All posts tagged: Hardware

As the Internet-of-things industry and products is justifiably booming – like any emerging market or technology area there are several challenges and pitfalls to work through and hopefully avoid. As with the boom in personal computer types in the early 1980s, through to various standards in video and audio media towards the end of the last decade – making the right choices now can be a challenge.

When choosing IoT platforms – do you face problems with privacy, security, or expensive over-engineering of technology for technology’s sake? Are you considering replacing existing systems that aren’t really broken in a way that offers no real return in terms of user experience or economic value – just to be on the “latest craze”? With the standards of the IoT not being entirely prevalent or fixed, issues such as reliability, privacy, security, ownership and control of private data still pose questions that are barely beginning to be worked out.

The Internet of Things is not just something that is hidden away – out of sight somewhere inside an embedded control system. The growth in this field is also represented in a growth in the use of smart devices and technologies that are directly facing the domestic or industrial consumer.

One of these challenges is security of end-user data. As various devices enter the domestic arena, increasingly-enlightened consumers will have be concerned and have various questions about their privacy and security. And as these Internet of Things devices start to generate detailed real-time data about how much electrical power you’re using, which lights and appliances you have turned on at particular times, or even personal medical data logged directly from biomedical sensors – customers and end-users expect to know where that data is being collected and used, by whom, and why. To achieve confidence and acceptance amongst consumers, companies collecting data through Internet-of-Things systems must do so only with the consumer’s consent and only in a secure and controlled fashion.

The next challenge to meet is demonstrable financial benefit. Consumers expect that if they’re paying for new technology that they serve them – and not just the utility or manufactured. For example, if residential electricity consumers are paying for new smart metering infrastructure – then consumers expect to see how the new technology actually benefits them, not just providing a financial benefit to the energy provider who can save money by removing the number of meter readers.

Do the new technologies actually show a clear financial benefit, to corporate, industrial and household users? It has been said, for example, that one Australian electricity distribution company is “building its own Internet” to collect electricity billing data from residential smart meters. It seems ostensibly absurd to “build your own Internet” instead of building solutions that operate – with appropriate security and reliability – on top of the established Internet.

Although everyone may seem to have an education with regards to IoT devices, another challenge is educating potential and existing customers to the benefit of the devices. For example, as Internet-of-Things devices must be relatively inexpensive if they are to become truly ubiquitous in the home and not only adopted by early adopters who see past the initial price tag. For example, if an IoT-enabled light fixture costs $100 against a few dollars for a conventional bulb, it is not clear how widely adopted such a product will be. Although it’s worth noting that the total cost of ownership should be considered by the consumer – including the necessary cloud or software services, and not just the cost of the hardware node.

Another larger challenge, and one that needs to be overcome (or prepared for) before any final sales and installation is the hardware or software standards being used in the device. For example can the device work with IPv6 addressing? With the upcoming exhaustion of IPv4 addresses the address space represents a significant limit for the Internet of Things, for example there is no way that every refrigerator can have an IPv4 address exposed out to the Internet. However, with the introduction of IPv6 the problem is solved. Thus hardware needs this support.

Although the Internet-of-things will eventually prevail – the example challenges listed above and many more still exist. Improvements for the end-user and operator still introduce design problems and perhaps a little “fortune-telling” just as any new wave of technology or standards.

But how do you ensure your hardware will meet upcoming or new standards? Will your Internet-of-things ideas translate into profitable, desired systems by all stakeholders – not just your design team. Or can your existing systems be enhanced to benefit from the Internet-of-things without a total redesign? All these and many more questions can be answered by a design house with the expertise and experience such as here at the LX Group.

At the LX Group we have a wealth of experience and expertise in the IoT field, and can work with the new and existing standards both in hardware and software to solve your problems. Our goal is to find and implement the best system for our customers, and this is where the LX Group can partner with you for your success.

We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you – within your required time-frame and your budget. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Recently Google announced their new Cloud Platform services, which allow almost anyone to build applications, websites, store and analyse data using Google’s infrastructure. This is an exciting development for those looking to implement a scalable Internet-of-things system at a minimal cost – so we’ll take an overview of the system as it stands today.

Almost everyone is aware of the researched information, computing power and infrastructure available for Google’s myriad of services, and now it’s possible to harness some of this for your own needs. With the introduction of their “Cloud Platform”, you can harness this power that Google has used internally for years to provide Google’s familiar high-speed, high-scale big-data products and services such as Search, YouTube, Google Docs and GMail and make it available as cloud computing services for use with your own Internet-of-Things projects.

Large-scale, high-speed, distributed “cloud” storage and computation with large amounts of data is at the heart of everything that makes Google what it is, so it’s clear that they have substantial opportunities to offer external cloud-computing customers.

Whilst Google is not the first major player in the cloud computing market, their substantial infrastructure and “Big Data” experience represents a significant source of potential competition with other established cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services. The capability to use Google’s data centre infrastructure for cloud storage and computation, their data tools such as BigQuery to process very large scale data sets – and integration with Google’s data, services and apps are increasingly attractive.

The Google Cloud Platform is made up of a couple of different core components – Compute and Storage being two of the most important. The Compute component includes the Google Compute Engine, which is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform designed to run any application on top of Google’s infrastructure – which offers fast networking, scalable processing and storage, and the App Engine, a platform for developing and hosting web applications. The Storage component includes Google Cloud Storage and the BigQuery large-scale query system.

As with most cloud computing platforms, end users access cloud-based applications and infrastructure through a relatively lightweight local computer – via a web browser, lightweight desktop software, or a mobile device application – with the data and most of the software are stored on remote servers in the cloud. Therefore, the hardware requirements for the user to leverage the power of applications and data on Google Cloud Platform-hosted applications and services are almost trivial.

Many components of the Google Cloud Platform support open standards and protocols such as REST-based APIs. The Google Compute Engine is built atop a JSON RESTful API which
can be accessed via numerous different libraries, command-line utilities and GUI front-end tools. Google’s BigQuery, a cloud-based fully managed interactive query service specifically designed for work with massive datasets, is operated via an SQL-like query language.

Google Cloud Storage complements the Compute component of the Google Cloud Platform and serves to glue together all Google Cloud Services. Google Cloud Storage is a HTTP service that serves data directly over HTTP with high performance and resumable transfers of objects up to the terabyte scale. It offers support for two different APIs – one that is compatible with the XML standard used by competing providers such as Amazon Web Services and another API built around JSON and OAuth, consistent with the Google Compute Engine’s API.

The Google App Engine is a “Platform-as-a-Service” cloud computing platform for the development and hosting of web applications in Google’s managed data centres. Applications are sand-boxed and distributed across multiple servers. One of the major benefits of using the Google App Engine is that it can offer automatic scaling for web applications – that is, automatically allocating more resources for the web application to handle the increased demand as the number of requests for a particular application increases.

All that sounds quite useful, however why would your organisation use the Google Cloud Platform? Whilst it requires an initial investment to import your data (especially on a large scale) into the cloud, this is offset by the substantial advantages offered by the platform. By offering fully managed services that remove the requirement for upfront capacity planning, provisioning, constant monitoring and planning software updates. This can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of large-scale data handling solutions.

Furthermore there’s one thing in particular that sets the Google Cloud Platform apart – the network that connects the company’s data centres so data can be processed and delivered where it is needed in milliseconds. Google has a private distributed backbone between all its data centres – so if you’re moving data around within Google’s cloud, even within geographically diverse data centres (although this is essentially invisible to the user) your data travels over Google’s backbone, and not over the Internet – providing substantially improved performance.

Whilst the Compute and Storage components of the Google Cloud Platform are separate offerings, the performance of Google’s networks make it appear as though they integrated seamlessly, thus allowing integration of Google’s cloud storage and computation with no obvious slowdown.

At the LX Group we have a wealth of experience and expertise in the IoT field, and can develop new or modify existing hardware and software to integrate your system with the Google Cloud Platform. As always, our goal is to find and implement the best system for our customers, and this is where the LX Group can partner with you for your success.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Although we have recently been focusing on the systems and hardware that can be used in various Internet-of-things applications, there’s much more to learn and understand. One particular aspect is the way in which devices send and receive data between themselves and servers – and an example of that is MQTT.

Message Queue Telemetry Transport, or MQTT, is an open protocol for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications that enables the transfer of telemetry-style data in the form of messages from a network of distributed devices to and from a small message “broker” server – whilst maintaining usefulness over high-latency, expensive or bandwidth-constrained networks. This publish/subscribe messaging transport protocol is designed to overcome the challenges of connecting the rapidly expanding physical world of sensors and actuators as well as personal computers and mobile devices.

The origin of MQTT goes back to the late 1990s, where co-inventor Andy Stanford-Clark of IBM became immersed in M2M communication whilst working with industry partners to mine sensor data from offshore oil platforms, to inform better preventative and predictive maintenance. One of those industry partners was Arlen Nipper of Arcom, an expert in embedded systems for oilfield equipment. Together, Stanford-Clark and Nipper wrote the initial version of MQTT in 1998, and their open-source messaging software has continued to be improved over the following years.

Until recently, one of the challenges limiting widespread development of IoT technologies has been the lack of a clearly accepted open standard for message communication with embedded systems. Today, however, MQTT looks set to play an increasingly significant role in facilitating the Internet-of-Things. In much the same way that the HTTP standard paved the way for the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web as a tool for the sharing of people-to-people information on the Internet, MQTT could set the stage for the machine-to-machine equivalent of the WWW.

MQTT is particularly well matched with networks of small, distributed, lightweight, and pervasive devices – not just mobile phones and personal computers, but embedded computers, sensors and actuators – which can make up the “Internet of Things”. The MQTT protocol specification enables a publish/subscribe messaging model in a very lightweight way, useful for connections with remote devices where a small code footprint is required – low-cost 8-bit micro controllers, for example – and/or where network bandwidth is at a premium.

There is also another standard for sensors – MQTT-S, for which this specification is aimed at embedded devices on non-TCP/IP networks, such as ZigBee/802.15.4 wireless sensor mesh networks. MQTT-S is an extension of the MQTT protocol aimed at wireless sensor networks, extending the MQTT protocol beyond TCP/IP infrastructures for non-TCP/IP sensor and actuator networks. Furthermore, MQTT is already widely supported by servers and brokers including IoT implementations such as cosm, Thingspeak, nimbits, and more.

MQTT is already used in a wide variety of embedded systems. An example documented by IBM demonstrates a pacemaker that communicates via RF telemetry to an MQTT device in the home of a patient – allowing nightly data uploads to the hospital for analysis. This allows recovering patients to leave hospital earlier to recover at home whilst still being monitored by medical professionals. Or if an unexpected event occurs, the system can immediately alert the hospital and emergency services without any patient interaction.

Furthermore IBM has recently announced its’ new “MessageSight appliance”, designed to handle heavy-duty real-time sharing of large amounts of data between sensors and devices and using the MQTT protocol to do so. Finally, IBM and Eurotech have bought MQTT to the open standards process of OASIS – the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards. OASIS is a non-profit international consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.

The OASIS standardisation process started in March 2013, with the goal of establishing MQTT as an open, simple and lightweight standard protocol for M2M telemetry data communication. The newly established OASIS MQTT Technical Committee is producing a standard for the MQTT Protocol – together with requirements for enhancements, documented usage examples, best practices, and guidance for use of MQTT topics with commonly available registry and discovery mechanisms.

Although MQTT does seem to be championed by IBM, the OASIS recently called for industry representatives earlier this year to sponsor the formation of its MQTT Technical Committee, and was answered by Cisco, the Eclipse Foundation, Eurotech, IBM, Machine-To-Machine Intelligence, Red Hat, Software AG and TIBCO. The group will take the MQTT 3.1 specification, donated to the committee by IBM and Eurotech where it was originally developed, and work to standardise and promote its adoption it as an open standard.

In defining MQTT standards and making them open for all, this allows its’ use and will hopefully guarantee a future standard allowing interaction with devices from all suppliers and manufacturers who choose to work with it. It’s a standard that holds a lot of promise for the future of an efficient and affordable Internet-of-things.

At the LX Group we have a wealth of experience and expertise in the IoT field, and can work with the MQTT standard, hardware and software to solve your problems. Our goal is to find and implement the best system for our customers, and this is where the LX Group can partner with you for your success.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Continuing from our previous articles which are focusing on a range of currently-available Internet-of-Things systems, we now move forward and explore another addition to the Internet-of-Things marketplace in more detail – the system known as “ThingSpeak”. Considered to be one of the first openly-available IoT platforms, ThingSpeak operates on their own free server platform, or you can run the software on your own personal servers – and as the entire system is open-source, it’s easier to work with and customise.

As with the other systems examined, ThingSpeak gives your devices the opportunity to interact with a server for simple tasks such as data collection and analysis, to integration with your own custom APIs for specific purposes. Due to the open-source nature the start-up cost can be almost zero, and unlike other systems ThingSpeak is hardware agnostic – giving your design team many hardware options. However as always, let’s consider the main two components in more detail.

Hardware – You don’t need to purchase special base units or proprietary devices. As long as your hardware is connected to the Internet and can send and receive HTTP requests – you’re ready to go. For rapid prototyping, examples are given using many platforms including netduino, Arduino, mbed, and even with the competitive Twine hardware. This gives you a variety of MCU platforms from Atmel and ARM Cortex providers to work with, and as these development platforms are either open-source or inexpensive, your team can be up and running in a short period of time.

Furthermore creating your own devices can be quite inexpensive – a simple device based on an Atmel AVR and Ethernet interface can be manufactured for less than $20 in volume, and doesn’t require any software licensing expenses. To save on hardware costs, it could be preferable to have various sensors in a group communicate back to one connected device via inexpensive Nordic NRF24L01 wireless transceivers – and the connected device can thus gather the data into the require fields for transmission back to ThingSpeak.

Software – Thanks to the open-source nature of ThingSpeak either working with the existing server software or creating your own APIs isn’t a challenge. Interaction is easy with simple HTTP requests to send and receive data, which has a useful form. Each data transmission is stored in a ThingSpeak “channel”. Each of these channels allows storage and transmission of eight fields with 255 alphanumeric characters each, plus four fields for location (description, latitude, longitude and elevation – ideal for GPS), a “status update” field and time/date stamp. Data sent over the channels can be public or private – with access via your own devices and software finalising the security.

Once sent to the server this data can be downloaded for further analysis, or monitoring using various HTTP-enabled entities – from a simple web page, mobile application or other connected device. Various triggers can be created to generate alerts for various parameters, and can be sent using email, twitter, or other connected services such as an SMS gateway. After being in operation for almost three years, the platform has matured to a reliable service that has exposed many developers to its way of doing things, so support and documentation is becoming easier to find.

Overall the ThingSpeak system offers your organisation a low barrier to the Internet of Things. Creating a proof-of-concept device or prototype hardware interface can be done with existing or inexpensive parts, and the use of ThingSpeak’s free server can make an idea become reality in a short period of time. And once you device on the service, by internalising the server software, you can have complete control and security over your data.

If you’re interested in moving forward with your own system based on the ThingSpeak, we have a wealth of experience with the required hardware options, and the team to guide you through the entire process – from understanding your needs to creating the required hardware interfaces and supplying firmware and support for your particular needs.

Our goal is to find and implement the best system for our customers, and this is where the LX Group can partner with you for your success. We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you – within your required time-frame and your budget. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Many organisations, pundits and ourselves at the LX Group have discussed various aspects of what is generally termed the “Internet of Things” with great enthusiasm. And there’s many good reasons to be interested in this new level of technology. However from an external viewpoint, many people are still concerned that this “Internet-connected devices” is just a fad, being proposed by boffins and experimenters to automate their coffee machines or send a tweet when their children arrived home from school.

However nothing could be further from the truth. The Internet is real, devices are getting connected and more information than ever is being made available from connected systems. Industries of all types can take advantage of this to their benefit – and thus the concept of the “Industrial Internet” is born. This isn’t a new, separate Internet but instead a term for benefiting from the intelligence available with new technology to enhance any industrial operation.

This concept can be broken down into three specific categories:

Intelligent devices – these are the local hardware devices that work within existing or new installations that serve as the bridge between the installation and the larger overall system. Examples can range of a variety of connected instrumentation, sensors, local user-interfaces, or any other type of data-gathering and transmission device. In the past these may have been current-loop or other proprietary connections – but instead these devices are connected by a wired or wireless IP (internet protocol) connection.

The benefits of intelligent devices are several – their hardware cost can reduce over time with increasing volumes and popularity of the technology used; with a standardised interface the deployment and training costs for staff can be minimised; and with constantly-connected devices more data about the system operation can be gathered, allowing greater levels of analysis and faster decision-making cycles.

Intelligent systems – As the sum of all the parts, an intelligent system contains the new and existing hardware, networking and computing power that combine to offer a level of synergy unavailable from preceding technologies. With new levels of data output from intelligent devices, insightful programming by systems analysts and a strong background knowledge, optimisation of any operations can be achieved.

With knowledge comes understanding – allowing optimisation of all parts of the system. From simply matching machine usage to off-peak electricity prices to detecting device irregularities in real time, you can find savings in operations, system maintenance and also learn new insights about system operation in general. By monitoring device status in real-time you can reduce required holdings of consumables, pro-actively organise preventative maintenance instead of waiting to be notified of a fault, and fine-tune operations based on external and internal factors.

Intelligent decision-making – Over time as more operation data is gathered, analysed and verified by humans – the burden of decision-making can often be transferred to the system itself. The greater the number of data channels and volume of data being recorded offers the opportunity for a higher level of prediction of future events. Just as existing weather scenarios can often be used to predict future behaviour – a system can make decisions based on captured data that fit within predetermined parameters. From a simple laser printer that can order its’ own service call when the drum needs replacement; or an off-site diesel generator that can use data such as the load from attached refrigeration systems, ambient temperature and the amount of sunlight to determine how much fuel needs to be ordered and when it is required; or a delivery truck that can monitor speed, distance travelled, engine fluid levels, location and driver history and then decide when it needs a service – intelligent decision making can reduce the number of person-hours required for any organisation, and also help predict and determine situations that may not have been possible to realise with existing systems.

The Industrial Internet exists today, and using systems designed with the three categories mentioned earlier will help your organisation become more efficient, understand more about itself, and find cost benefits in all measurable areas. However the biggest step is the correct implementation of such a system. Like any plant or equipment purchase, making the right decision first – and once – will set your organisation on the path to increased efficiency and profitability – and this is where the LX Group can partner with you for your success.

We can discuss and understand your requirements and goals – then help you navigate the various hardware and other options available to help solve your problems. We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

There has been much discussion about the increasing possibilities available to existing systems by using the Internet of Things for two way transmission of data for logging and control purposes. However there is so much more than just working with data in a more efficient and cheaper method.

The concept and reality of the Internet of Things also allows devices to have increased levels of intelligence to further their defined tasks. This may sound like science-fiction, however it is possible – and already demonstrated in may consumer devices. For example – recent smart phones can download and install operating system updates without any intervention by or technical knowledge required from the user.

Using this same method your IoT devices – if designed appropriately – can be updated with new firmware just like our example smart phones. You can do this with two methods – by either using existing hardware such as “Electric Imp” modules that can be fitted in existing hardware, or creating new or re-designed hardware with the appropriate microcontroller/wireless chip combination.

When your devices can remain connected – or connect when necessary, they can also offload processing requirements to the cloud service or other connected server hardware. By programming your devices to simply send, receive and act on data the processing work can be offloaded to the server-side, reducing the requirement for faster device CPU speed, memory and so on. This in turn can reduce the hardware purchase cost, physical size, and also the power requirements for the device – saving money at all stages of operation.

All this sounds great – and has been put into practice in many fields. Let’s run through a few examples from a wide variety of examples.

Remote Point-of-Sale devices – Within the broad field of vending machines, point-of-sale devices, unattended ticketing machines and more – so much can be done to make stakeholders’ lives easier and cheaper. Product prices can be updated in real-time; data from the POS machine can be served to the central host giving real-time data and sales analysis; environmental data can be used to price cold drinks in real-time – for example when the local temperature increases or you know a certain area will be busier than usual – increase the drink price. The concept of supply and demand can be tweaked to your advantage with the right technology. And of course service calls and device monitoring can occur.

Passenger Information Systems – Almost every public transport system has some sort of PIDS (Passenger Information Display System), however their level of usefulness is usually determined by the ability of the system to run on-time. Remote displays may be programmed with timetable data to show when services should arrive, and on-board displays can show the “next station is…” type of data.

However when things go wrong – such as diversions, breakdowns, late-running or data required in an emergency – this data cannot be updated by local operators or staff in unattended stations. Thus the ability for a bus or train to communicate with a central server can allow relevant data to be displayed in real-time to the required PIDS units. Redundancy can be employed to allow for various failures, for example RFID technology at a railway station can be used to detect when a particular train arrives and departs. And when timetables change, stations are altered or new information is required to be displayed – it can all be done remotely or even while on the move.

Cube Satellites – In the last twelve months various groups have been working on tiny satellites that are launched into space along with regular commercial satellite payloads. Although this is a far-out example, it’s a demonstration of what we’re talking about. Each of these tiny satellites contain inexpensive consumer-level microcontrollers that control sixteen AVRs each running their own firmware, collating data and sending it back to earth via UHF radio link. The firmware for each of these AVRs can be uploaded and thus alter the satellite’s function when required.

The IoT is more than just wireless data – it’s about control. Having more control over your assets and revenue stream can increase business efficiency and profitability. With the right applications and minds on the task, even the simplest thing can be constantly tweaked to maximise gains. Here at the LX Group we can discuss and understand your requirements and goals – then help you navigate the various hardware and other options available to help solve your problems. We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design. https://lx-group.com.au Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

After reading various articles in the media and elsewhere, or examining your competitors’ products – you may start to ponder if the “Internet of Things” really matters. That’s a fair question, and the same can often be asked when a new technology emerges from the horizon. However unlike other changes in technology the leap to an IoT can be considered as revolutionary instead of evolutionary – and thus it does matter.

But why? As mentioned in our previous articles, the ability for something to be connected to the a network is tremendous. With intelligence provided by bespoke hardware at the client side, they can now receive or send data when the device is programmed to do so at an appropriate time. Consider the following examples:

Monitoring temperatures of multiple points in a production facility – No longer do you need to use a wired connection back to the main system – instead each temperature sensor can be equipped with a wireless module and communicate to the server via WiFi. Sensors can be relocated, added, or deleted without the effort to rewire – and with the advances in energy harvesting they can possibly be self-powered. A minimal microcontroller between the sensor and wireless module can also continuously monitor all status and notify the server of an error – and the server can detect a total failure and alert technicians without delay via many channels.

Consumer-device interaction – By now you’ve seen the LED light that can be controlled via a smartphone. However that technology can be utilised in many more ways – imagine if you arrived home at night, and your car communicates with the home system to turn on various lights, HVAC, and even turns on the stereo. Or an alarm system that emails, tweets and texts you images of the room where motion is detected – as well as alerting the authorities.

Upgrading existing M2M connectivity solutions – If you have existing devices that communicate with a server over custom wireless data solutions or expensive GPRS packet-data links – there may be an opportunity to upgrade the communications to IP via WiFi.

For example, if you have twenty vending machines in an airport that has terminal-wide WiFi access – by switching the communications from cellular to WiFi you not only save on line subscription and data charges, you can also interact more easily with the machines for status updates and alerts. Converting equipment to standard wired or wireless IP communciations allows integration with a wide variety of current and future IoT systems giving you flexibility and more possibilities than ever before.

The Internet of Things is important, it does matter – almost anything can communicate with anything or anyone. It’s a simple statement, that describes an almost infinite amount of possibilities. And the race is on to introduce this functionality to existing and new products. Customers are becoming more savvy with the Internet and networking – and understand how it works. By creating solutions that makes life easier, simpler and more convenient for your customers via IoT technology you will be ahead of the pack – to your benefit.

If you want to find out more, move forward with your own designs to make them IoT-ready, or don’t know where to start – partner with an organisation who can pull together the software, hardware and know-how to make it happen – the LX Group.

Here at the LX Group we can discuss and understand your requirements and goals – then help you navigate the varioushardware and other options available to help solve your problems. We can create or tailor just about anything from awireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

Moving on from our examination of Hardware design directions for Internet-of-Thing solutions, we now turn to the software portion of the solution. As there was many hardware options to consider, there is also a variety of choices to select from when looking for a service to collect data from and interact with your hardware. Each have their own features, costs and drawbacks – however these factors and more are subject to the goals of your project.

Nevertheless each have their own distinctive features, so let’s examine three existing and experienced market players in more detail. The first is known as “cosm”, however previously called “pachube”. Cosm is flexible in that you can use your own hardware designs or existing hardware from other vendors, and no hardware licensing is required. You can prototype very easily with cosm using inexpensive development platforms such as NXP’s mbed or even an Arduino-compatible board. This allows your hardware team to get started straight away.

However the service is mainly for capturing and organising “feeds” of data from connected devices, and this can be done for zero cost. There are other options that allow device management and provisioning, however they are in beta stage at the moment. Nevertheless the cosm platform is effective and excellent for capturing data from remote devices for analysis and action – and with very low start-up and running costs it’s great for experimenting or proof-of-concept prototypes.

The next service we consider is “Thingspeak”. This is a fully open-source IoT platform that designed for data feeds and interaction with hardware in both directions. You can also import existing data collected before implementation. Although Thingspeak is open-source, it does provide security via API keys and user authentication. Rules can be created that react when data reaches a certain value or parameter – which cause twitter messages, can trigger hardware or other devices via a connected PC.

You can also export all captured data in .csv file format for ease of local analysis or system transfer. Due to the openness of the system, there’s a great variety of tutorials and examples available for Microsoft .NET, Arduino, python, processing and other environments – which will help your team get up to speed. And currently the service is no-charge. With these factors in mind, Thingspeak can provide a simple solution however more direct enquiries with the organisation would need to be made with relation to long-term changes in costings.

Finally we take a look at “Nimbits”. This service provides the usual cloud-based data gathering, analysis and so on – but using the Google Apps. This offers an incredibly reliable server, integration with Google Docs and other related software tools. As with Thingspeak, Nimbits is fully open-source and allows import and export of your own data. Nimbits offers integration with social media such as facebook and twitter.

The service is free for up to 1000 API calls per day, and then one cent per 1000 calls. Therefore you can again try it for free, or at a very low cost. Getting started is simple, with a range of tutorials on data capture, and interaction or messaging based on circumstances. It does require more coding than cosm or Thingspeak, however this isn’t an insurmountable challenge.

The IoT industry is growing, and even as we write this more services are being introduced and demonstrated. It can be difficult to choose which service to use, as they’re all quite young and untested over the long term, so having hardware and plans that can span two or more different services is essential for the longevity and sustainability of your IoT project.

Here at the LX Group we can discuss and understand your requirements and goals – then help you navigate the various hardware and other options available to help solve your problems. We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design. https://lx-group.com.auPublished by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

When designing hardware to integrate with an Internet-of-Things solution, or an entire solution – it can be easy for the design team to focus on the software, server and control system due to the ease of prototyping and the availability of experienced people. It’s a common philosophy that once the software is “sorted out” – the hardware can be easily designed to work with the system. Thus it can be tempting for organisations who move towards IoT solutions to focus on the software more than the hardware as it may seem at the outset to be more complex and more difficult part of the system.

However hardware design cannot be overlooked or resources in that field minimised. There is much more to consider than just what “the hardware will do” – the consideration of which type of IoT system to work with needs to be executed – and in conjunction with that the choice of which hardware design path to take.

After deciding on which IoT platform to design your hardware for, the choice of hardware design path is crucial to the success of your IoT implementation. Even if you’re developing for internal use, or offering hardware or turnkey systems to customers – the choice of hardware design can play a part in the long-term success or failure of the system.

When we say the “choice of hardware design” it is not the actual type of device (however that can also play a part in success or failure) or design tools used to create something – it is the choice between one of hardware design paths. That is, will you choose proprietary hardware interface designs from an existing supplier; create your own hardware and protect the intellectual property with copyright and possible patent protection; or open-source your design to some degree to allow input and contribution from internal and external customers? There are pros and cons to each method, so let’s examine them in some more detail.

Existing design – This is the easiest option for your design team, as the hardware interface to the required IoT system has been designed, tested and ready for integration into your hardware. To resell your own devices based on an external system can require licence or royalty payments to the system provider, however this will often be returned “in kind” with marketing support, referrals and leads from the system provider. However you’re at the mercy of the success or failure of the host system – which could leave you with outdated and useless hardware that can be at least difficulty to modify or at worst a total write-off.

Internal, protected design – With this option you have access to the required interface design from the IoT system provider that allows you to create your own hardware instead of buying or licensing technology from the provider. It gives you total control over the hardware design – including possible modularity between the IoT interface hardware and the product itself, in case of system failure (as mentioned previously). Furthermore you have complete control of the design, maintain all IP, and can market your designs as an exclusive product that’s compatible with the system. However all design, support and revisions will happen in-house.

Open-source – After a few minutes searching on the Internet it may seem that almost everyone is open-sourcing their designs to allow all and sundry to review, modify, critique and sometimes re-manufacture their products. This method is preferable if you are offering paid access to the server-side infrastructure or you are happy to allow others to create devices that compete with your own hardware to quickly allow customer take-up of your IoT system. Furthermore you can build a community around users of your system, which can reduce the support load and generate good-will. However taking this path in essence abandons revenue from hardware sales and any intellectual property your team have created. Finally, larger customers may see this product as insecure (even if it offers encrypted data transmission) due the openness of the designs.

Here at the LX Group we can discuss and understand your requirements and goals – then help you navigate the various hardware and other options available to help solve your problems. We can create or tailor just about anything from a wireless temperature sensor to a complete Internet-enabled system for you. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.

As mentioned in our previous discussion of the 4-20 mA current loop, there are many forms of wired data transmission that can be used in products, and today we’d like to review another form – the Inter-integrated Circuit bus (or I2C bus for short). This is also known as the “two wire interface” and has been around for quite some time. Invented by NXP (previously Philips Semiconductor) the I2C bus is a multi-master serial single-ended data bus used to allow systems to communicate with a huge variety of electronic devices.

From a hardware perspective it is quite simple – each device connects to the serial data and clock lines, which are controlled by the master device. The clock and data lines are connected to Vdd via pull-up resistors, for example:

The master device controls the bus clock and initiates communications with each slave device. Communications are initiated by sending the slave device address – which is unique to each device – and then either data write or request commands. Then the slave device will act upon received data, or broadcase the required number of bytes of data back to the master device.

You may be wondering how the slave addresses are organised – each device manufacturer applies for an address range from NXP for their products. Some devices will only have one set address, and some can have their address altered – for example by changing the last three bits in the binary representation of the addresses. This is done in hardware by connecting three pins to Vdd or GND.

The speed of the I2C bus varies, and can range from 10 kbps to 3.4Mbps – with the speed usually proportional to the total device power requirements. The usual speed for the majority of devices is 100 kbps.

The decision to use the I2C bus can be simple, due to the popularity of the interface even on the most inexpensive of microcontrollers – and many design engineeers are familiar with the bus due to the history.

But what sort of devices can make use of the I2C bus? There are literally thousands available, in a wide range of categories. These can include simple temperature sensors, EEPROMS, motor controllers, LCD interfaces, I/O expanders, real-time clocks, UART interfaces, ADC/DACs, and more.

Apart from the huge range of devices, the advantages of using the I2C bus include industry expertise, the ability to address literally hundreds of devices using only two master I/O pins, and that devices on the bus can be “hot swap” – that is you can add or remove devices from the bus without powering off the entire system. This in itself is perfect for systems with maximum run-time requirements, as technicians can replace faulty device modules with reduced down-time for the end user.

However there are disadvantages to the I2C bus, two of which need to be taken into consideration. The first is that the maximum physical length of a bus run is usually around 20 metres, and in some cases much less. You can use bus extension devices from NXP (and others) that will allow much further physical distances – however designers need to ensure the capacitance across the bus stays at around 400 picofarads.

The second disadvantage is the possibility of slave address clash. You may have two specialised devices with the same slave address. In these situations you need to use an address multiplexer IC on the bus which first needs to be controlled, and then the device selected is addressed as normal. Nevertheless, as part of normal prototyping and planning these disadvantages can be removed or minimised with appropriate engineering.

It can be said that the I2C data bus may not be the “latest technology”, but it can effectively solve problems in the right circumstances. However there are many options, and choosing the right one is a fundamental step for the success of your project. So if your design team is set in their ways, or you’re not sure which data communication method is best for your application – it’s time to discuss this with independent, experienced engineers.

At the LX Group we have experience designing a wide range of data gathering and control systems over short and long distances – and using this experience we can determine the most effective method of returning data and control signals no matter the application or geography. Our engineering team have developed a number of systems in this area and have extensive experience with the core technology requirements of such systems.

We understand the importance of high availability, accuracy and integrity of the systems, combined with the need for future proofing infrastructure rollouts. For more information or a confidential discussion about your ideas and how we can help bring them to life – click here to contact us, or telephone 1800 810 124.

LX is an award-winning electronics design company based in Sydney, Australia. LX services include full turnkey design, electronics, hardware, software and firmware design. LX specialises in embedded systems and wireless technologies design. https://lx-group.com.au Published by LX Pty Ltd for itself and the LX Group of companies, including LX Design House, LX Solutions and LX Consulting, LX Innovations.