Mass adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been severely hampered as a result of the industry’s focus on building separate, walled gardens. This is part of an effort to “own the home” where companies want to be the providers of the entire IoT ecosystem, rather than build products that work universally, across ecosystems. A number of efforts have arisen to improve this type of connectivity, including Alasdair Allan, who gave a talk at Linux Conf AU about The Thing System: a series of architectural ideas that try to address these issues.
- [1:00 – 9:00] – How increasing use and growing interconnectedness of sensors, APIs, and controls is opening the potential for a rethinking of how we interact computers.
- [9:00 – 12:00 ] – The importance of automating tasks to remove the requirement for users to control devices.
- [12:00 – 15:00] Solving user friction by making things intelligent
- [15:00 – 21:00] Building IoT that is transport neutral, with a separation of hardware/software development, client neutral, capable of decentralized processing.
- [22:00 – 26:00] Using local networking and processing to intelligently build services on products from multiple companies.
- [26:00 – 37:00 ] The importance of privacy in the IoT, achieved through an abstract data modeling layer that can link hardware with software protocols.
- [38:00 – 41:00] Explanation of The Thing System.
- Its made of software libraries and network protocols written in Node.js that act as a middleware for an IoT. It allows you to communicate with all things, and allows things to talk to other things. It has an HTML client that includes an abstract data model which gives you the ability to assign rules to hardware types.
