to do controller based input to such a system that can only understand basic directives).
Per the video, the drone is probably not even following the instructions accurately. For example, the drone drifts, rather than holding position, probably because there was some breeze. Meaning it probably doesn't judge location or anything, and instead hardcodes assumptions about how long to run certain motors to acheive X degree turns, Y meters of flight.
It's a fun little hack, but could have all been done inside the Pi, without pulling in Amazon infrastructure. So it's a bit eye-roll worthy to me to tack that on for the sake of a corporate sponsorship of an event. I would have rather seen projects that pull in remote services for some meaningful purpose than just saying you pulled them in. The challenge being is that quck hacks are rarely going to need something that AWS provides that local horsepower can't provide (even 'embedded' processors are overwhelmingly capable). It could incorporate the locality of the data, and the baby nap thing could plausibly claim to enable people to conduct otherwise impractical studies, but the drone doesn't do that either.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm assuming that none of the entries have any security protection against being taken over for nefarious purposes. IoT, not for me!
So, the voice commands went through the wifi router, over the intertubes and ended up at the drone? Where is the "internet" in this "internet of things" drone?
I guess this was that famous Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon Iv been hearing about.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
There is currently no evidence linking interest in electronics with RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM. As far as we know. Sincerely, the FAA.