All posts tagged: platform

The Device Connection Platform from Ericsson is a cloud service for machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things applications, which is specifically aimed at enabling telecommunications network operators to offer connectivity management to their business customers in the IoT/M2M sector.

This new platform enables mobile network operators to provide support services for a growing variety of IoT and M2M devices, as well as simplifying the process of large-scale IoT network deployment and reducing costs. Ericsson has recently acquired this M2M platform from Telenor Connexion, in an effort to build their technology and know-how in this growing sector. Telenor Connexion will become Ericsson’s first customer for the Device Connection Platform.

Ericsson’s DCP is a dedicated M2M/IoT platform aimed at enterprise IoT users that handles connectivity management, subscription management and integration with Operations Support and Business Support Systems. It also allows for automation of business processes between mobile operators and business enterprises.

The platform is sold as a cloud service, offering users the traditional cloud benefits of a low initial investment and a fast rollout – that can significantly reduce barriers to deployment of IoT/M2M solutions by cellular network operators and their customers, keeping the total cost of ownership down while maximising quality of service.

Ericsson’s platform supports network operators who are expanding their M2M and IoT business sectors by assisting with connectivity management across the whole device lifecycle, as well as assisting with the marketing of DCP-based services. Furthermore, the platform provides valuable functions such as subscription management, device management, and self-service Web-based administration portals for both operators and enterprise users. Ericsson’s offering is comprised of the basic Platform-as-a-Service functionality along with service portals and APIs for users.

By offering a range of APIs, Ericsson allows enterprise customers to integrate their back-end systems and processes with this M2M platform – allowing these back-end systems to access the data and capabilities of M2M/IoT networks.

Through a service portal, available at any time from anywhere, customers can access self-service functionality to manage and control their installed SIM cards, monitor operational status in real time, access analytics data, and perform other management functions.

Ericsson’s platform aims to make it more viable for device manufacturers, enterprises and service providers to deploy large Internet-of-Things solutions across geographical boundaries, and has already been implemented by some telecom providers abroad such as Orange, TeliaSonera and Bell Canada.

Multinational enterprises offering connected M2M/IoT services and devices to an international customer base are faced with a key challenge – how to provide an easily managed and seamless IoT solution for end users as they move between different providers and different mobile networks.

The fragmentation of mobile networks between different countries and different carriers is a major obstacle to global M2M deployments. However with Ericsson’s platform – the goal is for operators and their customers to enjoy a unified experience in large-scale mobile IoT deployments, including global use of a single SIM card, harmonised service levels and harmonised business processes, across multiple countries and multiple network operators.

Ericsson, together with the Global M2M Association – a cooperative effort between six international tier-one operators active in the M2M telecommunications market, have showcased their new Multi-Domestic Service at Mobile World Congress 2015.

The Multi-Domestic Service aims to address this issue of network fragmentation across different carriers and countries by delivering a single, consolidated M2M/IoT management platform, based on Ericsson’s Device Connection Platform. Three of the Global M2M Association’s members (Orange, Telia and Bell) have already started using the Device Connection Platform individually.

Orange Business Services have also recently announced that they have entered into a strategic agreement with Ericsson to use the Device Connectivity Platform. As with Ericsson’s other partners for this platform, their goal is to better serve the growing global M2M market and to respond to the need for multi-domestic connectivity with seamless user experience across different carrier networks in many countries.

As well as the cross-border mobile IoT efforts of the Global M2M association, the Device Connection Platform is also going to be adopted to support connectivity, security and device management by members of the Asia-centric Bridge Alliance of mobile carriers.

The Bridge Alliance aims to use the Device Connectivity Platform to lower the barriers to entry into IoT services for device OEMs and service providers across 36 different countries that are covered by the member companies in the alliance, with the goal of common end-user experience and back-end management.

Furthermore, the Bridge Alliance hopes to remove the need for complicated deals that businesses would otherwise have to negotiate with national telecommunications network carriers in each country they’re operating in, and enable them to create multi-national platforms and processes to support IoT services and devices that can seamlessly “roam” internationally and between different operators.

Considering the effort Ericsson has expended into the platform, along with the efforts of the Global M2M association – this new platform could be the solution to your M2M and IoT device needs.

Here at the LX Group we have end-to-end experience and demonstrated results in the entire process of IoT product development, and we’re ready to help bring your existing or new product ideas to life. Getting started is easy – click here to contact us, telephone 1800 810 124, or just keep in the loop by connecting here.

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 IoT embedded systems and wireless technologies design.

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

The exponential growth of the Internet-of-Things marketplace is encouraged by new platforms to host prospective products and data – and new player to the scene is Cloudplugs – an end-to-end platform that provides cloud computing services for Internet-of-Things applications – with features including a trigger management engine, geolocation engine, database and storage engine and a billing engine.

Their new SmartPlug Apps cloud-based IDE allows the development of CloudPlugs IoT applications from the cloud, along with cloud-based automation that enables the remote deployment, configuration, update and management of devices.

IoT applications can be developed in JavaScript using the SmartPlug cloud based IDE, or with your favourite JavaScript development tool, anywhere, any time, on any browser. Whether you are a home user, an appliance manufacturer or a service provider, the CloudPlugs cloud service allows you to develop, deploy and manage as many as thousands of Internet-connected devices quickly without the need to develop and manage your own IT infrastructure to support them.

CloudPlugs offers the SmartPlug agent as the backbone of their IoT platform, which they claim is the most powerful and secure agent available for IoT devices. It is a secure, robust and lightweight yet powerful software agent with full lifecycle management capabilities for IoT gateways and other devices – enabling secure and efficient communications with the CloudPlugs IoT platform through their PlugNet protocol.

The platform supports local communications through multiple interfaces and protocols simultaneously, enabling devices with different physical interfaces and protocols to communicate. Devices and gateways powered by SmartPlug can easily exchange data with and control other devices, and scripts can be developed in the cloud and deployed to thousands of SmartPlugs with one click.

CloudPlugs offers maximum flexibility by delivering its end-to-end IoT connectivity platform as a subscription service as well as for in-house deployments. There is no limit on the number of prototype virtual devices that you can create and test in CloudPlugs, even with a free account.

The free account allows you to get started with free evaluation or hobbyist use of CloudPlugs, with up to 10 physical devices, up to 100Mb of storage and 100Mb of bandwidth per month. This is designed to allow individuals or small businesses to use the CloudPlugs platform to manage IoT devices as well as providing a free evaluation platform for larger users.

Moving up to a paid business subscription allows you to use as many devices as you want, with as much storage and bandwidth as your devices need, and a pay-as-you-use elastic pricing model which scales as your IoT business grows – where you’re only paying for the bandwidth and resources you’re actually using.

You can also choose a white-label CloudPlugs deployment in order to deliver IoT services, devices and management dashboards to customers under your own brand, along with in-house deployment on your own servers if desired for security or compliance reasons.

CloudPlugs uses a flexible and powerful MQTT-based publish-and-subscribe architecture, where things and applications subscribe to channels to publish their information and to read or issue control commands. Channels are data structures that allow things and applications to publish and to read data. Things or applications publish data into channels, or subscribe to channels to read data.

Channels can be created manually through the platform, or created dynamically. This dynamic management of channels means that they will automatically disappear if all the data published to that channel is deleted and will be created on-the-fly as data gets published to a newly specified channel by devices, removing the need for manual and inflexible configuration of channels.

Your devices and applications communicate with each other by subscribing to the same channels through MQTT, REST, WebSockets or the PlugNet protocol. Devices or “things” that use MQTT can connect and exchange data with other things that use the MQTT or WebSockets protocols, and if you’ve already developed existing products or devices that communicate using MQTT then it’s easy to get started connecting them to the CloudPlugs platform by modifying the MQTT logic to communicate to the CloudPlugs backend service.

To get started connecting your IoT things to the CloudPlugs platform, you need a CloudPlugs account – along with an appropriate hardware platform such as an Android device, an Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Libelium Waspmote or many others. Next you’ll need a software library that will be integrated with your controller firmware, and these are supplied for free download from CloudPlugs to cover a range of supported devices.

A wide range of different hardware and software platforms can easily and quickly be connected to the CloudPlugs platform using a lightweight REST API, which allows for almost any contemporary or future hardware platform to be integrated into the system.

CloudPlugs libraries are designed to give developers maximum flexibility and choice for the development and integration of applications to monitor and manage their IoT devices, and libraries are available that enable the development of software for integration with CloudPlugs using a range of different programming languages and environments – including Node.js, JavaScript, C, PHP, Android, Arduino and Objective-C.

These supported platforms cover a wide range of applications, including networking, development on embedded platforms such as the Arduino, Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone, and the Objective-C development of iOS apps.

Getting started with Cloudplugs can be easily achieved – for any purpose from initial experimenting with the Internet-of-Things to a full system. Here at the LX Group we’re ready to partner with you to meet your Internet-of-Things product goals, and can work with your ideas and more to bring them to reality. Getting started is easy – 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.

Industrial behemoth General Electric have now entered the Industrial Internet arena with their new “Predix” product – a new software platform and ecosystem aimed at a wide spectrum of machine-to-machine applications and “Industrial Internet” applications.

Predix is aimed at making it easy to connect machines to the Industrial Internet, to embed analytics into machines, making them somewhat intelligent and self-aware, and to retrofit and upgrade machine software without mechanical modifications though a platform which essentially provides the equivalent of cloud computing for the Industrial Internet.

One of the main goals of Predix is to offer connectivity to industrial assets of any vintage, from any vendor, to the cloud and to each other – meaning that your industrial applications can benefit from the asset performance management and operations optimisation that Predix makes possible, whether or not the other equipment and systems you use are GE products.

Predix enables industrial-scale analytics for asset and operations optimisation by providing a standard way to connect machines, data and people. Predix can be used as a platform to build apps for any industry or sector – by customers, OEMs, or developers, with the goal of efficiency improvement across a range of industries from automotive to building management to agriculture.

Furthermore Predix aims to connect people with intelligent machines and advanced analytics, giving you new levels of actionable insight, helping you optimise system operations and respond to situations as they arise. As part of this goal, the system helps you gain actionable insights from massive volumes of machine data flowing in rapidly, and to manage all assets from individual parts on the factory floor up to entire “smart factories”.

Operators can orchestrate analytics processing in real time across distributed machines and data, and get industrial-grade control and insight with modern consumer-style sleek user experiences across different platforms including mobile devices.

Predix can operate as a cloud-agnostic platform that can run on local servers, in your data centres, or in public clouds – with support for a scalable big-data computing fabric including the Apache Hadoop open-source framework for reliable, scalable, distributed computing, as well as support for historians and graphs.

You can control data across machines, networks and clouds in a resilient and secure way, with high availability for mission-critical applications, and you can control access to assets while enhancing communications between machines, networks and systems.

GE believes that industrial customers want predictability about performance and better asset management, and this is what the Predix platform helps to deliver. Over the coming year, GE aims to include connected sensors and Big Data capabilities in almost all of the company’s new products.

Development is still ongoing, as GE has also announced partnerships with AT&T, Intel and Cisco for the development of the Predix platform. Existing examples of products from GE that incorporate this technology include control of a jet engine aimed at maximising fuel efficiency while monitoring greenhouse gas emissions – which is predicted to save an airline $90 million over five years. A similar product, which optimises the efficiency of a gas turbine for power generation, is expected to save an energy utility $28 million per annum, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Applications can be built for any system or machine – from jet engines to MRI scanners – and be remotely managed while connected to the Internet. So far there are four components to the platform, for the sensors themselves, analytics, management of the connected devices, and a user interaction component called Predix Experience.

In 2016, GE plans to offer a developer program that lets third parties integrate Predix platform technologies into their own services. Under their part in the new Predix partnership, AT&T will develop device and sensor connectivity via cellular, PSTN and Wi-Fi connectivity. GE says its partnership with Intel will embed virtualisation and cloud-based, standardised interfaces within the Predix platform.

The Predix platform aims to eventually bring all of GE’s industrial machines together into one contextually aware, cloud-connected system. By connecting machines to the network and the cloud, Predix aims to enable workers all around the world to track, monitor and help maintain industrial machinery remotely through highly secure machine-to-machine communications.

Bringing together all machines, from wind turbines to medical imagers to jet engines, into a single, unified but contextually aware platform for all their operation and maintenance aims to deliver significant efficiency gains and reductions in downtime for GE and their customers.

The Predix platform is scalable, supporting high-volume analytics, industrial data and operational management, across individual machines and entire networks, on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. The platform is adaptive, allowing applications to be customised and extended across industries and their assets, data sources and devices, both mobile and fixed.

The development environment also enables the creation of new apps that can leverage mobile use requirements in an OS- and hardware-neutral fashion. The promise of Predix goes beyond cohesiveness and convenience. The real vision is to link all these diverse machines to the cloud, quantifying their performance and benchmarking them against each other – all in the name of improving efficiency and reducing unscheduled downtime.

The idea for the platform goes far beyond giving engineers a touchscreen manual for repairs. It’s really about creating a resource that knows exactly what needs to be done to optimise any machine at any moment, with a contextual understanding of that device.

Eventually, Predix will make sure everything’s on the same page, from the machine in question to the enterprise software in the cloud down to the tablet or other device carried by the maintenance engineer in the field.

And this is the benefit of the Industrial Internet – to give operators knowledge and control over their devices to maximise operational efficiency, minimise downtime and costs – in order to maximise profit. And no matter whether you’re looking to optimise a few local sensors or monitor devices from around the globe – here at the LX Group we have the team, experience and technology to bring your ideas to life.

Getting started is easy – join us for an obligation-free and 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.

In what would seem to be an already crowded marketplace, Ayla Networks have introduced their new agile, cloud-based Internet-of-Things “application enablement” platform that makes it easy and cost-effective for OEMs to connect any of their products or devices to the Internet.

Ayla’s pervasive software creates an adaptive fabric for IoT applications, which aims to accelerate the development and support of smart, interactive product solutions from the device level, to the cloud, to the application level. The Ayla IoT Cloud Fabric combines innovative cloud-based services with powerful software agents integrated into both embedded IoT end-node devices as well as in mobile device applications.

By working closely with Broadcom, Ayla can deliver Embedded Agents supporting Broadcom’s WICED embedded Wi-Fi platform, and Ayla has also partnered with USI to deliver production-ready Wi-Fi Modules incorporating the Ayla Embedded Agent, bringing connected modules and services to market that will allow manufacturers to quickly and economically join the Internet of Things.

The Ayla Design Kit gives you an easy path to get started with securely connecting your product to Ayla’s flexible cloud platform and application libraries. Ayla’s reference design kit provides an out-of-box solution based around an STM32 microcontroller, a Wi-Fi module from Murata pre-loaded with Ayla’s Embedded Agent and a demo mobile app that enables you to quickly get started connecting to Ayla cloud services.

There’s no need to know anything about socket programming or to develop any networking code or learn how to provision a cloud service, because Ayla’s design kit provides you with out-of-the-box Wi-Fi cloud connectivity that is very easy to use.

You can start programming the on-board microcontroller right away, or connect the Wi-Fi development board into your existing microcontroller or the hardware in your product.

Supplied with the Ayla design kit you’ll find microcontroller driver source, demo applications and Ayla’s Application Libraries, which will help enable you to create great apps that securely control your Ayla-enabled hardware with a smartphone or tablet, with support for Android and iOS applications or Web interfaces.

With the Ayla Design Kit, you’ll get an account on Ayla’s Developer Portal, where a simple UI-driven design allows you to build or modify templates for your products in just minutes. Just sign up for a developer account, define a new template, and when you use the same named properties in your design, Ayla will take care of connecting the device and the cloud and keeping them in sync.

The Ayla Design Kit will also give you access to Ayla’s support site, with documentation and how-to guides to assist with your product development, from porting guides for SPI drivers to documentation on connecting to other cloud services through the RESTful APIs that Ayla provides for connectivity with outside services. You can also sign up for a support package that meets your needs.

When you’ve registered your developer and tech support accounts, which are free for users of the Ayla design kit, you can follow Ayla’s online support tutorials to walk through the Design Kit setup process, and you’re ready to get your Design Kit connected to the cloud.

The Ayla platform’s architecture is composed of three primary components – Ayla Embedded Agents, Ayla Cloud Services, and Ayla Application Libraries. Ayla Embedded Agents run on IoT end-node devices or IoT device gateways. They incorporate a fully optimised network stack along with additional protocols to connect devices to Ayla Cloud Services. Developers can choose to use Ayla-supported Wi-Fi networking modules alongside essentially any existing microcontroller in their system.

Ayla Cloud Services are the brains of the Ayla solution. The distributed, cloud-based architecture delivers connectivity with high efficiency, without forcing you into business models requiring ongoing payments. Ayla Cloud Services offer a full suite of intelligence about your product’s performance.

Furthermore, Ayla Application Libraries contain rich APIs for creating apps to securely control Ayla-enabled products with a smartphone or tablet, via iOS or Android native apps or from a web interface.

By abstracting the security and protocol complexity of communicating with the rest of the Ayla platform, Ayla Application Libraries present developers with a virtual device object which is easy to interact with.

When it comes to developing a mobile app, Ayla provides a demo app with the Ayla Design Kit to showcase its cloud-connectivity functionality as well as mobile app libraries to help you create your own Ayla-connected apps, with support for both iOS and Android application development.

With Ayla’s IoT platform you can focus on your UI and customer experience, and leave the platform to take care of the back-end networking, authentication, security and provisioning for you.

The Ayla IoT cloud platform is built for enterprise applications, and it can support your IoT products and applications at any scale. The platform is fully equipped for security, flexibility, operational support, and data analytics – all the capabilities and tools that commercial IoT vendors and developers need to scale their product support at enterprise scales.

And as a leading developer of embedded hardware, IoT products and services from design through to product manufacturing and support – here at the LX Group we have the team, experience and technology to bring your ideas to life.

Getting started is easy – join us for an obligation-free and 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.

AllJoyn is an open-source project that aims to let compatible smart “things” around us in Internet-of-Things networks recognise each other and share resources and information across brands, networks and operating systems in an interoperable way.

Initially developed by the Qualcomm Innovation Centre, it is now a collaborative open-source project of the AllSeen Alliance – a non-profit consortium providing open-source Internet-of-Things solutions aimed at enabling widespread adoption of products, systems and services for what they call the “Internet of Everything”.

Their goal is to provide portable open-source software and frameworks for all major platforms and operating systems and creating elegant and accessible solutions for the smart home, its appliances and its gadgets.

As an open, universal, secure and programmable software and services framework, AllJoyn enables hardware manufacturers and software developers to create interoperable products that can discover, connect and communicate with other products enabled with AllJoyn support.

These frameworks enable discovery and communication with devices nearby, with the Notification Service Framework making it easy for products or devices to broadcast and receive basic communications such as text, images, video or audio from other AllJoyn-enabled devices in the area.

AllJoyn events allow for effective management of machine-to-machine interactions, with events and corresponding actions on one device that are discoverable and can be linked together to respond and execute on another AllJoyn-enabled device.

This platform aims to give manufacturers and developers the tools they need to invent new ways for smart things to work together, recognising that homes, cars and the things around us are getting smarter, and smart devices are becoming more numerous, every day.

The AllJoyn Core Framework includes a set of service frameworks that are designed to address the desire for users to interact with their nearby things, in a way that is very simple and easy to use. AllJoyn’s universal software framework and core set of system services enable interoperability among connected products and software applications across different manufacturers and vendors to create dynamic proximal networks – focused only on the Internet-of-Things devices that are in your proximity, in particular, rather than all those Internet-connected devices and things that are mostly not directly relevant to you.

Thus AllJoyn aims to enable manufacturers to offer interoperable products and services that will engage and delight users in new, exciting and useful ways. AllJoyn is designed to be a powerful engine for enabling peer-to-peer experiences across connected devices, appliances and more.

This can be enabled over a range of consumer products being limited only by your imagination – from the mobile devices that consumers always have with them, to the appliances and media equipment in the home, to the electronics in cars and the office equipment in the workplace.

With AllJoyn you can significantly reduce the time, effort and cost of adding peer-to-peer features to your application. Whether you are developing for a smartphone, tablet, television, PC or embedded consumer electronics, AllJoyn is designed to provide the connectivity to enable groundbreaking new experiences.

The tools are provided to enable the Internet-of-Things developer to add proximal peer-to-peer connectivity to your applications, from gaming, entertainment and social media to automation and enterprise applications, and empowers multiple people on different devices to share, interact and collaborate in real time, enhancing the user experience by asking others to join in the experience – from multiplayer games to business productivity tools, social networking, and “smart” home and building automation applications.

The ability of devices enabled by AllJoyn to send and receive notifications to other devices mean that devices in building automation or smart home applications can be controlled by data sources other than PCs or mobile devices.

For example, devices can be controlled by and communicate with AllJoyn-enabled wearable computing devices such as Qualcomm’s Toq smartwatch. AllJoyn dynamically discovers and learns what nearby devices have specific interfaces and capabilities, for example allowing an AllJoyn service to detect all nearby AllJoyn-enabled devices with a built-in clock or timer and synchronising their time, all together at the same time.

Because AllJoyn is proximal and does not need to go out over the Internet to a cloud service it is very fast and responsive, with no lag or latency, and without outside Internet connectivity being essential.

Smart AllJoyn gateways can detect and manage every AllJoyn-enabled device and app on a network, as well as controlling how much bandwidth each app and device gets, ensuring that everyone and every device gets the best connected experience.

With the AllJoyn ON application, it allows for easy discovery, connection and control of any AllJoyn devices nearby, and the AllJoyn Control Panel service framework allows devices with simple or limited user interfaces to expose their properties and controls via a remote, virtual, control panel.

Those properties and controls can be dynamically rendered on a display such as a smartphone or tablet, for a richer user experience on devices that would not usually provide a rich user interface. The Control Panel service running on a device allows it to expose its capabilities to a control panel application running on a smartphone or tablet, which can use this data to render a graphical user interface for that device in a way that is completely independent of the manufacturer or device type.

This virtual control panel can even expose controls with no direct physical analogs, allowing simple devices with limited physical UI to offer much deeper user interaction and convenience.

The AllJoyn framework allows for proximity peer-to-peer interaction over various transport layers. It is written in C++ at its core, and provides multiple different language bindings and complete reference implementations across various operating systems and chipsets, making it easy for developers to get started.

Furthermore this provides an object-oriented approach to making peer-to-peer networking between connected devices easier, allowing developers to avoid the need to deal with lower-level network protocols and hardware.

As the market for Internet-of-Things increases, and the various growth of platform options such as AllJoyn appear, selecting the right platform for your application can be a nightmare. However with our team here at the LX group, it’s simple to get prototypes of your devices based on the AllJoyn platform up and running – or right through to the final product. We can partner with you – finding synergy with your ideas and our experience to create final products that exceed your expectations.

To get started, join us for an obligation-free and 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.

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

The Axeda Machine Cloud platform is a secure and scalable cloud platform for connected products, machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things networks which is backed up by professional, commercial support and a growing library of technical content and resources.

This versatile platform enables system integrators, solution architects, and developers to quickly and easily connect, manage and innovate powerful machine-to-machine systems, connected products and IoT applications, potentially faster and at a lower cost than with internally built solutions.

Covering a wide spectrum of areas, the Axeda platform addresses the complex requirements that are often invisible but vital to overall success, providing an end-to-end M2M solution, and not just the application user interface that your end-users see. The Axeda platform enables you to connect and communicate with any wired or wireless asset, innovating with M2M and IoT connectivity for connected product solutions.

As part of the Axeda platform, their “Machine Cloud” service includes M2M and IoT connectivity services, software agents and toolkits that enable you to establish connectivity between your devices or assets and the Axeda platform while allowing you to choose the communication methods and hardware that best suit the needs of your IoT solutions. Thus you can connect to any product using any device over any communications channel including cellular networks, WiFi, satellite, or any form of Internet connectivity, for any application.

Axeda’s M2M connectivity services include multiple types of solutions, covering different classes of devices or assets that you may need to connect to. Axeda firewall-friendly agents are software agents that run on Linux or Windows and install directly on your asset devices (if equipped with these operating systems) or on a gateway computer on your network that is connected to your assets, providing user-friendly cloud service connectivity out through firewalls without difficult firewall administration.

Working with the platform is made easier by the supplied Wireless Agent Toolkits – Java or ANSI C libraries for embedding Axeda connectivity into your devices, compiled into your own software and executed on a wide variety of embedded computer hardware platforms. These different choices offer a great deal of flexibility in getting the Axeda platform operating with your existing hardware, software and networks.

The Axeda Machine Cloud supports the open MQTT protocol, which is becoming increasingly popular and important in Internet-of-Things applications. Axeda Ready gateways support MQTT networks right out of the box, and can listen to any MQTT broker, allowing for support of local MQTT-based sensor and device networks as well as connectivity between MQTT device networks and the Axeda machine cloud.

For support of other protocols, Axeda’s Device Protocol Adapters connect to many different IoT message protocols in common use today, and these device communication servers can be extended with custom “codecs” to support new protocols, translating the native communications protocol(s) of your device or network into a form that the Axeda platform can understand and process.

The Axeda Ready program broadens the device options available to consumers, allowing you to choose the right communications technology for your Internet of Things applications. Axeda Ready is a technical compatibility approval program for communications devices and modules for embedded and machine-to-machine communications, ensuring device compatibility with the Axeda platform, speeding time to market for your designs that are aimed at use with the Axeda platform, ensuring accurate and secure data communication, and creating useful expectations of technical support and compatibility when approved hardware is used with the Axeda platform.

Futhermore maintenance and control is simple with the Axeda Wireless Console, which enables users to manage their connected assets, devices and SIMs from a single machine, eliminating the need to integrate with multiple separate platforms. Using the Axeda Wireless Console allows for easier activation and deactivation of device SIMs, better management of rate plans and traffic, and real-time configuration of alerts and alarms from remote assets.

By making SIM data available to the Axeda rules engine and APIs, developers can program logic that uses SIM billing and usage data in machine-to-machine applications to configure device behaviour and adjust plans on the fly, minimising network costs whilst also keeping the communication available when it is needed.

Axeda’s advanced M2M cloud service allows you to easily get started managing connected products, building and deploying IoT and M2M applications in confidence, backed up by Axeda’s own robust, secure and scalable data centre infrastructure, with professional operations and customer support.

Their on-demand cloud service is reliable, secure and professionally supported, allowing reliable deployment of your IoT applications without the challenges and overhead of administering and implementing the technology and hosting infrastructure yourself.

Axeda provides a pay-as-you-go model that minimises risk, rapid deployment to help you realise a relatively fast return on investment, and rapid and easy implementation to reduce the difficulty of initial implementation of your system. Axeda offers much lower upfront capital investment, with an annual subscription to their service removing a need for investment in your own servers and infrastructure.

You can focus on the business side of Internet-of-Things applications, without the need to purchase, maintain and support server infrastructure yourself.

Axeda’s Internet-of-Things cloud platform promises faster time-to-value, since your solution can be deployed more rapidly on their server infrastructure, without having to first put that infrastructure in place yourself.

You can host your own applications that you build and deploy on the Axeda Platform at Axeda’s on-demand centre, simplifying the maintenance and administration of your complete M2M and IoT solutions. Axeda offers enterprise-grade security, availability, and scalability, so you can rely on their secure and scalable infrastructure built on high-quality hardware and software investments and their operational expertise, without worrying about it yourself. Ongoing administration is performed by experts in the Axeda application, networking, security, hosting, data protection, and database administration.

As you can see, the Axeda platform offers another option in the growing cloud-based IoT infrastructure market, and if this meets your needs we can work with you to bring your product ideas into reality. If you have a great prototype or idea – and need to take it to the market, our team of engineers can help you in all steps of product design, from the idea to the finished product.

To get started, join us for an obligation-free and 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.

The Pinoccio platform is based around the Pinoccio “Scout” board – a small, inexpensive microcontroller development board based on the Atmel ATmega256RFR2 microcontroller with built-in 802.15.4 2.4 GHz radio, aimed at quick and easy development of wireless, mesh-networked systems and projects without worrying about common challenges such as efficient battery power management, FCC certification and mesh networking protocols.

This hardware offers an integrated Web platform and API so you can easily get started talking to the Web with your project right out of the box, and a built-in lithium polymer battery on every board that is recharged via the same micro-USB port used for programming, with a battery runtime from days up to over a year depending on the software configuration and how the microcontroller and radio are used.

Pinoccio aims to provide an inexpensive but powerful, FCC-certified, power-efficient, mesh-networked and Internet-ready platform for easily accessible Arduino-style development, wireless sensor networks and Internet-of-Things experimentation.

A network of Pinoccio nodes are connected together via a lightweight 802.15.4 mesh network, using the 802.15.4 radio incorporated in every board to network with any other board that shares its Personal Area Network (PAN) ID.

At one or more nodes in the network, the Pinoccio node is equipped with a Pinoccio Wi-Fi board, based on the Gainspan GS1011MEPS 802.11 WiFi module, that connects the 802.15.4 mesh network to your wireless LAN. This means that every Pinoccio node is connected to the LAN and to the Internet, but with a substantially cost and substantially lower power consumption than would be needed if every node in the network was equipped with an 802.11 wireless LAN chipset.

The ATmega256RFR2 draws less than 20mA of current with its microcontroller and RF transmitter running during active transmission – about 10% of the current consumption of a typical Wi-Fi device. The ATmega256RFR2 can be put into sleep states with far lower power consumption as well, with “wake-on-radio” capability to wake up the microcontroller when the wireless network indicates.

With a WiFi connection on at least one node, every Pinoccio board in the mesh network is connected to the Internet. Routing between nodes is supported, so if board A and board C are out of reach of each other, but they can both reach a board B, then B will route packets for A and C to reach each other.

Even if one of the Scouts is out of WiFi range, the others will route its data up to the Web. Pinoccio uses a lightweight mesh networking stack by default – not ZigBee, for example, although there is no reason why advanced users can’t deploy a ZigBee stack on the Pinoccio hardware if they wish.

This coordinator-less mesh network stack is a lightweight alternative to coordinator-based network architectures. Several network configurations are possible, including the traditional coordinator/router/end-node, as well as a completely decentralised peer-to-peer mesh network with routing.

All Pinoccio Scout nodes can be programmed wirelessly, over the air, in a way that is fully compatible with the Arduino IDE – each node in the 802.15.4 network simply appears, with the Pinoccio networking software installed, as a virtual Arduino-compatible serial port in the Arduino IDE.

Without WiFi connectivity, however, users do still have the option of programming each board directly from a PC, via the USB port, just like any Arduino-compatible device, and more advanced users can talk to the chip via traditional hardware interfaces like ISP and JTAG.

You can have your Pinoccio boards scattered all over an area on a wireless mesh network, each doing their thing, and when you need to update the code on one, some, or all of them you can just do so wirelessly from your computer.

If you have Pinoccio boards within an installation, which are difficult to get to, you can easily update their software over-the-air, post-installation, offering a level of convenience that is hard to achieve with other microcontroller development platforms.

You can update a range of boards by listing several of them, or send an update to all boards in the network at once, sending out a single update broadcast. A single update could be sent out to 100 Pinoccio boards if they all need to be updated, and they would all receive the broadcast and update themselves.

The real value of the Pinoccio platform doesn’t just come from the Pinoccio Scout boards, but from the entire stack – from the physical hardware to the API and Web service and back. This includes features like over-the-air firmware updates, optimised mesh networking and the ability to easily move data between multiple Pinoccio boards across the mesh network, to the Web and back again.

Along with easy routing, discovery and beaconing, provisioning a new Pinoccio WiFi bridge node to the larger Web, and the use of low-bandwidth-friendly protocols like MQTT, Pinoccio is a platform that provides a high level of openness and interoperability.

Pinoccio is aimed at being very easy to use, power efficient, Arduino compatible, and completely open source, providing a complete end-to-end ecosystem for building the Internet-of-Things, but with open standards and without proprietary lock-in.

The Pinoccio API completes the last mile between your network of Pinoccio hardware and the Web, allowing you to send and receive messages between your board and the API. However, using the Pinoccio API is totally optional – you own your data, and you can run your own web server to talk to your Pinoccio devices if you wish. Every Pinoccio board can have its own REST-based URL, and it can respond to HTTP POST and GET requests, with the 802.15.4 mesh network and the WiFi bridge doing all the routing for you.

Pinoccio aims to support websockets and webhooks, allowing easy connectivity with Web services, and saves and logs all the data pushed to the API from your devices.

Unlike some other options on the market such as Electric Imp, Pinoccio offers a pre-baked end-to-end platform and Web service with a tightly integrated web-hardware experience to allow everybody to easily, quickly get up and running with a network of devices talking to a Web service – without locking you in and forcing you to only use their servers and Web services with their hardware.

The Pinoccio Scout is open-source hardware – you can download the hardware schematics, board layout and bootloaders freely. Pinoccio strives to use open, industry-standard protocols that are standardised by groups such as IETF and OASIS where possible.

Pinoccio currently uses MQTT as the core messaging protocol for the Pinoccio API on top of Atmel’s Lightweight Mesh Protocol and the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC and radio physical layer, and is considering moving towards 6LoWPAN and RPL in future once these standards are more mature and more work is done in this area in the IETF working group.

One vision of future work that the Pinoccio team has is to have each board accessible from the Internet with a unique IP address, using IPv6/6LoWPAN and a WiFi bridge at one node. Shying away from non-standard protocols, Pinoccio supports HTTP and MQTT-S (MQTT for Sensor Networks) out of the box – but, again, without locking you into any particular choices, if you’re willing to put a bit of work in yourself to implement other protocols.

Pinoccio has good security capability available in every part of the network stack, which is attractive for automation networks and Internet-of-Things applications. The ATmega256RFR2 microcontroller has hardware-based AES128 encryption, along with a true hardware random number generator.

It’s simply a matter of defining a shared secret in your code to enable encryption for the entire mesh network. With the support for TLS sockets in the Pinoccio WiFi module, complete encryption is supported from the device to the Web.

Although still in the beta stage, the Pinoccio system holds great promise as an inexpensive and open mesh networking system which could be applied to new or existing IoT-enabled products.

If this is of interest, or you need guidance for any or all stages of product design – the first step is to discuss your needs with our team of experienced engineers that can help you in all steps of product design, from the idea to the finished product.

To get started, join us for an obligation-free and 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.

ThingWorx is a relatively new offering in the Internet-of-Things platform space, offering an Internet-of-Things and Machine-to-Machine application platform which promises very fast application development, scalability, search ability and integration with other data sources such as social media, all in a complete development and runtime platform for rapidly developing sophisticated IoT and M2M applications.

The platform provides all the necessary functionality required to get your solution to market quickly and easily. Let’s take a quick look at what the ThingWorx platform promises for Internet-of-Things developers and engineers.

ThingWorx enables rapid creation of “smart” end-to-end Internet of Things applications, when used in conjunction with hardware from various vendors, for a wide range of application markets such as smart agriculture, telematics, healthcare, “smart cities”, energy efficiency, utility metering and building automation.

The platform is aimed at the building and running of the applications of a “connected world”, reducing the time to market, cost and risk associated with building innovative Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine applications through the use of ThingWorx’s model-based design and search-based intelligence.

Furthermore, data can be integrated from a multitude of different devices, machines and sensors that make up the “Internet of Things”, collecting, tagging and relating the resulting “Big Data” of different types, creating an operational data store that becomes more valuable over time as the quantity of data and the density of relationships within that data set increases.

ThingWorx collects, tags and relates the unstructured, transactional and time-based “data exhaust” from networks of Internet-connected sensors and devices as well as data from human collaboration, such as from social media for example. This enables your team to create dynamic Internet of Things applications that evolve rapidly as new inputs and insights become available.

Dynamic applications of this kind become more valuable the more they are used and the more data they accumulate, with that data serving as a catalyst for innovation. The ThingWorx environment includes ThingWorx Composer, a unified, model-based development environment aimed at compressing the design-develop-deploy cycle, reducing time to market and spurring easier innovation.

In addition, ThingWorx also offers their “Mashup Builder”, aimed at enabling rapid assembly of applications that integrate the data, activities and events from people, systems and the physical world, in an easily accessible “zero-code” tool that is claimed to offer developers, analysts and business users the ability to create HTML5-based user experiences, analytics and dashboards in minutes, greatly expanding the accessibility of the creation and customisation of these sorts of systems.

Composer is an end-to-end application modelling environment designed to help you easily build the unique applications of an Internet-of-Things enabled world. Composer makes it easy to model the things, business logic, visualisation, data storage, collaboration, and security required for a connected application.

The “drag and drop” Mashup Builder empowers developers and business users to rapidly create rich, interactive applications, real-time dashboards, collaborative workspaces and mobile interfaces without the need for coding experience.

This next-generation application builder reduces development time and produces high quality, scalable connected applications which allow companies to accelerate the pace at which they can deliver value-added solutions for working with Internet-of-Things data.

ThingWorx’s SQUEAL (Search, Query and Analysis) intelligence tool empowers users to search the data from people, systems and machines in their Internet-of-Things world to find what they want when they want, bringing search to the world of connected devices and distributed data.

With SQUEAL’s interactive search capabilities, users can now correlate data that delivers answers to key business questions. Pertinent and related collaboration data, line-of-business system records, and equipment data get returned in a single search, speeding problem resolution and enabling innovation.

As you can imagine, ThingWorx lets you deploy their service in exactly the way you want to to meet your needs – from deployment in the cloud to local on-premises deployment, federated or embedded deployment.

ThingWorx relies on a significant network of partner companies provide ThingWorx-approved compatible hardware and firmware solutions for Internet-of-Things applications and wireless sensor networks, while ThingWorx itself focuses exclusively on the software platform.

The growing ecosystem of hardware, software and service partners surrounding ThingWorx can be leveraged to allow more rapid innovation in a ThingWorx-based environment, including access to a huge range of sensor hardware and wireless devices to suit diverse needs.

If your organisation is considering the ThingWorx plaftorm – or other systems, our engineers are equipped with the tools and experience to bring your ideas to life. To get started, join us for an obligation-free and 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.

Freescale Semiconductor and Oracle announced earlier this year that they are working together to develop the “OneBox”, a gateway platform for secured service delivery for Internet-of-Things applications based on open Java technology and Freescale silicon.

So what is OneBox all about? The aim of OneBox is standardising and consolidating the delivery and management of Internet-of-Things services through one gateway box rather than multiple gateway boxes from different vendors.

The idea is that the gateway appliance and its Java-based software stack can “speak” all of the different protocols being used to connect devices to the network in a context of, say, a home automation application – a single gateway that is interoperable with every networked Internet-of-Things device in the home.

For example, the OneBox gateway will have the ability to connect to multiple different kinds of RF networks such as 802.15.4, 802.11, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy, providing conversion and interoperability between different connectivity standards.

The “smart home” OneBox reference implementation from Freescale runs Java SE Embedded and is powered by a Freescale i.MX 6 series applications processor built on the ARM Cortex-A9 core. OneBox has enough local processing power to handle some real-time data processing, and can then send the processed data up to the cloud if desired.

There, Oracle’s infrastructure will be happy to crunch those bytes for you although you could use whatever cloud infrastructure you’d like – there is no lock-in. This local processing power is advantageous because it improves responsive interaction by removing the latency of a trip out to the remote server – for example, when you push the button to turn your lights on you want an effectively immediate response, not a delay of many seconds before the lights actually turn on.

The entire secured service delivery infrastructure – from the core of the network through the gateway to the small edge nodes – uses Java technology, pitched by Oracle as a unifying, open platform for the Internet of Things.

The Freescale/Oracle development team used Java SE embedded on the gateway box and Java ME embedded for the microcontrollers in their OneBox reference implementation. With its broad adoption, open source model, huge ecosystem and well-defined roadmap, Java technology is being pitched by Oracle and Freescale as ideally suited for Internet-of-Things requirements.

Due to the Java base, the system will be open throughout, without requiring hoops for programmers or device developers to jump through. OneBox offers a secure, standard and open infrastructure model for the delivery of Internet-of-Things services, combining end-to-end software with a converged gateway design to aim to establish a common, open framework for secured Internet-of-Things service delivery and management from the core of the network right through to low-power wireless sensors and other nodes at the edge of the network.

As part of the collaboration, Freescale will join the Java Community Process and work with Oracle and other JCP members to drive development of technical specifications for Java, particularly focusing on Java on resource-constrained platforms such as the low-cost microcontrollers that provide the embedded intelligence in Internet-of-Things enabled products.

Freescale will also work with Oracle and other JCP members on new and enhanced Java APIs to improve the support for Internet-of-Things protocols and features available on their microcontroller hardware.

The addition of a service layer based on enterprise-grade Java as an open standard, along with full security, on top of the whole system including the smallest resource-constrained microcontrollers takes the OneBox platform beyond a typical converged gateway.

Oracle and Freescale see it as a blueprint for an ideal secured service delivery infrastructure for the Internet of Things, one that will solve some of the common problems perceived as limiting the advancement of the Internet of Things.

OneBox is designed, both in terms of hardware and software, to be very modular, so the appropriate connectivity – ethernet, WiFi, 802.15.4/6LoWPAN, ANT, Bluetooth, whatever – can be “plugged in” and the corresponding software blocks needed for a particular service automatically loaded. This modularity supports future standards and a variety of use cases – from home automation and consumer electronics to industrial automation.

Freescale believes that it’s the small players that will bring the majority of innovation to the table, and they have specifically ensured that the OneBox platform is open and based on readily available software and hardware in order to promote participation by smaller players and decrease barriers to entry.

Freescale’s edge node sensors and devices based on Kinetis ARM microcontrollers are cheaply available, with all of the tools needed. Freescale silicon is distributed openly through small-volume distributors, datasheets and documentation for their processors are openly available to all, and Java is openly available to download and license.

After this quick summary it appears that this new idea between Freescale and Oracle could provide the backbone for a new, open-source and easily-adapable Internet-of-things platform for almost any situation. As the technology proceeds to mature we’d be more than happy to examine the possibilies available with your organisation for your benefit.

And we’re ready to offer our experience and know-how on this and every other stage of product development to meet your needs. As we say – “LX can take you from the whiteboard to the white box”. So for 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.