This Week in IoT: ELVIS Lives
The world of IoT is moving fast. Here are five stories from the past week you may have missed.
Talking Turkey (and IoT)
Will you join family or friends for Thanksgiving? You might be asked to explain IoT.
To keep the party lively, here are some Thanksgiving-related gadgets you can mention. Start with June, a connected oven that lets you control your baking and view your food from a smartphone. Pretty neat!
If any family or friends own a Crock-Pot, then the “Crock-Pot Smart Slow Cooker” might be the thing to cook that turkey (or Tofurky). It comes with a companion application for your smartphone to adjust time, temperature, and other factors.
And when they tire of hearing you prattle on about the IoT, you can wrap things up by recommending—at least for the older folks—an IoT hearing aid that includes an all-in-one wireless Bluetooth microphone and headset.
ELVIS for IoT Lives!
Ready to breadboard your latest IoT idea? Then you’ll need the ELVIS III all-in-one electronics lab from @NIglobal. My colleague and senior tech editor Bill Wong (@AltEmbedded) reviews the prototyping marvel for @ElectronicDesgn.
The Engineering Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite (or ELVIS) III has a rugged base that hides the guts of a CompactRIO that runs NI’s LabVIEW graphical programming environment. CompactRIO is essentially a PC with an FPGA optimized for control, test, and measurement chores. The complexity is hidden by LabVIEW software.
Data Broking or Brokering?
@Gartner Inc recently released its list of top IoT tech trends for 2018, which includes AI, data broking, security, and the development of new networking architectures.
According to @EETimes, one of the latest additions to this list is data broking. Yes, broking, not brokering. Regardless of the spelling, broking refers to the buying and selling of IoT data. By 2023, Gartner predicts that it will become an essential part of many IoT systems. Organizations will need to understand the risks and opportunities related to data broking to set IT policies required in this area.
(Fun fact: Some see broking as an up-and-coming term, especially in light of the exploits of Mr. Madoff and his investment shenanigans.)
Systems Engineering Meets the IoT
Ever wonder how companies that engage in IoT systems development will handle all of the design complexity issues—from time constraints and low costs to hardware-software integration, connectivity, and data partitioning? The answer is with a system-of-systems (SoS) engineering approach.
As much as IoT will need the SoS multidisciplinary and multi-domain techniques, SoS will also be forever changed by the engineering realities of IoT. The key lesson is that the same approaches used to build spaceships and aircraft carriers must be tailored to meet the unique technologies and engineering skills of this generation.