DataArt, in partnership with Microsoft and Canonical, hosted its first annual Open Source IoT Summit in New York City. On November 12, 2015, six dozen technology innovators gathered at Microsoft’s New York Conference Center on Times Square to learn how they can develop their own in-house IoT solutions.
DataArt has always been supporting open innovation movement, which is at the heart of new technology development, and our open source IoT device-management platform DeviceHive is a testament to that. DeviceHive runs on Canonical’s Ubuntu, is available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace and provides the tools to solve any smart manufacturing or smart home challenge in-house, without costly investments in software solutions. At the summit, we showed how DeviceHive accelerates IoT product development, allows for creating a solution prototype in a matter of hours, and then deploying and scaling it to a limitless number of devices or control variables with no additional software or investments requirements.
We walked the audience through the design, prototyping, deployment, and scaling up of a predictive maintenance IoT solution, enabling preventative, condition-based monitoring of a piece of manufacturing equipment. We used accelerometer-based sensors and an IoT gateway to capture the vibration profile of a fan and analyzed it in the Microsoft Azure Cloud using Juju, to determine whether it’s in the range of a normally operating equipment, and if not – to trigger a maintenance alert.
Continuously monitoring manufacturing environments for hazards and having the option to prompt people (or even machines) to take corrective action to avoid damage or interruption, can significantly reduce manufacturing risks and costs. Device connectivity enables more than just monitoring and predictive maintenance, it ultimately allows for precise control and management of critical assets, automation of tasks and decision-making, and optimization of processes across the manufacturing value chain. That covers R&D, sourcing, production and outbound logistics which helps attain major reductions in waste, energy costs, and human intervention, leading to vast improvement in efficiency.
While manufacturing is the area where IoT is an obvious game changer, IoT presents a rich opportunity for all areas of our lives. Examples include a heart monitor implant that alerts care providers of important changes in a patient’s heart condition, a car with built-in sensors that alerts the owner’s phone when tire pressure becomes low or emissions high, or precision farming equipment with wireless links to data from satellites and ground sensors that adjusts the way each part of the field is farmed based on different soil and crop conditions. IoT can be used to build a home automation system that customizes home devices to the habits of its residents, eventually enabling smart cities: monitoring customers’ power usage behavior, managing power demand and supply to optimize city-wide electricity usage, enabling remote monitoring and maintenance of gas pipeline networks, or installing billboards that assess approaching human traffic and change display messages accordingly.
Connected devices are here to stay. Embracing the objects’ ability to sense their environment and communicate about it presents unprecedented opportunities and insight across industry sectors and processes. The greatest challenge ahead is learning to convert vast amounts of data into actionable insight, to make sense of complexity and respond to it swiftly, eventually enabling machine learning and minimizing human intervention. DataArt and its partners look forward to continued sharing of our experience with the IoT community. We welcome new partnerships to create value through new Internet-of-Things capabilities.