The case for experimental Internet of Things

Aug 31, 2016

Try this. Close your eyes and imagine the ideal solution for IoT data acquisition, transport, storage and processing. What do you see?

You’d probably see a need to mix different technologies depending on connectivity requirements, location of equipment (indoor/outdoor), duty cycle, choice of sensors and end user application features. You might think of a big, all-singing, all-dancing platform that does everything for you. Or, you might think of your real business problem and think to yourself, “how can I experiment on my own terms and explore different scenarios?”

Objective opinions are not easy to find.

Marketing hype, industry ‘alliances’, trade shows and conferences are all good and well. But there is a lot of noise in this mad scramble for mindshare. And a lot of players that want you to buy access to their vertically integrated platforms.

You’ve probably asked yourself, “Who can I turn to for impartial advice?”

Start small, scale later.

Some of the vendors you talk to will want to understand your volume forecasts and business case for a full-scale IoT deployment. That might be premature. You need to get started, and to do this you need to discover and experiment.

The traditional way of getting started might involve consultants, a design shop, expensive prototype electronics, agreements with network operators and a steep learning curve to figure out embedded software development tools. Surely there must be a simpler, faster way to get things off the ground?

What could you achieve by shortening the discovery and experimentation phase from months to days, from weeks to hours?

The future is modular. And pluggable.

Rather than engage in lengthy and expensive studies, ELIOT (ExperimentaL Internet of Things) allows you to immediately experience a range of connectivity solutions and sensor technologies. The tools offered by Eliot are accessible not only to R & D teams, but also to IT professionals, management and operations/maintenance personnel. With a few days of hands on training even your marketing team will be up to speed experimenting with real IoT connected devices.

ELIOT kits are modular, you can assemble a fully working experiment in a couple of minutes using pluggable wireless modules, a 100% Arduino compatible (battery included!) microcontroller board and sensor/machine extension boards. Example code and device abstraction libraries allow you to build and deploy an IoT embedded software application in a couple of hours. How cool is that?