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Due to an ongoing web hosting issue, this week's RIoT will be a self-contained email. We hope to return to our normal service by soon. |
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Sigfox signs Securitas alarm deal, on back of Abertis Telecom network
French M2M and IoT network provider Sigfox has partnered with Securitas Direct and Abertis Telecom in Spain to link millions of home and premises security alarms. The group says is one of the largest deployments of devices on the IoT. The deal will see the Securitas alarms connected to and monitored by the Sigfox cloud platform, with connectivity provided by Abertis’ network of dedicated Sigfox cell towers. We spoke to Sigfox to find out how it all works. Read more
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Open Garden launches peer-to-peer mesh network for IoT devices
Open Garden has announced a new peer-to-peer mesh network for IoT devices, beginning with the Kickstarter-funded TrackR asset-tracking tag. Open Garden is best known for its FireChat app, which was published as a way of avoiding political censorship by way of anonymous peer-to-peer communication. This network architecture leverages smartphones to form an ad-hoc IoT network. Read more
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More RIoT Research:
- Apple’s watches invigorate wearables, quiet on the HomeKit front Read more
- General Motors commits to semi-autonomous cars by 2016 Read more
- RacoWireless adds app store to its DevCloud PaaS Read more
- Imagination Technologies serves the MIPS flavor Raspberry Pi Read more
- Osram Sylvania picks Belkin WeMo for smart bulbs and fixtures Read more
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Around the web:
This week, Withings has released a home security camera, much like the Piper model that RIoT has covered in the past, and startup Playtabase has shown off its Reemo point-and-click smart home control system, which uses a wristband to let users operate connected devices. US cableco Suddenlink has jumped into the smart home game, and Nest is beginning its European rollout, in Belgium, France, Ireland and the Netherlands later this month, as well as adding more devices to its ecosystem. AT&T is licensing its Digital Life smart home package to Telefonica’s European trials.
LogMeIn is partnering within Verdeva to build connected petrol pumps, with Verdeva stating that the Xively cloud platform saved them about 6 months in development time. LogMeIn has also purchased Meldium and its ID management systems for $15m. Also, here’s an example of the way industrial IoT tech bleeds into the consumer sphere, as Tado’s diagnostic testing for boilers comes to market.
NetworkWorld takes a look at 10 hot IoT startups, and its sister InfoWorld dives into the weird and wacky side of the increasingly long list of wearables. EE Times looks at 4 hurdles to securing the IoT, Google is ramping up work on its Quantum Computer, NXP has released a guide to NFC and the IoT, RacoWireless has released an IoT for Dummies eBook. Dell opened an IoT lab in Silicon Valley, Texas Instruments has released a smart watch dev kit, M2M Spectrum Networks signs a colocation networking agreement with Conterra Broadband in the US, and Sierra Wireless is celebrating its 100 millionth shipment.
The telemedicine market is due to grown at 14.3% CAGR to $36.3bn in 2020, from $14.3bn in 2013, and the Latin American M2M market will reach $8.2bn by 2020. Itron has won a 1.2m smart meter with EDF in France, and there’s more bad news for Sensus, as SaskPower agrees to a $47m refund after blaming Sensus for a spate of smart meter fires.
To round off this week, take a look at a connected offshore mussel farm, and how smart water meters can prevent flooding from burst pipes. Tech Republic also warns that while the IoT is massive, so are its odds of failure. Finally, here’s a lecture on the ethics of autonomous technology: ‘who do you blame when the wrong decision is made?’ – and lastly, here’s a rather alarmist warning that smart grid vulnerabilities could be exploited by Mexican cartels hired by ISIS. We think “grid jihad” is the best term we’ve discovered all week.
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Sigfox signs Securitas alarm deal, on back of Abertis Telecom network
French M2M and IoT network provider Sigfox has partnered with Securitas Direct and Abertis Telecom in Spain to link millions of home and premises security alarms. The group says is one of the largest deployments of devices on the IoT. The deal will see the Securitas alarms connected to and monitored by the Sigfox cloud platform, with connectivity provided by Abertis’ network of dedicated Sigfox cell towers.
The Sigfox network has been built to carry two-way communications consisting of small messages i.e. the archetypal IoT transmission, which Sigfox says eliminates the cost and energy-usage barriers to IoT implementation – key to achieving mass deployments of low-power devices. We spoke to Sigfox’s Head of Communication, Thomas Nicholls, to learn more about the technology behind the Sigfox platform.
The global Sigfox network has been deployed on the back of the Sigfox Network Operator partnership program, and covers 1 million km2 so far. Abertis itself has also begun deploying a smart city network in Spain, which will carry communications between deployed devices and centralized management systems, in a very similar vein as the Arqiva network that has begun construction in the UK.
Arqiva already manages and owns much of the infrastructure behind the UK’s terrestrial television broadcasts and a network of WiFi hotspots, so the process of adding Sigfox compatibility would have been fairly straightforward. The deal will allow Arqiva to connect 10 million smart meters to its network, as part of a government program to improve energy efficiency. The Arqiva network will initially cover 10 cities before expanding to reach 100% coverage, as Sigfox has managed to secure in Spain, France and the Netherlands.
The Securitas alarms will not be using the Sigfox network as their primary method of communication, but as a backup instead, should a physical phone line be cut or a cellular connection fail. The company claims to be the leading supplier of home and business alarms in both Spain and Europe, and uses a monitoring center in Norway to handle its network of alarms. Operating in 13 countries (Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Sweden), the company has 1.6 million clients globally, and 700,000 in Spain alone. It managed to add Sigfox compatibility to its deployed alarms with a firmware update – hinting at the massive potential for retrofitting existing products with Sigfox connectivity.
Sigfox uses a set of patented ultra-narrowband (UNB) technologies for its network. The UNB frequency is part of the unlicensed spectrum found in the white space between signals used by TV broadcasters. In Europe, Sigfox uses the 868MHz ISM band, and in the US it uses the 902-928MHz ISM band.
The major benefit of these signal frequencies is their long attenuation, meaning that the radio waves will travel much further and through more barriers than radio waves from further up the spectrum – such as those used in WiFi (2.4GHz – 5GHz). This is key to the mass deployments that the IoT envisions, with devices needing the same level of connectivity in underground installation as they do when outside. Given that many devices are not mobile and are installed in one place for the duration of their lives, it is vital that they can connect to the wider internet without fault. Lower attenuation gives you a longer range and better penetration, at lower power levels.
But the UNB network can only handle communications with a data-transfer rate of between 10 to 1,000 bits per second – thousands of times slower than WiFi. But the power savings are hugely significant. Sending data at a higher rate requires more power. So the lower data rate inherently allows devices to get more out of their battery capacities.
The Sigfox chips use around 50 microwatts for one-way communication and around 100 microwatts for two-way. Cellular communications require around 5,000 microwatts. So while you won’t be able to hold a voice conversation or stream video on a network like Sigfox’s, that very low data-rate means you can install devices that can report status updates and reports for years on a single coin-cell battery, or longer thanks to energy harvesting technology or wireless power.
Sigfox doesn’t require dedicated hardware for devices to communicate on its network. Nicholls said that the same chips that are currently installed in devices like garage door openers are perfectly capable of talking to the Sigfox base stations. All that is requires is the Sigfox software protocol, which the company gives to developers royalty-free. Sigfox is simply a software protocol at the device-level, compatible with any sub-1GHz device.
The network architecture itself is a collaborative network system, which means that each sell has no knowledge of other cells that may be nearby. This allows quick rollouts, as adding a new cell to an area does not require you to reconfigure all the other nearby cells.
Nicholls added that if the network became congested in a specific area, the upgrade would be a simple matter of adding more cells where needed and shortening the range of the existing cells. Each cell can handle around 1 million devices, and is comprised of an off the shelf antenna and a small server. Nicholls said the architecture was scalable, and able to handle billions of devices.
All the complexity is in the network, which helps Sigfox and its partners keep the hardware costs down. The software defined network (SDN) is configured by a centralized cloud, whose main task is to de-duplicate the multiple copies of data that might be collected by the independent cells in the collaborative network architecture.
But Nicholls stressed that the network’s main advantage arises from its simplicity. Unique ID numbers in each device mean that you don’t have to provision the devices as you would in a cellular network – activation is straightforward. The other main benefit is keeping the hardware and subscription costs down.
Avoiding cellular connectivity modules, which can range from around $15 for a 2G SIM module and up to $40 for an LTE equivalent, also avoids the expense associated with a cellular M2M subscription. Instead, Sigfox’s compatibility with cheaper chips means that it is several times cheap to ship at volume and keep online.
Sigfox is a company of around 60 employees, with plans to double that number within a year. As the network partners like Abertis and Sigfox handle the physical installation, the majority of Sigfox’s staff are tasked with monitoring its cloud platform and planning new installations. Nicholls said business was growing rapidly, with 70 leads in the previous month that would cater for over a million connected devices – with bookings to handle 5 million devices already on the cards.
The company hopes to go public, and has so far attracted $35 million in venture funding, largely from Intel and French venture funds. The platform appears to be much more flexible than a comparable cellular network, given that it managed to achieve 100% coverage in Spain using 1,500 base stations with a budget of $12.9 million. Its next targets are the US and Asia.
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Open Garden launches peer-to-peer mesh network for IoT devices
Open Garden has announced a new peer-to-peer mesh network for IoT devices, beginning with the Kickstarter-funded TrackR. Open Garden is best known for its FireChat app, which was published as a way of avoiding political censorship by way of anonymous peer-to-peer communication. This network architecture allows hundreds of Bluetooth devices to be backhauled to the cloud by just one internet-connected smartphone.
When a user installed the FireChat app on their smartphone, they would become a node on a multi-peer mesh network. Communications between users would ride the mesh of phones until they reached the intended recipient. This allowed users to communicate on a network not controlled by a central government, and this political motive spurred the publicity of the app.
The 5 million downloads of FireChat has effectively built a crowd-sourced peer-to-peer GPS network, using the connections between phones over Bluetooth or WiFi. Open Garden now hopes to leverage this ad-hoc network to track and connect other IoT devices. The first device that will be integrated will be the TrackR coin-sized GPS trackers.
Open Garden intends to use Bluetooth Low Energy to link items to smartphones and tablets, without any pairing required on the part of the device owner. This allows any of the 250,000 TrackR tags to ping any phone or tablet within Bluetooth range to update the central database with its GPS location. This data is then pushed to the owner of the TrackR tag, allowing them to keep tabs on their items so long as they are within range of a smartphone with the correct app installed.
The system leverages the density of smartphones in urban areas, but has obvious drawbacks in rural locations or areas where a Bluetooth communication has too short a range to link to a phone. But this drawback should be offset by the fact that this network has a minimal upkeep, is self-repairing, and can be offered to end users for free. It also provides a way to link the Bluetooth communications of the devices to the cloud by a cellular connection, should the phone’s owner allow it, or over the phone’s WiFi connection too.
This method is anonymous, in that the owner of the smartphone which provides the backhaul service never knows that they have found a tag, or passed on a message. This prevents someone from using the app to find potentially valuable items, or intercepting potentially private communications.
"With the 250,000 devices in the market, TrackR is one of the most successful IoT devices to date. IoT devices require connectivity and simplicity. Because the Open Garden Network is 100% software based, it scales infinitely and the costs are extremely low," said Micha Benoliel, Open Garden's CEO and co-founder. "Open Garden's technology also enables operators to generate additional revenues while embracing the IoT revolution."
This deal gives TrackR a much bigger pool of phones to use, and not just the phones that belong to customers who have purchased its item tag. As more vendors join the Open Garden service, the network will become larger and more resilient, meaning that lost items have a greater chance of being found.
The network should provide a low-cost alternative to traditional cellular and RF M2M methods of connectivity, and one that has no real cost other than the fee paid to Open Garden and the resources required to integrate the developer’s app with the Open Garden one.
The challenge will be convincing people to allow their phones to run the Open Garden app to handle traffic for devices that they don’t own. For TrackR, this was easily solved, as they were able to sell their tags on the basis that more people meant a bigger network for finding your own item if it ever went missing. We can’t see a reason why this same approach can’t be used for other IoT devices, but Open Garden should be wary in case a user unwittingly racks up a large bill due to an inadvertent tick-box selection – but that’s still a very easy feature to make prominent in the app, and one that is being incorporated into the new design of the TrackR app.
Open Garden was one of the finalists at the CTIA Super Mobility Week Startup Showcase, where it debuted its FireChat app to great critical reception.
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Apple’s watches invigorate wearables, but all quiet on the HomeKit front
Apple held its launch event for the new iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch, but while the tech giant talked at length about its new hardware, it said nothing about its HomeKit smart home platform. It’s been quiet since its developer conference, and the only recent news regarding the potentially huge home automation service has come from iDevices, which confirmed that it would soon be releasing a Bluetooth connected cooking thermostat on the HomeKit platform.
iDevices' CEO, Chris Allen, used a company press release to show us that he is rather enthusiastic about the potential for his thermostat in the grand scheme of things. He also said that the iDevices app would be updated for use in HomeKit, and it is worth noting that the release schedule coincides with the Apple press event in October. This is perhaps the only bit of HomeKit news that we can glean from the September 9th event, so it seems that we will have to keep waiting until then.
Allen said "we are confident that this product, which will be unveiled to the public in late October, or early November, will play a pivotal part in changing the home automation market as we see it today. There will be no need for a complex system, or even a separate hub. The new iDevices product is the only thing you'll need to transform your home into a 'smart home.'"
While we are certainly not as enthusiastic about cooking thermostats as Allen, we are rather optimistic about the potential for integrating Siri’s voice control functionality with the HomeKit devices. Apple’s own description of HomeKit reads “HomeKit is a framework in iOS 8 for communicating with and controlling connected accessories in a user’s home. You can enable users to discover HomeKit accessories in their home and configure them, or you can create actions to control those devices. Users can group actions together and trigger them using Siri.”
That last point is rather understated in our opinion. Being away from home, at the office for instance, and being able to effectively tell your house that you want the oven’s pre-heating routine to coincide with your arrival home is a small feature that adds a lot of value to the Apple platform. The device manufacturers benefit from attaching their products to what is currently considered a premium experience, and the users are able to interface with their homes via spoken commands and questions.
Here at RIoT, we think that voice communication is the ideal means of controlling the smart home. It’s a hands-free method that also has inherent security and authorization functionality, and with only a few microphones in the home, or in this case using an iPhone or Apple Watch, the kids in the home can turn their bedroom lights on but are denied access to the heating controls and the garage opener.
But while Apple keeps us waiting on the HomeKit announcement, we can report that the Apple Watch has been released, after years of dogged rumors. While the much-rumored sapphire displays failed to materialize on the new iPhone, they have made an appearance on the new Apple Watches. Billed by Apple as a “comprehensive” device, the watch will go on sale early next year, with prices beginning at $349 – around a hundred dollars more expensive than rival smartwatches. The rectangular watches must be paired with an iPhone 5 or later to work, and come in 38mm or 42mm screen sizes.
There will be three versions of the new Apple Watch, the regular Watch, the Apple Watch Sport and the Apple Watch Edition. While the Sport’s name gives a pretty solid clue as to its functionality, the Edition is the premium version – featuring an 18-karat gold enclosure in either a yellow or rose shade.
Common to all is the crown – used in regular watches to change the position of the hands – which will let users cycle through menus without obscuring the screen. This gives the new Watches a method of navigating that doesn’t seem to be limited by the small screen size.
We have to give it to Apple; this is a navigation function so obvious and common-sense that it is painful to notice in hindsight that other smartwatches haven’t already made use of it. Perhaps there’s an unknown patent lurking in the shadows that dissuaded others from using the design.
The touchscreen can differentiate between taps and presses, which Apple says will improve the options for app developers, and the underside of the watch features a heart rate monitor which will integrate with the paired iPhone’s Health app. The UI will zoom in on elements to make touch navigation easier, with taps and presses differentiating from zooms and selections.
The mid-range Sport forgoes the sapphire glass screen in favor of strengthened Ion-X glass (which is a little confusing seeing as sapphire is supposed to be super-tough), and instead of the metal or leather bands of the other two versions it uses a “durable” fluoroelastomer band, which looks and acts like rubber. This is the most colorful of the range.
All three watches use a charging system very similar to the magnetic coupling seen on Apple’s laptops. Wireless charging has failed to surface in the watch, to the disappointment of many who hoped that Apple’s choice of wireless-power standard might unify the disparate competing protocols.
WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 are the only connectivity options for the watches, but given their dependency on the iPhone to work, this isn’t particularly surprising. There’s still the potential for the watches to act as presence sensors in the smart home, but we’ll have to wait and see how the watches integrate with Apple’s HomeKit ambitions. Apple did at least mention an app for controlling a Honeywell thermostat, as well as a tracking app for those BMW owners who manage to lose their car in a parking lot.
Two apps called Activity and Workout will relay their sensor data to the HealthKit app on the phone. This data is gathered by the heartbeat monitor, accelerometer and GPS coordinates, to give a readout of the user’s activity. Activity is the more passive application, which acts in the background, while Workout is used by the user to track more intense physical exercise.
This data could prove valuable to the healthcare industry, which is worth around $3 trillion in the US, and Apple has partnerships with a few US institutions to see what it can do with the HealthKit data. No solid news has arisen from these partnerships, but it does show that the company is seeing how it can monetize the data that its iDevices can gather from their users.
The watch also serves as a quick-messaging platform, where users can draw shapes, uses emoji symbols and even send brief audio messages using the Walkie-Talkie function – all methods that avoid asking users to input text on a small screen. The software looks much more functional than Android Wear, but we’re still not sold on the idea that a watch can sufficiently boost usability that’s worth the $250-350 price tag.
An SDK, called WatchKit, will be available to developers soon. The watches themselves will make it to market in early 2015, missing the potentially lucrative holiday season. But it’s still hard to envision a future where smartwatches are commonplace. They are simply too expensive – regardless of the small conveniences they might offer – and won’t take off until they come down in price.
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General Motors commits to semi-autonomous cars by 2016
General Motors, the largest US automotive company and parent of brands such as Chevrolet, Cadillac and Opel, has announced that cars featuring vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology and hands-free driving will be arriving in 2016. GM Chief Executive Mary Barra unveiled the news at the Intelligent Transport Society in Detroit.
V2V communication could remove human error from the top of the list of contributing factors in motor accidents – which kill millions of people globally each year. The cost of these accidents, both financial and personal, could soon be removed if these V2V systems can be successfully deployed and adopted. On top of this, Barra pointed to the 5.5 billion hours and 2.9 billion gallons of fuel wasted each year by congestion, which could be avoided entirely or drastically reduced by advances in V2V technology.
The first vehicle GM will sell with the V2V capabilities will be the Cadillac CTS sedan, however, GM says that the CTS will only be able to communicate with similarly equipped vehicles – which will be complicated by the overwhelming lack of compatible vehicles thanks to the ratio of new to used cars on the roads.
But it won’t just be other cars that the CTS will take to. Fixed infrastructure, such as traffic lights and street lighting, will be used as points in a mesh network that feeds live information to all the compatible vehicles on the roads.
Barra said “I’m convinced customers will embrace V2V and automated driving technologies for one simple reason: they are the answer to everyday problems that people want solved.” And by the looks of it, this technology will be sold as a high-spec feature, as Barra emphatically observed, “having it done for you – that’s true luxury.”
The GM technology will include the Super Cruise feature, which enables hands-free driving at highway and urban speeds. It offers lane following and speed control, with emergency braking; essentially adding steering functionality to adaptive cruise control. It won’t guide the car by itself, but it can feed any information gathered from compatible vehicles and infrastructure in a 300 meter range – providing a valuable heads-up and early warning to potential hazards up ahead. If the car feels the driver has not taken appropriate action, it will then intervene to avoid a crash.
It’s also likely that this feature will work its way from the top of the range towards the bottom, given that the CTS is a premium model and that a rumored flagship model based on the Elmiraj concept car is in development, and GM won’t confirm or deny that this is the second-confirmed car that will feature Super Cruise.
“We’re not going to wait until we perfect a driverless system,” said Jon Lauckner, GM’s CTO. “We’re going to take a leadership position by saying it’s time to get going on the deployment of V2V technologies.” Combining an ad-hoc network of information-gathering vehicles and traffic infrastructure with the semi-hands-off capability is not being sold as a feature to make driving easier or an experience that requires less attention to be paid to the road. As GM Director of Active Safety Electronics, John Capp, said “the sensing technology is not yet to the point where the driver can check out, but we don’t want to wait for 100 percent autonomous vehicles. We need to bring out new models. This is technology we can bring out now.”
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RacoWireless adds app store to its DevCloud PaaS
RacoWireless, the company behind the Omega DevCloud universal-translating cloud platform, has launched an app store for the platform. The aim is to provide the interoperability needed to work in the IoT with DevCloud, and then allow companies to sell and provide their own DevCloud-compatible apps via the Application Marketplace.
The US M2M Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider says its DevCloud can take any communication data from a device or cloud and convert it into JavaScript Object Notation, which is effectively a universally understood format. This then allows the DevCloud to push the “translated” information to the required device or cloud so that developers don’t have to program their devices and services to talk to everything – they just need to be able to talk to the DevCloud.
So this architecture would firmly place RacoWireless at the heart of the IoT, if enough systems migrate to the DevCloud platform. When we spoke to president John Horn a few weeks ago, he told us that RacoWireless had 1,300 customers and millions of device subscriptions. With the launch of the DevCloud app store, the company is betting that making the transition easier for developers will help boost this number.
Now third parties will be able to design and sell apps for these IoT installations, on the back of the DevCloud platform. The company says “the Application Marketplace allows app developers to create new revenue streams by offering their apps to a growing community of solution and service providers – who gain the ability to add value to their new and existing customers.” RacoWireless says that the app store, built on its Position Logic platform, will leverage the DevCloud to seamlessly integrate with existing deployments.
The customer facing end of the DevCloud is contained in a web browser portal, which hosts the tools needed for the developers. The first few devices connected are free of charge, so that potential new customers can trial the service without cost before committing to a subscription.
At the launch of the DevCloud, RacoWireless’ head of software engineering, Adam Schiable, described the platform as “a web-based REST/JSON API built on a hardened bi-directional M2M communication core that supports both TCP and UDP protocols.”
This essentially means that the service acts as an API between the device and the customer cloud – almost like middleware. As far as the two ends of the communication are concerned, the DevCloud doesn’t exist – they simply receive seamless communication. The customer uses the DevCloud tools to tell it how to handle these transmissions, and the hosted service does the rest – handled by 3 US datacenters with full redundancy measures in place. After all, what good is a translator if he keels over and stops talking?
The company recognizes that speed is currently the key to a successful IoT deployment. “While ‘making it easy’ is our mantra, part of that message is speed-to-market,” said Horn. “With the Application Marketplace, we are enabling our partners and solution providers to be able to get to market faster than ever before. This brings together both service providers and application developers in a way that is clearly needed in the IoT space. Now customers can quickly enhance their existing products, or build new products with a growing library of cost-saving and feature-rich applications.”
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Imagination Technologies serves the MIPS flavor of the Raspberry Pi
MIPS owner and GPU designer Imagination Technologies has revealed a MIPS-based development board. Very similar in concept to the Raspberry Pi, which costs $25 and has shipped around 1.5 million units in its lifetime, Imagination’s Creator CI20 is the first such micro-PC to feature MIPS processing power – which is renowned as an ultra-low power technology.
The board’s footprint measures 90.2mm x 95.3mm, and centers around a JZ4780 SoC from Ingenic Semiconductor – a Chinese company founded in 2005 and based in Beijing, and an Imagination partner. The JZ4780 uses a dual core MIPS32 CPU, clocked at 1.3GHz and with 512KB of L2 cache, paired with one of Imagination’s PowerVR SGX540 GPUs.
In the CI20, the JZ4780’s CPU is clocked at 1.2GHz. The board has 8GB of flash storage, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, and a HDMI output that supports up to 2K resolutions (2048 x 1536 pixels) and supports 1080p video playback. In terms of connectivity, the board features a 10/100 Ethernet port, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, as well as 2 USB 2.0 ports.
On the software side of things, the board comes preloaded with Debian 7, with other Linux distributions (including Gentoo, Yocto, Angstrom and Arch) said to be available soon. Imagination also promises that Android 4.4 will be available for the platform by the end of the month. Supported video codecs include H.264, VP-8, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and RV9.
The board has initially only been made available to developers in the Imagination Community, and has already gone out of stock – likely due to being free of charge. But that tactic will pay dividends if developers turn their attention to MIPS. A $0 cost is a good way of enticing new developers into the fold, as well as retaining the goodwill of older developers. But the CI20’s main purpose in life is to act as the platform on which new software and hardware can be refined and released - which is good news for Imagination, as the MIPS chips in these new products equate to new revenue.
Imagination is now shipping somewhere north of 800 million MIPS cores a year, as the architecture tries to challenge the dominance of x86 and ARM. To this end, Imagination set up a MIPS working group. Called Prpl, the group includes Broadcom, Cavium, Ikanos, Lantiq and Qualcomm, and it hopes to establish a strong software base for the MIPS architecture. Imagination is also working with Oracle to port the Java Development Kit and Java Embedded to MIPS too, but the firm has yet to join Prpl.
With the upcoming Android L ready to embrace the MIPS technology more readily than previous versions, MIPS might lead something of a resurgence against the x86 and ARM architectures that have been slowly squeezing it out of the market – especially if it can beat ARM at its own game in low-power chips.
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Osram Sylvania picks Belkin WeMo for smart bulbs and fixtures
Belkin’s WeMo range of home automation has now secured the backing of one of the largest light bulb and light fitting manufacturers in the world. Osram Sylvania has announced that the two companies have entered into a strategic agreement to collaborate on residential products, integrating the Osram Lightify range with Belkin’s WeMo ecosystem.
This is a big win for WeMo, adding a lucrative slice of the $6.85 billion in 2013 revenue that Osram Sylvania generated, of which 29% came from its LED division. The Lightify system uses ZigBee to communicate, so the WeMo hub or the Lightify hub will still be prerequisites for these lighting systems – as you need something to transfer the ZigBee messages to the smartphone.
Osram Sylvania will add WeMo compatibility to its iQ BR320 LED bulb, before adding the functionality to a broader portfolio of products – scheduled to appear after the European launch of its Lightify range in the fall. The WeMo bulbs will be available in the US in the coming months, primarily from e-commerce outlets including Belkin itself.
This will allow customers to control the bulbs via the WeMo app for smartphones, as well as through WeMo light switches and its NetCam HD+ cameras, as well as other IFTTT web services. This will allow IFTTT users to set up all sorts of alerts that trigger the bulbs – including novel cases such as flashing the bulbs when your favorite sports team scores and more functional use cases such as email or doorbell notifications.
“We started out with the goal of making WeMo the most approachable entry point to the smart home, and by working with Osram Sylvania, we are able to expand our ecosystem with touch points across people’s daily lives,” said Sunny Choi, VP Corporate Development at Belkin. “The addition of Lightify to our ecosystem enables more devices to communicate with each other to create a smart home easily and affordably, one solution at a time.”
Many people would swiftly dismiss this line of thinking, shrugging off lighting as just another thing that doesn’t need to be automated. But there is already a large market for security devices that will automate lighting patterns to give the appearance of occupancy while the owner is away from home. If you add in smart lighting as an extension of other security features, such as exterior motion-activated spotlights, you can begin replacing older exterior lighting systems with IP connected ones – allowing SMS alerts to be issued or IP cameras to be turned on if the gate moves of if the motion sensor pings the lights.
This sort of connectivity is the best example of the benefits of the IoT. It is a way of bringing new features to an existing product – not reinventing the wheel, but simply refining it. This is before you begin envisioning completely new use cases, such as the aforementioned alert lighting and IFTTT connectivity. This is the sort of deal that the IoT community should be praising more often, not snidely dismissing.
“As connected lighting becomes more mainstream, we are working with leaders in the IoT like Belkin to unleash the full potential of consumer’s homes by creating personal lighting experiences that promote comfort, convenience and joy,” said Jes Munk Hanse, Osram Sylvania’s CEO. “We are shaping the future of lighting by delivering not only long-life, energy saving LED solutions, but also by creating an experience that changes the way people think about their lighting.”
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FREE Report: Beware the Five Myths of the Internet of Things
A new report published by Rethink Technology Research has tried to dispel the hype that surrounds the Internet of Things. It can be downloaded here.
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