From Blink to IoT

system diagram
(right) door/window sensor, (left) temperature/humidity/light
door/window sensor

We're looking for mobile developers to help host an IoT workshop for IoTHackday 2017. Specifically, seeking mobile app developers who would be willing to make a presentation and demo starter projects to be used as a tool for other IoT projects.

Workshop Objective

This workshop will guide attendees through a practical approach to making end-to-end IoT projects. We’ll explore sensors and wireless hardware selection, as well as how to bridge wireless sensors to mobile apps and automation platforms. We’ll help attendees gain a core set of skills required for making end-to-end IoT projects; from electronics hardware, wireless device firmware, to networking, UI, and mobile apps. We’ll put emphasis on understanding systems architecture and “makability”.

The format will be a mix of presentations and hands-on lab work. The first two hours of the workshop will be presentations covering topics such as WiFi, BLE, and LoRa. We’ll use these wireless technologies to demo a variety of wireless gadgets. We’ll selectively deep dive into topics to give attendees a good feel for useful tools and engineering practices. The hands-on portion follows the presentation and gives attendees an opportunity to build some of these devices for themselves. Some example devices include door/window sensors, an “Amazon Button”, a long range GPS tracker, and connected dog food container.

Alt text

Mobile App

We're not set on the mobile app objectives, but here are some ideas that would fit with the wireless portion that's been planned. Both deal with BLE, with a slight preference for platforms like Xamarin, Ionic, or NativeScript. The first one (bottom diagram) is to develop an example mobile app that connects to a BLE module via GATT, reads the serial port service, parses the data (GPS + mac address), and plots it on google map. The second one is an app running as a BLE advertisement observer that scans, parses, and forwards advertisement data to some cloud service (Azure in this example). These example are meant to show some common mechanisms for BLE interactions (scanner/observer and GATT), and provide a starting point for attendees to build upon.

The workshop description above is aspirational. We're hoping some enterprising developers will volunteer their technical and creative energy to the effort. The idea is to have the the workshop take place at the same time as Hackday. It's a new feature for this Hackday, and we're trying it out to provide more opportunities for the community to engage. We're hoping to see some of this year's attendees in next year's Hackday team event!

Alexa Also looking for someone who is familiar with Alexa skills to integrate some Alexa functionality for wireless sensors.