RANT: Cloud of this, IoT of that . . .

[enl 227]

Networked, a DALI setup can be used to control / monitor lighting in a very large building. Which is very useful. As far as bluetooth lights go . . . I have one, and this one is not all that great, but I can see how bluetooth, or wifi lights can be very useful.

I don't follow that end of the universe at this point. I have worked in facilities with good, though AFAIK wired, network lighting control.

 

The consumer technology seems to be predominantly gimmick. Historically, the early adopters drove technology, and by the time it made mass market, there was a reasonable level of reliability and utility achieved from the experience of the early adopters. I don't see that with most of the IoT devices, honestly including the lightbulbs. I see a few uses in the home, and in fact have wireless control (formerly X10, now RF keyfob hanging on the wall by the door) for lights in my basement, as I didn't want to run more wire for the switch. I do not trust a system that requires a smartphone to operate the lights in my house (lose or break the phone and SOL until replaced) via bluetooth (poor security)

[yyrkoon 250]

Agreed. That's why I'm not delighted by the prospect of IoT-mania encouraging a proliferation of cheap internet-connected devices.

One of the biggest offenders in my mind is MQTT. Or at least the use of MQTT the way I've seen it demonstrated. It would not take much brainpower to royally screw up someones remote system through that protocol.

 

But, if you also occationally watch defcon, or other white,black, grey hat videos. You'll noticed several on hacking just about any wireless protocol out there. Bluetooth is particularly bad. By "particularly bad",  I mean I can not believe people actually endorsed the standard . . .Because the standard is horrendous. Then to compound things even more. Even though BLE is very short range. It does not stop others from "painting" your signal and spying form a greater distance. Which is why I'm glad we're essentially "wrapped in tinfoil" in our house. Which is actually an 80' x 100' steel building.

[haileyscomet 1]

So, am I the only one who is getting tired of hearing about "the cloud of this" or "the IoT of that" ?

 

Networking has been around since when ? the 60's at least right. Then embedded devices date back to at minimum the '70's right ? So since when did this "rocket scientist" of a person decide to reinvent these ideas that have been around for tens of years. Known as "network connected storage", or network connected sensors" ?

 

It's almost as bad as someone proclaiming in public "Hey, dont use your hand, there is this new product known as toilette paper . . ."

 

Or am I worrying too much about this whole thing ? heh.

 

 

Yea I definitely see your point. If it ain't new, it's hard to get the general public interested. Look at all the fuss over iPhones that are already positioned to be replaced by the time they reach users' hand. This remarketing makes me think about how successful Tesla has been in bringing back the electric car, which definitely good, but it's hardly a new invention as it is often touted. That being said, I would say IoT sounds more attractive than machine to machine haha.

[yyrkoon 250]

Yea I definitely see your point. If it ain't new, it's hard to get the general public interested. Look at all the fuss over iPhones that are already positioned to be replaced by the time they reach users' hand. This remarketing makes me think about how successful Tesla has been in bringing back the electric car, which definitely good, but it's hardly a new invention as it is often touted. That being said, I would say IoT sounds more attractive than machine to machine haha.

heh, well I was reading this months design news, or one of he embedded magazines we get sent to us, where IoT has a totally different meaning. The . . . Internet Of Tomatoes . . .which I guess a tomato could be classified as a "thing" But this was in relation to having sensors all over a tomato farm and an android app to view stats. There are other project out there too such as an application for monitoring dairy cows, and an indie go go project called "no more woof" that tries to extrapolate what a dog wants, by reading it's brain waves . . . Crazy, but pretty cool project

[Rei Vilo 695]

Wait... Cloud is so has-been! Last fad of the day is Fog computing.

 

Yes, seriously.

 

Read this Wall Street Journal's article Forget 'the Cloud'; 'the Fog' Is Tech's Future.

[LIJsselstein 9]

So just last week I stood before some 300 fruit farmers at a university research center showing our little IoT soil moisture transmitter that may either lift the burden of manually measuring twice a day on multiple locations, or from the long wires crisscrossing their fields with gprs modems and bulky batteries. There was quite some interest both from farmers as from their consultants. The name 'IoT' may be hype but there are a lot of realy useful applications.

[Rei Vilo 695]

So just last week I stood before some 300 fruit farmers at a university research center showing our little IoT soil moisture transmitter that may either lift the burden of manually measuring twice a day on multiple locations, or from the long wires crisscrossing their fields with gprs modems and bulky batteries. There was quite some interest both from farmers as from their consultants. The name 'IoT' may be hype but there are a lot of realy useful applications.

 

 

That's IIOT = Industry Internet of Things.

 

What was the transmitter technology, sub-1GHz?

[yyrkoon 250]

So just last week I stood before some 300 fruit farmers at a university research center showing our little IoT soil moisture transmitter that may either lift the burden of manually measuring twice a day on multiple locations, or from the long wires crisscrossing their fields with gprs modems and bulky batteries. There was quite some interest both from farmers as from their consultants. The name 'IoT' may be hype but there are a lot of realy useful applications.

there were actually a lot of useful applications long before the phrase "Internet Of Things" was coined. But NOW. every joe, bob, dick, and harry has a computer in their pockets . . . Which means, computer are no longer for "nerds", but for everyone. Since they're "cool".

[LIJsselstein 9]

Ha, I'm glad that iiot is different

 

I'm using LoRaWAN on the 868MHz band.

[yyrkoon 250]

I think the real factor now days is that sensors, wireless networks, and whatnot are more affordable than was available previous to the last few years. The hardware we have now days, would have cost 100 times more back in the 70's or 80's. Then probably 10's of times more in the 90's to early 2000's.

[LIJsselstein 9]

Yes, i've been doing telemetry since approx. 1997. Since then the prices have dropped significantly, both hardware as data bundles so we're connecting ever smaller and smaller installations as well. I guess that somewhere you cross the line between telemetry and IoT but nothing really changes. Even when there isn't a real boundary I'm still cool with 'IoT' because customers want it..

[roadrunner84 466]

heh, well I was reading this months design news, or one of he embedded magazines we get sent to us, where IoT has a totally different meaning. The . . . Internet Of Tomatoes . . .which I guess a tomato could be classified as a "thing" But this was in relation to having sensors all over a tomato farm and an android app to view stats. There are other project out there too such as an application for monitoring dairy cows, and an indie go go project called "no more woof" that tries to extrapolate what a dog wants, by reading it's brain waves . . . Crazy, but pretty cool project

This makes me think about a book I read a decade or so back: When Things Start to Think. For me, this book was a complete paradigm shift about what connectivity could be used for. There's lot of anecdotes in the book about things that are, that were and failed and where the future (which is now) is heading. I agree that a lot of IoT is just screaming to get pushed onto the market, but there are products that actually add a benefit to your life which are or might be classified as IoT.

 

I think there is a slight difference between M2M and IoT. M2M is about machine interaction and machine monitoring, while IoT is about human interaction with machines in a more immersive way than the mouse/keyboard/screen. Alas, most IoT solutions nowadays interact through smartphones, which are these stupid screens again.

Genuine Things (note the capital T) do not interact through a smartphone or website, they interact through other Things. For example, I do not want to switch on my coffeepot through scheduling it in my calendar, I want my coffeepot to figure out when I want coffee and have coffee ready when I want it. The pot can do so by querying my phone, watch (which monitors when I am asleep or not), my door lock, my alarm clock, my car, etc. I think Things are about smartness, not about connectivity.

 

Cloud is different from servers, although just slightly. Cloud is about virtualization. Cloud is a server(park) that allows clients (or yourself) to use a virtual machine (IaaS), virtual back end (PaaS) or virtual application (SaaS) while not paying for the physical servers. Cloud is about being able to migrate machines from one cloud provider to another, unlike renting a dedicated server, which must be either physically moved or backuped and restored in another physical location. I still think a virtualization pool is a better name than a cloud, but cloud just has a better ring to it.

[yyrkoon 250]

This makes me think about a book I read a decade or so back: When Things Start to Think. For me, this book was a complete paradigm shift about what connectivity could be used for. There's lot of anecdotes in the book about things that are, that were and failed and where the future (which is now) is heading. I agree that a lot of IoT is just screaming to get pushed onto the market, but there are products that actually add a benefit to your life which are or might be classified as IoT.

 

I think there is a slight difference between M2M and IoT. M2M is about machine interaction and machine monitoring, while IoT is about human interaction with machines in a more immersive way than the mouse/keyboard/screen. Alas, most IoT solutions nowadays interact through smartphones, which are these stupid screens again.

Genuine Things (note the capital T) do not interact through a smartphone or website, they interact through other Things. For example, I do not want to switch on my coffeepot through scheduling it in my calendar, I want my coffeepot to figure out when I want coffee and have coffee ready when I want it. The pot can do so by querying my phone, watch (which monitors when I am asleep or not), my door lock, my alarm clock, my car, etc. I think Things are about smartness, not about connectivity.

 

Cloud is different from servers, although just slightly. Cloud is about virtualization. Cloud is a server(park) that allows clients (or yourself) to use a virtual machine (IaaS), virtual back end (PaaS) or virtual application (SaaS) while not paying for the physical servers. Cloud is about being able to migrate machines from one cloud provider to another, unlike renting a dedicated server, which must be either physically moved or backuped and restored in another physical location. I still think a virtualization pool is a better name than a cloud, but cloud just has a better ring to it.

From what I understand. "The cloud" is all about remote processing. Or remote storage dumbed down so even the average Joe can use it. Usually through an abstraction layer( "clever" software ). In the context of "remote processing" I mean you perhaps have an app that runs on your phone. Which performs a specific task. But that specific task may actually, in part, or in whole be processed on a remote system. Which is more capable.

 

But again, I digress. All of this was happening long before "Einstein" decided to reinvent the wheel . . .

[roadrunner84 466]

Remote processing was very much possible before the cloud, but then you were doing it on physical servers. You rent these servers from a hosting provider like Rackspace. You could even have virtual servers, or VPS, mostly these used to be sandboxes or BSD jails.

The difference is that Cloud is not just a bunch of computers, it's a bunch of redundant computers, none of which have a hard tie to one service or another. Services are "floating" through the pool of computers. If one physical machine dies, not a single service dies with it. While with the classic VPS solution, a new machine (even if it's a running fall back) will have to be loaded with the previously running VPS or private server solutions before the service to the dependent customers could continue.

All things that are about online hosting/processing/back ends are possible in the cloud, but the cloud allows dynamic scaling of storage and processing power, in addition with an intrinsic redundancy. The key here is virtualization.

[yyrkoon 250]

You keep talking about virtualization, but thats been happening for years too. For most people however, virtual servers were undesirable. But I've known people who have been running Xen on Linux for many, many servers.

 

Anyway, the point *is*. All this technology already existed, and was being used prior . . .