Atmel hearts Makers, and here’s why

The Maker movement is growing and starting to make its mark on business, the economy and everyday life.

While the movement may have started small, pushing up from the grassroots, Makers are increasingly thinking “big,” beginning to focus on broader based needs, from improving consumer products that could hit the mass market, to designing medical devices to fill industry niches, to revolutionizing STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education.

The fundamentally social nature of the Maker space is inspiring people to launch innovative products easily and cheaply. In so doing, it is empowering a new generation of small/medium businesses and entrepreneurs. Even the corporate world and investor communities are starting to sit up and pay attention to makers and ask what role they might play in their success.

3D printing and easy-to-use robots are spawning a new era of social, collaborative manufacturing, which while still in its nascent stages, is growing exponentially and piquing the imagination of millions.

The Economist recently dubbed the burgeoning phenomenon “The Third Industrial Revolution” with the Boston Consulting Group noting that in areas such as transport, computers, fabricated metals and machinery, 10-30% of the goods that America now imports from China could be made at home by 2020, boosting American output by $20 billion-55 billion a year.

In a recent study of makers themselves, 46 percent of those polled said their commercial making activity was or would be their job, while 20% said they currently held “Maker” jobs.  83 percent were already employed and 31 percent had job titles in technical areas involving science or engineering. Two-thirds work in private industry. In addition, 56 percent of makers said they had applied for a patent or trademark.

Meanwhile, one in five makers said they had been approached by a commercial enterprise about an idea or prototype, which shows that the level of commercial enterprise interest is increasing.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, chipmakers are eyeing the maker movement as a possible development community for the internet of things, tapping in to the passion and creativity to revitalize their own research and development efforts. The manufacturing sector, in particular, could benefit from the entrepreneurial spirit and creative instincts of the makers, who find fixes to problems at a fraction of the cost.

Most chipmakers have produced inexpensive development boards for this very purpose, seeding them out among makers and keenly following their progress. While Raspberry Pi and Beagle Board have gained momentum among makers, however, it’s still Arduino that captures the hearts and minds of the majority.

Atmel, of course, makes the processor that sits on this incredible open source circuit board and is therefore at the very center of the whole Maker revolution.

At their basic level, Atmel’s microprocessors provide a minimal amount of computing power, with digital inputs and digital outputs. Many have an analog to digital converter built into the chip, allowing for sensors to be attached. At the higher end, some come with HDMI out, Ethernet, and WiFi built into the chip.

Of course, hardware is just the building blocks. On the software side, Arduino provides a Java-based Integrated Development Environment that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The code is based on C, and multiple libraries are included to interface seamlessly with various add on shields.

Credit: Funwithdc.com

For many makers, Arduino is the easiest and fastest way to go from platform to prototype, and the best part is that you don’t have to be an engineer to use it.

Like open source-software before it, open source hardware is making its presence felt, even in the corporate world, being championed by a maker movement happy to blaze a trail before business models have yet to set. Like the early champions of Linux, these frontrunners can be thought of as pioneers, to be ignored and dismissed at corporate peril. After all, isn’t the basis for Android Open Source?

If you want to see what all the Maker buzz is about, why not stop by the San Mateo Maker Faire this weekend (18/19 May), or follow @Atmel and Twitter hashtags #MakerFaire #AtmelMakes and #Whatwouldyoumake for regular updates from the show!

Evil Mad Science and Atmel at the 2013 Maker Faire

Many Atmel employees will be at our Maker Faire booth this weekend. I will be there both days and open-source guru Eric Weddington has flown in as well. The Atmel booth is right next to the Arduino booth, so we should be easy to find. Be sure to bring your sun hats and sunscreen since many attractions are outside and it is easy to get burned.

I also wanted to give a shout out to my pals Lenore and Windell from Sunnyvale kit maker Evil Mad Science. We met at the eFlea and I have visited their shop. I have bought two Alpha-5 clocks from them, knowing that the super-accurate real-time-clock combined with an Atmel processor will keep precise time.

I went to an open-house they had last year, and got these snaps. Be sure to visit their booth and check out their really cool kits. Here are some pictures:

Here is Windell showing off his latest project— The Digi-Comp, a ball-bearing operated mechanical computer.

Evil Mad Science does not re-sell cheap imported junk. They design, test, and package their kits right here in Silicon Valley.

Here are just a few of the kits Evil Mad Science sells. They all have great style, panache and entertainment value.

Every engineer needs a powerful CO2 laser cutter.

I wanted to show Windell’s bench, since we all can relate. Even young guys like Windell need microscopes to work on modern electronics.

They have this awesome CNC router at Evil Mad Science. That is one of their motion-sensitive LED panels on the bed. You wave your hand over it, and the lights modulate.

Here is a close-up of the light panel. I am pretty sure they use Atmel chips in it.

Typical Maker—Windell spent months designing and perfecting this custom cabinet, rather than buying some chipboard stuff from Ikea.

Here is Lenore, the co-founder of Evil Mad Science. She is holding up my pal Ron Quan’s new book on building your own transistor radio.

And here is Ron, who came down to the open house at Evil Mad Science because he is a maker as well as a brilliant engineer with 65 patents and membership in SMPTE, IEEE, and the AES.

Hope you like the peek inside Evil Mad Science. I will be writing up experiences at Maker Faire as well as keeping you up to date on Ron and Atmel and my other pals.

Electronics User Experience with Sally Carson, co-founder of Pinoccio

By Eric Weddington, Marketing Manager, Open Source & Community

Sally Carson, co-founder of Pinoccio

Sally Carson, co-founder of Pinoccio

In February I did an interview with Eric Jennings, co-founder of Pinoccio. Pinoccio is a new Open Source Hardware business, building “a complete ecosystem for the Internet of Things”. The Pinoccio is a pocket-sized microcontroller board, with wireless networking, rechargeable LiPo battery, sensors, and the ability to expand its capabilities through shields, much like an Arduino board. It features the new Atmel ATmega256RFR2, a single-chip AVR 8-bit processor with low power 2.4GHz transceiver for IEEE 802.15.4 communications.

Pinoccio featuring new Atmel ATmega256RFR2

Eric Jennings, along with his partner Sally Carson, co-founded Pinoccio. In my interview with Eric Jennings he said:

Eric Jennings: Sally Carson, Pinoccio’s other co-founder, is an expert in the intersection between humans and technology.  What I mean by that is that she thinks very deeply and carefully about the psychology of humans interacting with computers.  Human-computer interaction, user experience, and usability all fall under her umbrella.  I consider her contribution a secret weapon in what we’re trying to achieve with Pinoccio.

A Secret Weapon?!… I had to find out more what Eric meant, and just what exactly is Pinoccio’s Secret Weapon. I contacted Sally Carson and asked her about the intersection of User Experience (UX) with electronics and the design of the Pinoccio. Along the way, I learned some good lessons on why Design is important, even to just a set of electronics.

Eric Weddington (EW): What intrigued you about the Pinoccio to co-found a hardware startup company?

Sally Carson (SC): Well, I was always a creative kid, always drawing or making something. And, I always loved fiddling around with gadgets and electronics. In high school, I became an audio/video nerd. I got into skateboarding and playing in bands with friends. But, a huge part of both of these hobbies was the A/V part. So, for example, I filmed tons of footage of my friends and I skating. I would make these skate videos, editing the footage down using two VCRs. I’d use a 4-track to mix in audio, or I’d splice in the audio from an old Nintendo, like from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Every time we ollied or did a trick, there would be the “bloop” sound of a turtle jumping. So, I wasn’t like, busting out the soldering iron, but I was trying to find all of the different ways I could combine the electronics that I had access to.

Later on, I became a Web Designer and suddenly all of my creative output was virtual and done on a computer. I missed the physicality of using my hands to make things. Tim O’Reilly was a big influence on me, and I tried to keep up with whatever O’Reilly Media was putting out. I cut my teeth on the Web Design In a Nutshell book. I listened to podcasts of ETech and the Web 2.0 Conference.

Around 2004, I started to specialize in Interaction Design, and I was really interested in the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea — where Massimo Banzi was teaching, and where Arduino was being developed. They were teaching Interaction Designers to prototype and test their product ideas by quickly building a physical prototype. This was fascinating to me — you could still be a Tech nerd but also build things with your hands. That blending of physical and virtual was super compelling; I always thought I had to choose one or the other.

Then, I got the first issue of Make when it came out, and I was totally enchanted. Make had found this incredible group of people who were tech geeks like me, but who knew how to build real things with their hands. I filled sketchbooks with ideas for DIY projects that I personally wanted to build. But, I still felt this barrier to entry and I hadn’t yet found a community of Makers who could help me. Every project I wanted to build needed to be wireless and Web-enabled, but that seemed totally out of reach for someone like me who wasn’t deeply technical.

I think there are a lot of people out there like me, who are somewhat geeky, but not super “deep geeks.” They want to build wireless, web-enabled projects but they don’t know how and they’re not sure it’s even possible. With Pinoccio, we’re providing all of that scaffolding for you. Your board is talking to the Web wirelessly within minutes of taking it out of the box. It already has a rechargeable battery that can last for weeks or months. From there, it’s up to you to start imagining possibilities for this platform. We want you to focus on the specifics of your project, instead of losing momentum trying to figure out all that other stuff.

So, with Pinoccio, I got really excited about enabling other people to build cool projects like the ones I had been dreaming about for years. There’s something really magical about creating a tool that enables other creative, talented folks — there’s this amazing multiplier effect.

EW: The Pinoccio could be looked at just the electronic guts of a larger system, as just a set of functions to be implemented. You and Eric Jennings see a need to approach the problem differently with Pinoccio. What led you to do this differently?

SC: The two most basic questions that I ask when I’m designing a product are: “Is it useful?” and “Is it desirable?” I want the answer to both questions to be yes.

If we had approached Pinoccio as “just a set of functions to be implemented,” we would have been building something useful, but not desirable. And that’s when you run the risk of commoditization. Your customers won’t have any particular loyalty to you, they’ll simply comparison shop between functionally similar products and choose whatever’s cheapest. Even if you’re first to market, this makes you vulnerable to cheaper knock-offs in the future.

So we want to be both useful *and* desirable. What does that look like? Let’s take Sugru as an example. Sugru is this magic, self-curing rubber that you can use to fix or modify practically anything — tools, electronics, everyday objects around the house. I had a sample packet laying around for a few months. I understood what it was, I understood the usefulness of it, but it wasn’t yet desirable in my mind.

Once Fall rolled around, I was commuting by bike at night, and I was frustrated with my new headlight. It had this recessed on/off button that was nearly impossible to press with thick gloves on. I used Sugru to fatten up the button and make it taller. The next day, once the Sugru had cured, I tried turning my light on and off with gloves and it was way, way better. I FELT SO SMART AND AWESOME! That was the moment that I fell in love with Sugru, because of how it made me feel about myself. I felt clever, capable, and industrious.

Now Sugru is both useful and desirable to me. I want to use it again, because I want to feel smart and awesome again. I want to show off what I “made” to my friends. It’s less about the Sugru, it’s more about how it made me feel. That “a-ha!” moment is what we’re shooting for with Pinoccio. We want to build a useful tool that makes people feel smart and awesome. We want to reduce those frustrating barriers to entry so you maintain your motivation to see a project through to completion. Then we want you to share what you built, show it off online, and collaborate with others who are working on similar projects.

EW: How is the process of designing the User Experience for the Pinoccio different than for other products?

SC: When I’m designing for the Web, I try to put together a functional prototype as quickly as possible, even if it’s just a clickable simulation comprised of sketches. Then I test it with real users. But, this is harder to do with hardware, it takes a lot longer to get to the functional prototype phase.

So, we used conferences like the Open Source Hardware Summit as an opportunity to interview potential customers and ask them about what they have actually done in the past. Have they tried to build a web-enabled project? How were they powering their projects? What tools did they use? What was frustrating? What worked well? This is a lot different than asking them if they think they would use Pinoccio, or asking them what features they’d like to see. We tried to identify existing pain points, based on the actual previous experiences of our target audience, then shape features around those insights.

EW: What part of the design process of the Pinoccio surprised you?

SC: I wouldn’t say I was surprised by this exactly, but I am constantly amazed by how awesome our community is. They’re brilliant, creative, and determined. They’re also incredibly generous and it’s super fun to see them sharing ideas and helping each other. I guess it surprised me how much idea exchange is already happening between members of the Community. It’s really rewarding to see that happening, and being an open source hardware company made it possible.

EW: What was the biggest challenge of the design process of the Pinoccio, and how did you overcome it?

SC: Well, for Web-based products, we try to build a Minimal Viable Product, get something into the hands of users as quickly as possible, see how they respond, then iterate and evolve the product organically from there. That’s a lot easier to do with software, because it’s relatively fast and cheap to put together an MVP.

Hardware is slower, it’s more expensive, and it’s inherently a “Waterfall” process — meaning there are a series of linear dependencies and the project can’t advance until each phase is complete. For each iteration, you have to make design changes to the board, order components, order PCBs, get the boards assembled, test them, rinse and repeat. It’s a weeks-to-months iteration cycle, instead of the hours-to-days cycles that we enjoy in Web Development.

I think the way that we address this is to bring assembly in-house. That will really allow us to take advantage of these Agile methodologies that we’re used to — rapid iterations of testing and refining. It will let us tighten up those cycles of iteration.

EW: What are some common mistakes that you see in hardware product design, that don’t take into account User Experience?

SC: Well, I think for any tech product, be it hardware or software, it’s tempting to think about features first, and to create a list of technical requirements as a starting point.

What we try to do instead is to think deeply about who our customer is. We think about what Peter Merholz calls their “emotional requirements.” What are their needs, motivations, and goals? What excites them? What frustrates them? How does Pinoccio fit into their lives, and how does it fit into a typical day? We answer these questions via different methods of qualitative research, including ethnography and interviews. It’s not enough to ask your target audience if they think they would like a particular product or feature. People are famously bad about self-reporting, it’s better to observe what they actually do, as opposed to asking them what they think they might do or might like.

Let’s go back to my bicycle light again. I’m going to hypothesize around what happened. The designers knew they were designing a light. They decided on some features — it’s possible they even asked customers what features they’d like — and they decided the light should have three modes: blink (for visibility and longer battery life), steady/low beam, and steady/high beam. They explored the interface — how do you use a single button to turn it on/off and to cycle through the three modes? The single button may come from a cost constraint. The flat, rubber button may have been an attempt to waterproof the light for riding in the rain. But did they observe real customers actually using the product? Not just in a lab setting, but in the real-world, during a typical day? Here in the States, in the late Fall, daylight saving ends and suddenly we’re all biking home in the dark. This is the time of the year that I start using my bike light. And because of the colder weather, I’m usually wearing gloves. If they had observed customers like me, in everyday conditions, they would have seen how hard it is to press that button with gloves on. And they would have seen me cursing under my breath, vowing to never buy a light from them again.

I think the best products make their customers feel smart. When you’re building complex technology products, if you do a bad job with the User Experience, the customer will blame themselves, “I suck at computers.” But it’s not their fault, it’s yours. And no one wants to keep using a product that makes them feel dumb. Frustration, hacks, and work-arounds are all super valuable insights. These are signals that a need that’s not being met. When I used Sugru to make the button easier to push, this was a work-around that signaled a need was not being met.

The key is to learn who your customer is, and to build empathy for them. Let that shape your product.

EW: How do you extend User Experience to the Pinoccio shields that are being developed?

SC: We talk to customers, we try to identify pain points that they’ve experienced with existing tools out there. We also talk to them about what they’re planning on building with Pinoccio. So, we just sent out a survey to our IndieGogo campaign funders asking them what their first Pinoccio project would be. Their answers will inform which shields we produce first. Then, once we have some shields produced, we’ll conduct qualitative research — observe actual customers using them during a typical day, in a typical setting. For example, we might go to a Makerspace where we know someone is building a project with Pinoccio, and just be a fly on the wall while they’re working on their project. Where do they get stuck? Where do they feel frustrated, or need help? That will help us refine the experience for the next iteration.

EW: There are many different solutions in the Wireless field, and the networking of objects that communicate wirelessly. What are some of the challenges of the user experience in this area, and what is Pinoccio doing to help users in this area?

SC: I think to-date, most solutions out there are either (1) so technical that only deep geeks can make use of them, or (2) they’re user-friendly but they’re constrained to a very specific use case, like home automation.

Our challenge is to build an extensible enough system that can support a variety of use cases, a robust enough system that we don’t lose the interest of those deep geeks, and yet still offer something that is easy for less technical folks to understand and use. For that final piece, we’ll be building a series of web-based tools that will help get those less technical folks up and running quickly and easily.

EW: You and Eric Jennings are located in different parts of the country, yet you have a start-up company together. What are the tools that you use to work together?

SC: Yep, Eric’s in Reno, and I’m in Ann Arbor. Eric and I use a number of tools, and have found a set up that works really well for us. We usually have IM running in the background, and ping each other throughout the day. We also do a daily Google Hangout — basically our “Stand Up” meeting in the Scrum parlance. Because we’re a young company, we’re happy to let these calls go long, and meander from detailed product decisions, all the way to long-term roadmap stuff.

We use Git for collaborating on code. We also have an internal documentation site that we use for asynchronous communication. It’s just a WordPress install running the P2 theme — it’s well-suited for short updates that can grow organically into longer discussions. We can archive pages that have evergreen info, and can easily search for and reference them later:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2

EW: What are your future goals with Pinoccio?

SC: I want Pinoccio to become just another tool in the average person’s workshop, makerspace, or art studio, sitting there right next to the duct tape. When they have an idea, they’ll grab a couple of Pinoccios and quickly throw together a prototype. I want this to feel totally unremarkable. Pinoccio is just another tool at their disposal that expands their capabilities. The object — the board itself — is less important. What’s important is that it enables them to build what they want to build, and it makes them feel smart, industrious, and clever (which they are!).

1:1 Interview with Michael Koster

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Three-part Interview Series (Part 2)

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Series 2 – IoT Toolkit and Roadmap

Tom Vu (TV):  What is in the roadmap for IoT Toolkit?

Michael Koster (MK):

The IoT Toolkit is an Open Source project to develop a set of tools for building multi-protocol Internet of Things Gateways and Service gateways that enable horizontal co-operation between multiple different protocols and cloud services. The project consists of the Smart Object API, gateway service, and related tools.

IoT Smart Object Structure

The foundation of the platform is purely bottom up, based on applying best practices and standards in modern web architecture to the problem of interoperability of IoT data models. I believe that the practice of rough consensus and running code results in better solutions than a top-down standard, once you know the basic architecture of the system you’re building.

To that end, I created a public github and started building the framework of the data model encapsulations and service layer, and mapped out some resourceful access methods via a REST interface. The idea was to make a small server that could run in a gateway or cloud instance so I could start playing with the code and build some demos.

The next step is to start building a community consensus around, and participation in, the data models and the platform. The IoT Toolkit is a platform to connect applications and a mixture of devices using various connected protocols.  It’s real power lies in its broader use, where it can span across all of our connected resources in industry, ranging from commerce, education, transportation, environment, and us. It’s a horizontal platform intended to drive Internet of Things more widely as an eventual de facto standard, built for the people who are interested in building out Internet of Things products and services based on broad interoperability.

IoT Applications Run on Cloud or On Gateway

We intend to create a Request For Comment (RFC), initiate a formal process for the wider Internet of Things platform and standards.  An community agreed upon process similar to the world wide web that we use today, based on rough consensus and running code, with RFCs serving as working documents and de facto standards that people can obtain reference code, run in their system to test against their needs, and improve and modify if necessary, feeding back into the RFC for community review and possible incorporation of the modifications.

The Internet of Things interoperability platform stands as an ideal candidate, leveraging the power of the open source community’s development process.  In turn, community involvement is taken to a new level, across many fields of discipline, and in many directions. Here is where we can get the most benefit of an agile community.  Crowdsource the development process based on principles of open communication and free of the need for participants to protect interests toward proprietary intellectual property.

We need to build the platform together meshed around the community of Makers, DIY, Designers, Entrepreneurs, Futurist, Hackers, and Architects to enable prototyping in an open ecosystem.  Proliferation then occurs; a diverse background of developers, designers, architects, and entrepreneurs have many avenues of participation. They can create a new landscape of IoT systems and products.

This broad participation extends to industry, academia and the public sector.  We are aiming for broad participation from these folks, build a global platform based on common needs. As a member of the steering committee, when I participated in the IoT World Forum, I heard from the technical leaders of enterprise companies (Cisco and others), research departments, and IoT service providers. They believe an open horizontal platform would be needed to enable applications that span across their existing vertical markets and M2M platforms.

Instead of a top-down approach, where people from corporations and institutions get together in a big meeting and put all their wish lists together to make a standard, we’re taking an overall bottom-up approach, bringing together a diverse community ranging from makers to open source developers, and entrepreneurs. Together with corporations, academia, and public sector, we all will participate in a very broad open source project to develop a platform that can be ubiquitous that everyone can use.

In many ways, this is modeled after the Internet and World Wide Web itself.  As we need to create a more formal standard, it will likely engage with the IETF and W3C. A good example is the semantic sensor network incubator project, which is an SSN ontology that describes everything about sensors and sensing. This enables broad interoperability between different sensor systems and platforms, based on common data models and descriptions. What we want to do is something similar to that, only on a more comprehensive scale and intended for the Internet of Things.

Tom Vu (TV):  Can you take us through a tour of the Data Object model importance and how it yields significance for simple and sophisticated connected devices?

Michael Koster (MK):

The Internet of Things today consists of many different sensor networks and protocols, connected to dedicated cloud services, providing access through smartphone and browser apps. It is rare for these separate “silos” to cooperate or interact with each other.

We abstract the complexity of sensor nets connecting devices and hardware by adding a layer of semantic discovery and linkage. This enables the sensors and actuators on disparate sensor nets to be easily combined to build integrated applications.

The way this works is using a few techniques. First, the different sensor nets are integrated through a common abstraction layer. This works a lot like device drivers in an operating system, adapting different devices and protocols to a common system interface. Only in this case, they are adapted to a common data model.

The common data model for sensor nets is based on the new IETF CoRE application protocol and sensor descriptions. This provides standard ways for common types of sensors to be discovered by their attributes, and standard ways for the data to be linked into applications, by providing descriptions of the JSON or BSON data structure the sensor provides as it’s output.

We use the W3C Linked Data standard to provide web representations of data models for sensor data and other IoT data streams. Linked data representations of IETF CoRE sensor descriptions are web-facing equivalents of CoRE sensor net resources. Linked data provides capabilities beyond what CoRE provides, so we can add functions like graph-based access control, database-like queries, and big data analysis.

Internet Smart Object

Internet of Things Applications are essentially graph-structured applications. By using Linked data descriptions of JSON structures and the meaning of the data behind the representation, we can create applications that link together data from different disparate sources into single application graphs.

Then we enable the platform with an event-action programming model and distributed software components. The common semantic language enables the data sources and software components to easily be assembled and make data flow connections. The result is an event-driven architecture of self-describing granular scale software objects. The objects represent sensors, actuators, software components, and user interaction endpoints.

Interent of Things with FOAT Control Graph

Tom Vu (TV):  Who and what companies should be involved?

Michael Koster (MK):

Whoever wants to participate in the building out of the Internet of Things. The people that use the infrastructure should build it out; the people who want to provide products and services based on interoperability, along with those who provide the backplane of thinking low power microcontrollers / microprocessors, connected sensors, and importantly the network infrastructure.

We want to enable all avenues of participation to allow corporations, academia, policy and standards makers, entrepreneurs and platform developers, makers, and DIY hackers all to be involved in building the platform as a community.

For corporations, we will provide an important role, to build a vendor-neutral platform for data sharing and exchange, an open horizontal platform that will allow the integration of what were traditionally vertical markets into new horizontal markets.

Anyone participating or expecting to participate in the emerging Internet of Things, Internet of Everything, Industrial Internet, Connected World, or similar IoT ecosystems initiatives, could benefit by participating in creating this platform. Companies that provide network infrastructure and want to build in value add can adopt this standard platform and provide it as infrastructure. Companies that want to provide new services and new connected devices that can use the IoT Toolkit to easily deploy and connect with existing resources could benefit.

All companies, organizations, and people that can benefit from an open Internet of Things are welcome to participate in the creation of a platform that everyone can use.

Tom Vu (TV):  How important is Open Source to Internet of Things evolution?

Michael Koster (MK):

I don’t see how the Internet of Things can evolve into what everyone expects it to without a large open source component. We need to go back to Conway’s law and look at it from both the system we’re trying to create and the organization that creates it. Interoperability and sharing are key in the system we want to create. It’s only natural that we create an open development organization where we all participate in both the decisions and the work.

Removing the attachment of intellectual property, changes the dynamics of the development team, keeps things engaged and moving forward solving problems. It’s important for software infrastructure projects like this to remove the barrier to cooperation that arises from the self-protection instinct around proprietary Intellectual Property, or even egoism associated with soft intellectual property, “my” code.

Instead, we turn the whole project into a merit-based system as opposed to being ego driven.  Rather than worry about guarding our property, we are motivated to solve the problems and contribute more to the deliverable. The limits to participation are removed and there is a more rapid exposure of intentions and goals. Engagement and innovation can rule in this environment of deep collaboration.

Tim Berners-Lee said that he was able to achieve the creation of the World Wide Web system because he didn’t have to ask permission or worry about violating someone’s copyright. We are creating the same environment for people who want to build our platform, and even for those who want to build their services and applications on top of the platform.

We are going to create the service enabled layer as open source as well so that any one of the companies can help proliferate the idea and everyone has influence and access to the development of the underlying IoT platform.  If it’s open source infrastructure and platform software, you can make a service on top of that software that can contain proprietary code. With our license, you can even customize and extend the platform for your own needs as a separate project.

Tom Vu (TV):  Describe your work with the EU IoT organization and how you are involved as a voice for the Internet of Things?

Michael Koster (MK):

I work with the IoT Architecture group within the overall EU Internet of Things project. The IoT-A group is closely related to the Future Internet project. They have an Architecture Reference Model describing different features one might build in an IoT platform, a sort of Architecture for Architectures. Since their process mirrors my own design process to a large extent, I found their reference model to be compatible with my own architecture modeling process.

They are conducting a Top-Down activity, stewarding the participation in the architecture and standardization model.  One of the ways I work with IoT-A is to use the Smart Object API as a validation case for the Architecture Reference Model. They are building the reference model top down, and we’re building the architecture bottom-up, based on a common expression of architecture relationships and descriptions.

I am also involved in advocating open source of IoT and building of local IoT demonstrator projects, educating around IoT, open data, etc. as well as user controlled resource access and privacy.  I am providing a voice for open source and open standards, into the standards movement going forward.

Here in the USA, there is not anything like what they have in Europe. Here the process will be to engage corporations and institutions and create a participatory structure that enables fair and open opportunity for influence and access to both the development process and the final products.

Tom Vu (TV):  How important is an open standard – building of an RFC in which all industries can agree upon ultimately serving to a wider scale factors of adoption and proliferation?

Michael Koster (MK):

To simply put it, the construction of a formal RFC is something that describes part of system.  A Request for Comments (RFC) is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.  It is a process or evolution in achieving a more widely adopted standard.  The founders of the Internet created this process, and http, etc are all built using original RFC process from many years ago.

Through the Internet Engineering Task Force, engineers and computer scientists may publish discourse in the form of an RFC, either for peer review or simply to convey new concepts, information, or (occasionally) engineering humor. The IETF adopts some of the proposals published as RFCs as Internet standards.

If the IoT Toolkit platform becomes adopted, it may eventually be as many as 10-12 different RFCs, but it’s important to get people to agree on common first set.  This is the initial phase into a more pervasively used universal standard.  In fact, it’s sort of like a strawman platform.  It’s intent is to describe and collaborate, but also invoke and seek out broader participation…  We are at the stage of putting proposals together over the next few weeks and setting up meetings to talk to many people around collaboration and participation in building an Internet of Things platform.

We believe that an open standard platform for horizontal interoperability is key to achieving the promise of the Internet of Things. Everyone needs to be able to present and process machine information in machine understandable formats on the IoT, just as we humans enjoy commonly understandable web data formats and standardized browsers on today’s WWW. It’s important that developers be able to focus on solving problems for their clients and not waste resources on communication and translation.

Read Part Three to Learn More about Why IoT (Internet of Things) Matters?

Here are Part 1 and Part 2 of the Interview Series.

Imagining the Future — DIY Style

By Eric Weddington

It’s the beginning of February already. The New Year has started with a bang, with barely enough time to reflect on the past year. However, there have been some exciting things in 2012 that I can’t wait to see continue on in 2013…

Engineers can be a funny group. On one hand they’re the makers of a wide range of technology. But because engineers are, in general, interested in getting the details right, sometimes they can get caught up in the details, with a focus on what should be the “right” way of doing something. One of the privileges of being involved in the open source community has been attending the Maker Faires, put on by Make: magazine, in the Bay Area in May, and in New York in September. The Arduino microcontroller board is a big part of  these Maker Faires, powering all sorts of projects. It’s become popular because it enables people who are not engineers to get involved in making stuff with electronics, allowing them to add smarts to all sorts of things.

What I’ve discovered is that it doesn’t magically turn these people into engineers. They see the Arduino as a tool that they can use to turn their ideas into reality. They don’t get caught up in the details of what is the “right” way, or the “wrong” way, to implement a solution according to their engineering training. They keep their eyes firmly on their goal. They’re too busy creating! During the last year, I have been amazed at all the cool, weird, wonderful ideas that have been thought up and implemented by many in this Maker community. I wouldn’t have thought up half the stuff that I have seen done with an Arduino and our AVR processors. A DIY X-ray CT scanner controlled by an Arduino. FireHero, which has an Arduino controlled propane “puffer” interfaced to a GuitarHero controller. A winner of the California Science Fair used an Arduino to measure foot pressure for diabetics. All manner of quadcopters and UAVs. Desktop 3D printers. Clothing design. And the list goes on. It’s exhilarating to see what’s been done and to think about what people will imagine next! Yes, it’s going to be a fun 2013!

A Pocket-Sized, Low-Power Ecosystem Makes Wi-Fi Easy

By Ingolf Leidert

Sensor networks are nothing brand new and even terms like “smart dust” have been around for a while. Many have envisioned a future where every technical entity around us will be “smart” in some way and is permanently connected to a huge network consisting of small sensors that help monitor and control our world. Usually, the large step into such a future vision is divided into several smaller steps. Obviously, one parameter seems to be essential for the small and smart sensors vision: the power consumption of such an entity. With the ATmegaRF SoC family, Atmel has introduced one of the lowest power IEEE 802.15.4 systems in the world. Its low power consumption combined with the full AVR microcontroller (MCU) capabilities makes networks built with lots of compact, low-power wireless sensors look more realistic now. One project that shows this perfectly is the Pinoccio.

Pinoccio is an open-source, crowd-funded solution that provides a complete ecosystem for building products supporting The Internet of Things. These small “scout” boards, compatible with the Arduino platform, come with everything a “smart, wireless, connected entity” would need:

• LiPo battery (chargeable over USB)
• LED
• Temperature sensor
• Antenna
• Several I/Os for connecting DIY hardware (like more sensors)
• And, as its “heart”, the Atmel ATmega128RFA1 with its excellent power consumption of less than 17mA when actively transmitting. The ATmega128RFA1 is pin-compatible with the new ATmegaRFR2 family…so perhaps we’ll see future “scout” boards in 64kB or 256kB versions. 

The developers have chosen that MCU explicitly for its low power and RF capabilities. And, as you can see from the estimated power specs, a sleeping scout board should be able to run for more than a year from one battery charge. Because the whole Pinoccio ecosystem includes a Wi-Fi board that finally connects all the tiny “scout” boards to an existing Wi-Fi infrastructure and even offers SD card data storage, this whole system looks like a wonderful first step into The Internet of  Things.

Open Sauce

By Steve Castellotti

CTO, Puzzlebox

North Beach, San Francisco’s Italian neighborhood, is famous for the quality and wide variety of its many restaurants. From colorful marquees scattered up and down Columbus to the hushed, more dimly lit grottos hidden down side streets and back alleys, there is no lack of choice for the curious patron.

Imagine then, having chosen from all these options, you sit down and order your favorite dish. When the plate arrives the waiter places next to it a finely embossed card printed on thick stock. A closer examination reveals the complete recipe for your meal, including hand-written notations made by the chef. Tips for preparation and the rationale for selecting certain ingredients over others are cheerfully included.

Flipping the card over reveals a simple message:

“Thank you for dining with us this evening. Please accept this recipe with our regards. You may use it when cooking for friends and family, or just to practice your own culinary skills. You may even open your own restaurant and offer this very same dish. We only ask that you  include this card with each meal served, and include any changes or improvements you make.”

Sharing the “Secret” Sauce

Having been raised in an Italian family myself, I can assure you that there is no more closely guarded secret than the recipe for our pasta gravy (the sauce). But I can’t help but wonder how such an open sharing might affect the landscape of a place such as North Beach. If every chef was obliged to share their techniques and methods, surely each would learn from the other? Customers would benefit from this atmosphere of collaboration in terms of the taste and quality of their dinners.

These many restaurants, packed so tightly together as they are, would still be forced to compete on terms of the dining experience. The service of their wait-staff, the ambience, and cost would count for everything.

For the majority of customers, knowledge of the recipe would simply be a novelty. In most cases they would still seek a professional chef to prepare it for them. But to the aspiring amateur, this information would contribute to their education. A new dish could be added to their repertoire.

An experienced restaurateur could no doubt correct me on any number of points as to why such a scenario would be a poor business model and never could or should be attempted. But just across town, throughout Silicon Valley and indeed across the globe, in the realm of technology, this exact model has been thriving for decades.

Open Source in the Software World

In the software world, developers have been sharing their source code (the recipe for the programs they write) under licenses similar to the one outlined above on a grand scale and to great success. The Internet itself was largely constructed using open platforms and tools. Mobile phones running Google’s Android operating system are now the most popular in the world, with complete source material available online. And in 2012 Red Hat became the first open source company to achieve a billion dollars in revenue, with customers from IBM to Disney and Pixar among their roster.

The benefits are many. Developers can leverage each others’ work for knowledge and time saving. If you want to build a new web site, there’s no need to write the web server or common routines such as user management from scratch. You can take open versions and start from there. Even better, if you have questions or run into trouble, more likely than not someone else has, too, and the answer is only a search away. Most importantly, if the problem you found indicates a flaw in the software (a bug), then a capable coder is empowered to examine the source and fix it himself or herself. And the result can be shared with the entire community.

There are parallels here to several fields. Similar principles form the basis of the scientific method. Without the sharing of procedures and data, independent verification of results would be impossible. And many discoveries result from iterating on proven techniques. A burgeoning do-it-yourself community, a veritable Maker Movement, has grown around magazines like Make and websites such as Instructables.com. New inventions and modifications to popular products are often documented in meticulous detail, permitting even casual hardware hackers to follow along. Electronics kits and prototyping boards from companies like Arduino are based on Atmel microcontrollers  plus open circuit designs, and are often used to power such projects.

Brain-Controlled Helicopter

Recently, our company, Puzzlebox, released the Orbit, a brain-controlled helicopter. The user begins by setting a display panel to the desired level of concentration and/or mental relaxation they wish to achieve.  A mobile device or our custom Pyramid peripheral processes data collected by a NeuroSky EEG headset. When that target is detected in the user’s brainwaves, flight commands are issued to the Orbit using infrared light. One can practice maintaining focus or a clarity of thought using visual and physical feedback.

Puzzlebox Brain-Controlled Helicopter with Atmel AVR

Beyond novelty, however, lies the true purpose of the Puzzlebox Orbit. All source code, hardware designs, schematics, and 3D models are published freely online. Step-by-step guides for hacking the software and electronics are included. Methods for decoding infrared signals and extending mechanisms to operate additional toys and devices are shared. Creative modification is encouraged.  The goal is to promote the product as a teaching aid for middle and high school sciences classes and in university-level programming and electrical engineering courses.

This business model is itself a bit of an experiment, much like the restaurant described above. There is little preventing a competitor from producing a knock-off and leveraging our own recipes to do it. They might even open their doors just across the street from ours. We’ll need to work hard to keep our customers coming back for seconds. But so long as everyone abides by the rules, openly publishing any modifications of improvements made on our recipe, we’re not afraid to share the secrets of our sauce. We only ask that they include the original material with each dish they serve, and include any changes or improvements made along the way. We’re willing to compete on cost and dining experience. In this way we hope to improve the quality and flavor for everyone.

Puzzlebox with Arduino and Atmel AVR

Openness and The Internet of Things

Today, communities such as Kickstarter and others tapping into the power of openness and crowd-sourcing are fueling a lot of technological innovation.  The next era for enterprise is revolving around The Internet of Things (#IoT), machine-to-machine (#M2M) communications and even the Industrial Internet (#IndustrialInternet).

One strong proponent of innovation and thought, Chris Anderson, is renowned for having his fingerprints and vision on trends as they bloom into movements.  Anderson is committed and energized in this Make-infused world. His latest book, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution”, eloquently outlines the “right now” moment with makers. “Hardware is the new software”, opening up the brink of the next age of the Internet, where devices and machines become connected. Cloud, agile apps, and embedded design hardware (systems on chips, microcontrollers, or smart devices) are converging and  paving the next generation of integrated products across the fabric of devices.

“The real revolution here is not in the creation of the technology, but the democratization of the technology. It’s when you basically give it to a huge expanded group of people who come up with new applications, and you harness the ideas and the creativity and the energy of everybody. That’s what really makes a revolution.

…What we’re seeing here with the third industrial revolution is the combination of the two [technology and manufacturing]. It’s the computer meets manufacturing, and it’s at everybody’s desktop.”

Excerpt credited from Chris’s Anderson’s “Maker: The New Industrial Revolution”

With that said, we enter the next age, where hardware is the new software.

Arduino the “Glue” Behind the Internet of Things

“Everything will eventually be connected to the Internet and Arduino will be our glue.” — Juliette Powell, We the Data

Will 2013 be the year of the Internet of Things? Indeed, more and more “things” around us are busy collecting data, connecting to other devices and machines via the Internet, and causing those devices and machines to act on that data.  As our world becomes more automated, We the Data’s Juliette Powell surmises that the Arduino platform, developed with Atmel AVR microcontrollers, will become the “glue” behind the Internet of Things. Arduino, Powell writes, is how we humans can give something to the Internet. And the fact that Arduino is an open-source hardware platform aligns with the very basis of the Internet,  architected around open-source software.

Do you agree that Arduino is the glue behind the Internet of Things?