Interview: Contiki OS Creator On Building the Internet of Things 45
angry tapir writes "Last year Adam Dunkels, the creator of the open source Contiki operating system, launched a startup to build tools for the 'Internet of Things'. This week his company, Thingsquare, is releasing an evaluation kit that lets people test drive their IoT system. I caught up with him to talk about Thingsquare's plans and the hype around the IoT."
What Are His Thoughts (Score:5, Interesting)
What are his thoughts on the absolute saturation of the 2.4GHz spectrum and the increasing load on the 5GHz spectrum.
The internet of things sounds nice, but the amount of devices pointlessly WiFi enabled and broadcasting in my home is having a very negative effect on the usability of the spectrum for anything of value. Does he have any plan to mitigate this growing issue? Does he care at all about it or is he solely focused on funding and an early exit with a fleeting; 'I'm rich, bitch'?
Re:What IoT is supposed to mean (Score:4, Interesting)
Internet of things is yet another buzzword applied to an older term: home automation. Similar to how cloud computing is a throwback to mainframe computing. Street lighting, traffic signal automation, industrial automation, smart distribution and metering of electric power falls under automation and SCADA. I don't see a point to remotely control a washer or toaster over the internet. Though a local system might be helpful with remote reporting.
Though there are some appealing ideas that can come of connected home appliances, the most obvious being text alerts of status. I would love it if my washer and dryer could text me when they are finished. Nothing sucks more then forgetting to dry your work clothes and then finding the wet, wrinkled, mildew smelling mess in the washer the next morning. Same with the dryer, wrinkled dry clothes are just as useless as wrinkled wet clothes. Those are the only two good examples I can come up with. Connected refrigerators aren't as appealing. I know how many eggs I have left and how much milk I have left as I open my refrigerator daily. Microwaves and toasters aren't that necessary either as they spend little time doing the cooking. Maybe oven or stoves could be timed and send an alert that they are done. Thermostats and AC units could be monitored for usage and remotely turned on/off. That is another good use.
Home monitoring of power usage might be useful for people looking to cut their usage. If you had solar it would be good if you could compare your home load to your banked kw/h and see the usage in real time. "Your solar system generated 50 kW/h today. Your current load is 10kW, you have 5 hours of free power left." Then you could look at your current appliance load and see what uses the most power. A breakdown chart of appliances and their monthly power consumption could help people determine if they could use that appliance less. Clothes dryers suck up a lot of power, maybe during the warmer months they could use a clothesline. Hell I dry my clothes indoors during the winter too, the dry air helps.
Instead of wireless, which makes integration easier, powerline networking would be just as appropriate. Most of those appliances are either hard wired in or plugged in. A router would need a wall plug adapter and ethernet cable or better yet, the routers power cable could pass through to an internal power line networking adapter. That or use Zigbee on the lower frequency ISM bands.