Prior to 2012, the Internet of Things (IoT) industry began to see the potential of Machine to Machine (M2M) communications as it relates not only to traditional “machine” communications, but also to the efficiencies gained in people’s lives by connecting everyday products to the Internet. During the infancy stages of IoT growth, there were few standardizations and off-the-shelf components to leverage, so developers were forced to reinvent the wheel each time a new product was created. From custom network protocols to hardware and web server applications, everything needed to be created from scratch.

Devices all around us are being connected to the Internet - automobiles, fitness trackers, devices on our pets, and devices in our homes are all becoming Internet-enabled. There is no question that companies who are manufacturing products are heavily investing in the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Problem

For its entire existence, the Internet has always had the notion of Clients and Servers. Clients make a request for a resource on a server and the server responds to the client. This works great for traditional browsing of websites because the servers have all the information that the clients want and the clients know when the user wants it.

Exosite is pleased to announce that we have become a member of the Texas Instruments cloud ecosystem. The TI IoT cloud ecosystem was established to help manufacturers using TI technology to easily and rapidly connect more products to the growing Internet of Things (IoT). More information on TI’s cloud ecosystem can be found here.

http://youtu.be/P5QoHKgLtug

It’s no secret that the Internet of Things (IoT) is starting to catch the eyes of some of the biggest tech players in the game.  With some experts estimating there will be 50 billion connected devices by 2020, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Texas Instruments (TI) has shown they’re serious about the M2M (machine-to-machine) space by choosing Exosite as their cloud solutions partner.  Together, TI and Exosite have brought you the foundational elements for building connected products. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, you can use our IoT building blocks to create your connected product vision quickly.

I've been working on updating our Arduino Library. If you haven't heard of Arduino yet, it's a really cool embedded development and prototyping ecosystem. It consists of both hardware development boards and an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) with many useful libraries to quickly and easily create embedded electronic devices. Exosite has created a library that makes getting your Arduino project talking to the cloud easier than ever.

TI CC3000 is a new Wi-Fi module for embedded systems. It's Simple Link Wi-Fi solution minimizes MCU software requirements and provides SmartConfig^TM technology that allows users to use their smartphones (iPhone / Android phone) to configure Wi-Fi passcodes/SSID in 2 steps: enter a passcode, and click start.

We happened to catch a video of Avnet Electronic's Jim Carver showing off their Wi-Go platform connected to Exosite at Sensors Expo 2013. Jim is the technical director of advanced architectures at Avnet and helped design the hardware and software of the Wi-Go platform, an IoT WiFi platform based on the Freescale Kinetis KL25Z MCUs.  The platform includes temperature, air pressure, altimeter, magnetometer, ambient light, and accelerometer sensors in addition to supporting Lithium Polymer batteries.  It's an impressive little platform and we wanted to share the demonstration.

CES 2013 was held last month and a recurring theme was “connectivity” (aka Smart Home, Smart Grid, HomeConnect, etc...) - spanning connected product categories such as ultra-high definition TVs, hot new smartphones, sleek appliances and other retakes on everyday household products. The revolution of connectivity that has been promised for many years is finally being realized.

The Dr Micro RX blog over at Renesas has several great posts on Cloud Connectivity using Exosite.

A good friend of Exosite, John Breitenbach of Renesas Electronics Corp, recently wrote a great article that is published in Circuit Cellar, the July 2012 Issue.

Exosite's XMPP chat interface is incredibly easy to work with. In fact, if you know how to chat with someone using an instant messenger app, then you can start chatting with your real time data! We have an XMPP bot (the JID address is commander@m2.exosite.com) that can receive and respond to chat messages.

We recently migrated our back-end data processing services to a new version of the One Platform. The updates were made in response to user feedback, capacity/performance needs and extensibility planning - the result is a rocket under the hood that gives the platform scalability in all dimensions.

One piece of information that we often take for granted is the temperature. In Minnesota especially where winters are extremely cold while summers can be hot, the temperature is always a talking point, be it on the news or small talk with people you meet on the street. With the temperature on my mind (the temp is 13 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping as I type) I took an Arduino prototyping platform and decided to create a really simple web-enabled temperature device.