Folks, this is a guest post from Kerwin Lumpkins who is working on a cool project he put on Kickstarter (there’s a video there too), check it out!! He has built a prototype and would like to have it funded to produce more of these. As we’re always happy to share cool projects made by others as well, here you go

The Ard-Vark is a basic electronics box that has wifi built in to allow easy remote control through a mobile app, and has the following features:

• Arduino compatible (can use the Arduino IDE as is, based on Leonardo platform)

• USB connection to PC for serial or re-programming

• Mobile app available for download (iPhone/iPad/iPod/Android)

• Built in wifi for wireless remote control (Roving Networks RN-171)

• 4 servo motor headers

• 2 small DC motor headers

• Built in light sensor

• Built in temperature sensor

• 3 analog sensor inputs with ground and 5V power supplied

• 3 digital I/O headers with ground and 5V power supplied

• LED

• Speaker

• Can be powered by 9V battery or 9V AC adapter plug

• Mounted in a durable plastic case, cutouts for headers, silkscreen labeling of ports

Tech details of the Ard-Vark Prototype

Figure 1 shows a block diagram of the Ard-Vark prototype. Blocks in green are parts that are exposed on the outside of the case. Blue are parts that are covered up inside the case. For clarity, I didn’t have a block for the level shifting from wifi module to the microcontroller, but those parts can be seen on the front of the circuit board. The numbers show how many lines were needed to implement that function.

Figure 1: Block diagram of the Ard-Vark

For the prototype, I designed a board in EAGLE that would allow me to solder on Sparkfun’s Pro Micro (5V) and RN-XV module that uses the RN-171 module from Roving Networks. If the project is funded, the parts on the Pro Micro board and the RN-171 module will be surface mount soldered onto a single circuit board. This will lower the price.

All pins accessible?: “Will there be headers for all pins on the micro?” – Yes. The Ard-Vark will not load the headers, but I will place the holes on the circuit board. I intend to put the standard Arduino header pattern on the board for those that want to use that as well.

About the Arduino IDE: The pro micro (and hence also the Ard-Vark) is based on the ATMega 32U4 microcontroller, which is supported for the Arduino under the Leonardo model. Arduino has not fully released this yet, but I had no problem using the standard Arduino IDE after making some simple changes in the boards.txt file and downloading Sparkfun’s driver. Look at the Pro Micro page for a tutorial if you’re interested. For the final version, I will write up a manual that has installation instructions, schematics, source code, suggestions for hacking, etc.

The prototype Ard-Vark has a Pro-Micro board with headers that solder onto the main board. The RN-XV module similarly solders onto the main board. Then the main board has header connectors, the AC power plug, 5V regulator (beefy one that can power all 4 servos at once), etc. In photo below, the surface mount 5V regulator is mounted on the bottom side of proto board. You can see rework (yellow tape) where I used a through hole electrolytic cap. I didn’t allow enough room for a SM cap on the top side. So I put the reg and cap on bottom. Final version will fix this little error.

Fig2. Ard-Vark with the back cover removed

Fig. 3 Proto Board top side with servo headers, etc. Speaker is at bottom right.

More rework is evident on the top side of board. I realized that the the power indicator LED was too close to the light sensor (could influence the reading if in a dark room), so I moved the LED to right of the power switch. The yellow tape insulates leads of a through hole resistor. I also had to solder some wires onto the blue LED (just to left of the speaker) since the LED is too far below the hole. Final version will use a through hole LED to solve this. Light sensor (TMP-36 from analog devices) is the TO-92 through hole package part at top right. In the center of the board are surface mount parts that do level shifting for the RN-171 module. It runs at 3.3V while the microcontroller runs at 5V. One more problem I got sick of dealing with.

Finally, not shown is a motor control circuit. I decided after I built this proto board that offering DC motor control built in would be a good feature. Final version will make use of a motor control IC like the L293D. So the motors can only draw at max about 1 Amp. This will be fine for small motors like those used on small mobile robots.

Fig.4 Proto board back side showing the Pro Micro and RN-XV modules from Sparkfun and power plug.

On the bottom side of the board are the two modules from Sparkfun, power plug and (temporarily), the 5V regulator.

A view showing the “front” of the Ard-Vark. Note that this board has the USB micro connector missing. The micro B surface mount connector on the Sparkfun Pro Micro broke off after 10 or so plug/unplugs. I put it back on with super glue, but it came off again (hence the nasty looking mess in the middle). One change I’ll make in final board is to use a mini B through hole connector for improved strength.

The Story of the Ard-Vark (for those that are interested)

I made the Ard-Vark because I frequently like to add motion to projects using servo motors; from animatronics projects at holidays to building something that’s actually useful, to making something to scare co-workers when they sit down in their cubes. I grew tired of re-inventing and building this kind of thing again and again. So I finally designed a circuit board that would allow me to integrate wifi and Arduino controller and servo headers and motor controller and 2 wire motor headers and speaker, etc, all into one design. I also got tired of having projects stop working because exposed copper caused shorts, handwired solder joints came loose from strain, etc so I designed a case. And I got tired of having to power it with a USB cable to a PC, so I designed in a 9V battery and an AC adapter plug. And then I wrote a mobile app to allow me to control it remotely. All of that, I called the Ard-Vark.

Some friends were interested in getting one, so I thought I would list it as a project on kickstarter.com to see if there was enough interest to produce them in quantity to make the price reasonable. If I made one or two of these at a time, it would cost about $120 in parts and 2-3 hours to build and test one. I don’t have time to sit and build these. It just wouldn’t be worth my time. But if I can make several hundred of them at once, it brings the price down to a reasonable $100.

Who would use the Vark?

There are three types of people using things like the Ard-Vark out there today:

1. Creative and technically talented folk that DO want to deal with electronics and motor control and highly technical stuff. DIY’selfers, beginning electronics class students, etc.

2. Creative people that hate technical stuff but that want to build projects using electronics.

3. People that for one reason or another, do not want to fool with building the electronics base and just want to get going on a project.

Group 3 sounds like it’s just group 2 stated in a different way. But I’m in group 3. I’m an electrical and software engineer with over 15 years experience building projects both professionally and for hobby. I’m highly technical.

Group 1 are the do it yourself types. They do this kind of work because they want to learn this stuff and building and soldering and tinkering IS the whole point of what they do. But at some point, Group 1 folk turn into Group 3 folk. Like me. I changed into Group 3 guy after about 7 years. Sometimes, I just want to pick up a box, plug in some servos, turn it on and go. And that’s why I made the Ard-Vark.

Group 2 are becoming more prevalent today. Artists that want to add motion and interactivity to their creations. But they want to concentrate on their creative project, not on learning technical stuff.

This article is written for Group 1 folk that are interested in what is under the hood of the Ard-Vark, viewing it as just another project. The source code will be open and free to use, so the vark can be modifed to work in your project as you want it. The vark is very flexible in that it can provide “it just works” functionality out of the box, but can also be reconfigured.

Think of a ‘Facebook for Things’ with apps, services and analytics powered by connected objects and their digital profiles. With billions of product and other objects becoming connected, tagged and scannable, there’s a massive opportunity for a company that can provide the trusted engine for exchanging this active object information.

In essence, the talk will be about:

- What is the Web of Things?
- Web of Things: How and Why?
- Problem Statement: Hardware and Cloud Infrastructures for Web-augmented Things
- Web-enabling Devices and Gateways
- Active Digital Identities (ADIs)
- EVRYTHNG as a storage engine
- Problem Solved: Connecting People & Products
- Vision: Every Thing Connected
- Projects and Concrete Example of How and Why ADIs are Useful.
- Using our cloud services and APIs to build your next Internet of Things / Web of Things applications.

Looking forward to seeing many of you guys and gals there. Thanks a lot to our friend Thomas Amberg and Christine Perey for organizing these meetings!

So if you like coding Java for the Web? Babbling Javascript/Python/PHP? Have RESTful dreams? Want your fridge to talk to your online toaster about how that toast doesn’t look good? Like Zurich? And read this blog!
Then why not working for us! We are hiring talented backend and frontend devs to implement the Web of Things! Now!

The detailed job ad is online, looking forward to receiving your CVs!

It seems to me a great thing, but a chip itself won’t make the IoT a reality, just like one swallow doesn’t make a summer. The greatest impediment here is still a lack of support for more people to start playing around this chip and learn how to use it. In other words, not just an Arduino-like approach, but literally a twine-like approach. Of course, fridges manufacturers now have yet another weapon to significantly augment the user experience of food storage. Obviously consumer electronics, automotive and other industries do have the budget/time/expertise to embed the flycatcher intro their products, but there are reasons it didn’t happen yet, and I doubt it’s purely financial.

I do believe this is not the right way to drive innovation as it doesn’t consider consumer as potential innovators. Most printers & routers today have a micro controller and wireless connectivity, and could easily offer a programmable interface (so that we’re not stuck with the awful Web-based user interfaces those devices have), but somehow they just don’t. And I do believe this is where it all will start: just like most Web-based services today do have a (ideally RESTful) API, our consumer electronics should also offer an API (obviously in addition – not replacement – to the ready-made Web-based UX). This way, the user experience to “average” users of these devices remains identical, but coders and hackers that might (and most often do) have better ideas on how to digitally augment consumer electronics will be able to create custom apps by leveraging, well… the Web to create new, disruptive, intriguing use cases for your printer (or fridge, or car…) the manufacturer didn’t think of. This in turn could lead to an app store for “any” of your electronic products, where you could download and install new apps for your fridge, car, or printer (e.g. “the new york times app that will print every morning at 6am a fresh 1-page of your personalized news stories that you can read on your short ride to work” anyone?).

As a final thought, it’s not a super powerful low-power CPU that is literally going to change the market landscape, but what one does with these chips. This is because we’re not limited by technology itself, but what we do with it. And more importantly: what we allow consumers to do with the products they buy.

What do you think we need for making the internet of things a reality? More importantly, how can we best send the message to manufacturers: “hey, put an API on that machine, coz we need one”?

For 148$, give your plant a voice and get one of these:

The fascinating part about this cloud is that much like our electricity consumption, we can’t really see it or feel it (well except for electro-sensitive people who say they can). Back in 2007, we started working on a project to make electricity visible the Web way (Energie Visible!), hence trying to make electromagnetic fields visible sounded like a fun challenge.

Ondes Visibles! is an Android + Arduino application that I developed to help people experimenting with and raising their awareness of electromagnetic fields (EMFs). It features tutorials giving you the very basics of EMFs as well as interactive experiments for low (LF) and high (HF) frequencies using home-made sensors. Basically, we plug an LF and HF sensor to an Arduino board. Then, using a USB bridge, we route the measurements to pretty much any Android mobile phone through a USB wire (using the great Microbridge library). and visualize the data in graphs.

But enough tech, let’s have a look at what it is like:

Want to try it out? Simply build it for yourself! Get the sources and instructions on the official project page! Hope you’ll enjoy it at least as much as I enjoyed building it (code contributions are welcomed, fork us on GitHub!).

Hence, as part of my Ph.D. Thesis I wanted to discuss this choice and base it on data, first looking at quantitative results (e.g., performances of REST vs WS-*) but then also getting some qualitative data: does REST really makes it easier to build upon smart things? WS-* and REST have previously been compared with respect to performance and features, but no work has been done to elicit the developers’ preferences and programming experiences in an Internet of Things context…

Hence, we conducted a study in which 69 (I promise I did not actually pick the number!) novice developers learned both technologies and implemented mobile phone applications that retrieve sensor data, both through a RESTful and through a WS-* service architecture. The results complement the available technological decision framework when building Internet of Things applications. The results suggest that, indeed, developers find REST easier to learn than WS-* and consider it more suitable for programming smart things (so it is NOT just us ). However, interestingly enough for applications with advanced security and Quality of Service requirements, WS-* Web services are perceived to be better suited.

Actually, we compiled the results in a paper that recently got accepted for Mobiquitous 2012 in Copenhagen. I did not have the chance to present it there (we are kept busy building Evrythng!) but Simon Mayer, our colleague and friend, did a great job presenting it there. Find the slides below:

And the full paper summing up the results which can also be found in greater details in Chapter I of my thesis (from page 90 on).

Convinced? Not? Let us know more about your experience/preference!

But the important part is that we’ve teamed up with entrepreneurs Niall Murphy (founder of WiFi network The Cloud, acquired by BSkyB last year) and Andy Hobsbawm (founder of Online Magic, which later became Agency.com) to form a very cool venture called EVRYTHNG, that is working in the area of… Web of Things! You bet!! Dom has taken upon the role of Chief Technology Officer, while mine is Chief Product Officer. EVRYTHNG is funded by the awesome Atomico (Skype’s Niklas Zennströms’ investment fund), so Dom and I are super excited to be part of a commercial start-up in the WoT space.

EVRYTHNG wants to organize the world’s objects with an Active Digital Identity (ADI) for every thing. We have a vision of dynamic digital services and experiences connecting people and things — where every product and other physical objects are part of the Web. EVRYTHNG’s engine for Active Digital Identities provides technology, tools and services to create ADI profiles for products and other types of objects. We help manufacturers and developers create brilliant new services, apps and experiences that connect things with people.

Feel free to sign-up for our BETA program and browse through our developer resources to learn about our API. Of course, please let us know what you think.

As you might have noticed, our official domain name is now webofthings.org – we wanted to keep this place separate from a commercial .com space. If you like, it’s our promise to you that we’ll keep the Web of Things site separate and keep posting quality, independent material to keep enriching this community more than ever.

We see WoT evolving into a curated source of useful news about what we (and you!) think are the hottest innovations in WoT/IoT technologies for techies and thinkers, and with the support of EVRYTHNG we’ll be able to setup more hackathons and workshops all around the world. In the longer term, we want to foster a strong global community of researchers, practitioners, and designers, and support open-source projects in that area.

We realize WoT has been online for around three years and we take this opportunity to thank you all for your trust, participation, help, suggestions, or simply readership. The day has come to rethink what it has been and where it should go. Therefore we’d really REALLY like your input on what comes next and what you’d love us to do. Send us an email or post a comment below. If you’re lazy, we added a little poll on the right column on our page – we’d love to hear from you!!

(Source: SVJ)

When Olivier Lascar, from Science et Vie Junior asked if I would be interested in participating to an article about the Internet of Things targeted towards teens I just couldn’t resist, especially since, as a kid, I never missed an issue of the magazine! A couple of interviews hours later and here we go: si vous parlez Français, je suis sûr que vous allez comme moi aimer cet article. It is a savory mix between vulgarization and facts, something that anyone (I believe) can more or less relate to, with plenty of well picked examples. The magazine is still on sale (SVJ 268), so get a printed copy. If you can’t, SVJ provided us with a free PDF version for our readers: L’Internet des Objets, SVJ 268

Remarks and commentaires are very welcome, as comme toujours!

Over the last few years, WoT has profiled itself as a major event for the Web of Things community and we can’t wait to see y’all there once again. So, get your ideas/projects/prototypes ready, set, submit!

CALL FOR PAPERS – Third International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2012)
in conjunction with Pervasive 2012, Newcastle, June 18-22, 2012.

Paper submission deadline: March 9, 2012
Notification of acceptance: April 2, 2012
Camera-ready papers due: April 20, 2012
Workshop date: June 19, 2012
Official Website

The world of embedded devices has experienced radical changes over the past few years. Real-world objects, or “Things”, such as home appliances, industrial machines, and wireless sensor and actuator networks embed powerful computers which often are connected to the Internet. Chumby, Gumstix, Sun SPOTs, Ploggs, Nabaztag, and ioBridges as well as the proliferation of data aggregation platforms like pachube are just a few examples of the rapid development of such connected embedded computers. The convergence of sensing, computing and Internet-scale networking provides new design opportunities and challenges, as digital communication networks will increasingly contain real-world devices and allow direct read/write interactions with them. While the “Internet of Things” has become a legitimate research domain in the pervasive and ubiquitous computing communities, its main focus has been on establishing connectivity on the network level in a variety of challenging and constrained environments. As these lower-level, technical problems are being solved, a whole new world of higher-level problems open up. The “Web of Things” is the next logical step in this evolution towards global networks of sensors and actuators, enabling new applications and providing new opportunities. The Web of Things explores the layer on top of connectivity with Things and addresses issues such as fast prototyping, data integration, and interaction with objects. Because the Web is omnipresent and flexible enough, it has become as an excellent protocol for interacting with embedded devices, and the Web of Things is a vision where things become seamlessly integrated into the Web – not just through Web-based user interfaces of custom applications, but by reusing the architectural principles of the Web for interacting with devices.

The “Web of Things” workshop solicits contributions in all areas related to the Web of Things, and we invite application designers to think beyond sensor networks and Web applications, and to imagine, design, build, evaluate, and share their thoughts and visions on what the future of the Web and networked devices will be. The workshop aims at exploring the use of principles and technologies at the core of the Web such as Representational State Transfer (REST), syndication (e.g., Atom), and real-time Web technologies (e.g., HTML5 Web Sockets) for providing access to pervasive and ubiquitous computing services and also solicits contributions related to the Web-based composition of things and physical mashups.

Topics:
- Discovery and look-up for things and their services on the Web
- Web-based things composition and physical mashups
- Real-time communication with physical objects (e.g., syndication, streaming, instant messaging, Web push)
- Human-things interaction models and paradigms
- Security, access control, and sharing of physical things on the Web
- Application of Web tools and techniques for the physical world (e.g., REST, HTML5, caching, cloud services, social networks)
- Applications of the Web of Things (smart homes/cities/factories)
- Deployments and evaluations of Web of things systems
- Business opportunities for the Web of Things

The third edition of the Web of Things workshop series will provide an interactive forum for WoT researchers to learn and discuss about existing efforts with respect to the Web-based interaction of smart things. In order to ensure a high-quality technical session, submissions must cover one of the topics above and should not exceed six (6) ACM SIG Proceedings Template pages. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere as they will be published to the ACM digital library and listed on DBLP. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop. Submission requires at least one author to present the paper on-site. For instructions on how to submit to WoT 2012, visit http://www.webofthings.org/wot/2012/submission.php.

Organizers:
Simon Mayer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland,
Dominique Guinard, Evrythng Ltd., UK,
Erik Wilde, EMC Corp., USA,

Program Committee:
Rosa Alarcon, Pontificia Universidad Catalica de Chile, Chile
Benoit Christophe, Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs, France
Christian Floerkemeier, Auto-ID Labs, MIT, USA
Artem Katasonov, VTT Labs, Finland
Gerd Kortuem, Lancaster University, UK
Matthias Kovatsch, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Marc Langheinrich, Universita della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Switzerland
Rodger Lea, University of British Columbia, Canada
Olivier Liechti, University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, Switzerland
Marino Linaje, Universidad de Extremadura, Spain
Diego Lopez de Ipina, Universidad de Deusto, Spain
Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Florian Michahelles, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Guido Moritz, Universitaet Rostock, Germany
Claro Noda, Universidade do Minho, Portugal
Jacques Pasquier, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Dave Raggett, W3C
David Resseguie, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
Till Riedel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Andreas Ruppen, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Vlad Stirbu, Nokia, Finland
Vlad Trifa, Evrythng Ltd., UK
Inaki Vazquez, Symplio, Spain

Extending Seamlessly to the Internet of Things (esIoT) is an international workshop focused on the integration aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT), we just got the CFP and a couple of our friends are in the PC so you might want to consider submitting something there (of course after submitting to WoT 2012 )

Scope

ICTs evolution has led to wireless personal devices such as smart phones, personal computers and PDAs. These devices have in common that they are designed to operate over IP Networks. Hence, the number of devices that are connected to the Internet is growing exponentially. This has led to define a new concept of Internet, the commonly called Future Internet and Internet of Things (IoT).

The objective of IoT is the integration and unification of all communication systems located surrounds us. Thereby, the systems can get control and total access of the other systems for leading to provide ubiquitous communication and computing with the purpose of defining a new generation of services.

Extending Seamlessly to the Internet of Things (esIoT) is an international workshop focused on the integration aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT). The emerging machine-to-machine (M2M) systems should provide transparent access to information and services through a seamless integration into the Internet. On the one hand, the so-called Web of Things aims for direct Web connectivity by pushing its technology down to devices. On the other hand, cost and energy requirements of embedded devices demand efficient protocols and communication patterns, which affect the application layer. This workshop provides a forum to elaborate on ideas and approaches to adapt, extend, or bridge the existing IoT building blocks, such as ETSI M2M, ZigBee, IPv6/6LoWPAN, RFID, and legacy networked embedded systems. In addition, the impact of the IoT on industry, business, and society, including security and privacy requirements, will be discussed.

Tracks & Topics:
Extending things to Internet through IPv6

Architectures and Middlewares for Internet of Things integration
Global connectivity
End to End / Machine to Machine (M2M) protocols
Protocols for smart things: 6LoWPAN / DASH7 / ZigBee IP
Mobility management
Cloud computing and things internetworking
Standardization and regulatory issues

Web of Things

Lightweight RestFul / CoAP / Lightweight SOAP
Lightweight data structured (EXI)
Resource Directory approaches
Semantic description of things and services
New patterns to communicate with things Blockwise, Observe etc…

Security, trust and Privacy

Lightweight implementations of cryptographic stacks
End to end security capabilities from the things
Security for CoAP and ZigBee IP (DTLS, TLS etc..)
Bootstrapping techniques (PANA, EAP, HIP DEX …)

RFID and end-devices Identification

EPC to IPv6 approaches, and ONS and EPCIS for things
NFC integration in the Internet of Things
Human-device interactions based on RFID/NFC
Protocols and algorithms for the massive identification of things
Naming, address management and addressability issues

Performance modeling and network technologies

Performance analysis (QoS, scalability, reliability, etc.)
Channel and traffic models
Routing protocols for the Internet of Things (RPL…)
Sustainable design and technologies (e.g. energy-efficiency)

Use Cases and Applications

Mobile applications (Android OS, iOS, Windows mobile, etc.)
Real-time data management / Critical Environments
Smart cities / Home Automation / Building Automation
Industrial solutions
Business models
Test-beds and field trial

Special Track: AAL and e-Health (with a special issue for these papers)

AAL and e-Health applications and solutions
Medical communications, protocols and standards
NFC and RFID in healthcare
Living labs and field trials

Well, after several brainstorming sessions with the crew at Evrythng, we had so many application ideas that I had to filter most of them in order not to overload the talk!

Not convinced? Well then make sure you watch the video below (I’m starting, in English, at 5:58:00 but if you understand Italian make sure to listen to the other talks in the session!):

or at least have a look at the slides:

Any other ideas of how we could contribute to Tourism 3.0? Let us know below

Meanwhile, the guys are currently launching a Web version of their plant monitoring iPhone App. It’s currently in private beta, but we have invites for 50 Web of Things readers. Just visit my.koubachi.com and enter the code WOT2011. So WoTters and plant lovers, make sure to check it out!

To get a taste of it, check the video of the neat iPhone app below (@Koubachi: How about an Android version? Pleazzze!)

Vlad and I were always pretty complementary in building our shared vision of the Web of Things. As such, my thesis is focusing more on the “software engineering” aspects of the Web of Things. I’d like to see it as a cookbook for implementing the Web of Things in such a way that for every cross-cutting concern, there is a Web recipe!

The architecture (see figure below) proposes Web solutions to 4 of these concerns: accessibility, findability, sharing and composition. It also introduces the Social Web of Things (where things use social networks) and the notion of Physical Mashups (where things can be used easily in 2.0 Web mashups).

The Web of Things Application Architecture

Here is a short version of the abstract:

[…] The Internet is a compelling example of a scalable global network of computers that interoperate across heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. On top of the Internet, the Web illustrates well how a set of relatively simple and open standards can be used to build very flexible systems while preserving efficiency and scalability. The cross-integration and developments of composite applications on the Web, alongside with its ubiquitous availability across a broad range of devices (e.g., desktops, laptops, mobile phones, set-top boxes, gaming devices, etc.), make the Web an outstanding candidate for a universal integration platform. Web sites do not offer only pages anymore, but Application Programming Interfaces that can be used by other Web resources to create new, ad-hoc and composite applications running in the computing cloud and being accessed by desktops or mobile computers.
In this thesis we use the Web and its emerging technologies as the basis of a smart things application integration platform. In particular, we propose a Web of Things application architecture offering four layers that simplify the development of applications involving smart things. First, we address device accessibility and propose implementing, on smart things, the architectural principles that are at the heart of the Web such the Representational State Transfer (REST). We extend the REST architecture by proposing and implementing a number of improvements to fit the special requirements of the physical world such as the need for domain-specific proxies or real-time communication.
In the second layer we study findability: In a Web populated by billions of smart things, how can we identify the devices we can interact with, the devices that provide the right service for our application? To address these issues we propose a lightweight metadata format that search engines can understand, together with a Web-oriented discovery and lookup infrastructure that leverages the particular context of smart things.
While the Web of Things fosters a rather open network of physical objects, it is very unlikely that in the future access to smart things will be open to anyone. In the third layer we propose a sharing infrastructure that leverages social graphs encapsulated by social networks. We demonstrate how this helps sharing smart things in a straightforward, user-friendly and personal manner, building a Social Web of Things.
Our primary goal in bringing smart things to the Web is to facilitate their integration into composite applications. Just as Web developers and tech-savvies create Web 2.0 mashups (i.e., lightweight, ad-hoc compositions of several services on the Web), they should be able to create applications involving smart things with similar ease. Thus, in the composition layer we introduce the physical mashups and propose a software platform, built as an extension of an open-source workflow engine, that offers basic constructs which can be used to build mashup editors for the Web of Things.
Finally, to test our architecture and the proposed tools, we apply them to two types of smart things. First we look at wireless sensor networks, in particular at energy and environmental monitoring sensor nodes. Then, to better understand and evaluate how the Web of Things architecture can facilitate the development of real-world aware business applications, we study automatic identification [...]
Put together, these contributions materialize into an ecosystem of building-blocks for the Web of Things: a world-wide and interoperable network of smart things on which applications can be easily built, one step closer to bridging the gap between the virtual and physical worlds.

Download the thesis! (PDF, 245 pages, 24MB)
Get the citation key! (Bibtex)
or… have a look at the final presentation:

Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:

Our research bridges the fields of Web technologies and embedded sensing into a unified vision called the \emph{Web of Things} — where the Web’s well-known standards and tools are leveraged to seamlessly blend NEDs (Networked Embedded Devices) with the existing Web infrastructure. By drawing upon tools and techniques from both domains, we define the fundamental building blocks of the Web of Things as an extension of the current Web paradigms. After evaluating the limitations of current Web technologies with respect to the requirements of NED applications, we propose practical solutions to alleviate these difficulties to enable the development of efficient, event-driven, and scalable DSAs (Distributed Sensing Applications). Finally, we propose an end-to-end, fully Web-based framework that fosters fast prototyping of distributed sensing applications that run on top of heterogeneous NEDs.

In contrast to existing research in sensor networks, the central question explored in this thesis is how much of the existing Web infrastructure can be reused to accommodate embedded devices. We further examine the common belief that Web standards are inappropriate for building efficient DSAs. Experimental results and prototypes are provided to support the hypothesis that using Web standards for NEDs is possible. Our results further show that the Web is not only a suitable, but actually a desirable medium to build distributed sensing applications that match the requirements for future large-scale sensing systems.

We provide a comprehensive — conceptual and empirical — investigation of the usage of Web standards to exchange information with embedded devices, and the contributions of our work are multiple. First, our results are relevant to the sensor network and pervasive computing communities, as they support the hypothesis that the existing Web ecosystem is sufficient \textit{as is} to build a new generation of scalable and flexible participatory applications on top of heterogeneous NEDs. Second, the Web community at large can build upon our set of guidelines to push the Web into the physical world by integrating devices in the Web fabric, thus making the idea of a Web API for the real world realistic. Third, we explore the practical usage of Web technologies in various contexts, from smart spaces to smart cities, and show that a fully Web-based infrastructure is an excellent basis to build an ecosystem of reconfigurable cyber-physical systems. Finally, we hope the work presented here will serve as inspiration for future Web developers and sensor network researchers. Bridging the gap between these two worlds will very likely shed light upon an unexplored design space to create more potent solutions for important societal problems, from energy-efficient buildings, to catastrophe detection and response systems, to more livable and enjoyable cities.

And here are the slides that I used for my final defense:

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, remarks, etc. Looking forward to your feedback!

Yes, the news came out a few days ago through the New York Times:

At Google X, where he is working on the Web of things, according to people familiar with his role, he has the mysterious title of rapid evaluator

So Google might well be working on the Web of Things. We, we kind of guessed already, through project like the Android at Home (which is you ask me is definitely missing the “Web” of “Web of Things”). However, I’m asking you, fellow WoTers, should we fear it or like it? How much of it is “land-grabbing” and how much is actual work-in-progress?

I’m willing to like it because it will generate a lot of attention to our field, but to fear it as well as their announcements might kill many startups in the egg based on bulldozer-type of marketing and the “if google does it we can’t be as good” syndrome (because, yes they are good!). You want an example: look at the Power Meter story, which was discontinued a little while ago after de-motivating a number of startups and researchers. We were amongst them as this announcement made us definitely give up the commercialisation of the Energy Visible project, wrongfully?

I’m telling you, WoTers from all over the world, let’s show them what WoT researchers and WoT startups can achieve. After all, we, WoTers are years of research ahead of them, aren’t we? What’s your take on it?

In a nutshell, the talk was about how HTML5 WebSockets would soon be ready for pushing data to mobile phones in a standard way (and possibly soon to/from any embedded device?). In a Web of Things context, we used this at the MIT Auto-ID labs to push data “directly” from RFID readers to Android or iOS mobile phones within a few lines of Javascript code (for the client) and 20 lines of Java code (for the server).

In this talk I focused on showing the elegance of using WebSockets for Web of Things applications. Indeed, thanks to the very simple Javascript client library, a WebSocket client is summed up as follow:


var myWebSocket = new WebSocket("ws://URL");
myWebSocket.onopen = function(evt) {
alert("Connection open ..."); };
myWebSocket.onmessage = function(evt) {
alert( "Received Message: " + evt.data); };
myWebSocket.onclose = function(evt) {
alert("Connection closed."); };

myWebSocket.send("Hello Web Sockets!");
myWebSocket.close();


Hard to make it simpler, right? However, the current reality is slightly different. Indeed, as the standard is still evolving, browsers and application/web servers support WebSockets in very different flavours (or just don’t!). Hence, in this talk I was also discussing the use of abstraction frameworks and in particular the impressive Atmosphere framework that deal for you with the current heterogeneous WebSocket support.

However, rather than a lengthy description here, I invite you to watch the talk which was recorded by the great Zurich GTUG crew, enjoy (sorry for the bad-jokes, it was a relaxed event ):

Due to popular demand (I wish ) I also posted the sources here.

And the slides are still available on slideshare.

When Johannes Schoening (a good research friend of mine) first mailed me about the project, I had to laugh for half an hour (before starting to wonder what kind of drugs he was on). But then he sent me a package, containing a sample of his invention: the first, Web-connected (ok, through a proxy but still) …. cookies! The idea is so simple, but just so nice: a box, full of ingredients for cooking cookies and containing some eatable QRCodes. These standard codes are resolved to a URL than can then be redirected to any online content through the QKies Website (German only, sorry about that!). Can you think of any better way to invite your friends to your next party or of announcing some happy event to your best (geeky) friends?

QKies – sag’s mit Keksen from r3 media on Vimeo.

Besides being a neat little product there is also one important thing we can learn from it: simplicity is the way to go forward to slowly but steadily bring the Web of Things to the masses! Big up Johannes

My focus was very much on thinking about the building-blocks (or layers) required to gradually ease the development of Internet of Things applications thanks to Web (inspired) protocols, techniques and tools. The underlying question being:

How can the Web be leveraged to ease the development of Internet of Things applications and bring it closer to non-specialists?

In a nutshell, I looked at four “layers” of integration: accessibility (REST, Smart Gateways, IP for devices), findability (lightweight semantics, microformats, Google of things, local search infrastructure), sharing (social Web of Things, social networks, delegated authentication for things, etc.) and composition (physical mashups, Web composition engine, real-world composite applications, etc.). I then applied these layers to two domains: Wireless Sensor Networks and Global RFID deployments (EPC Network). The more technically inclined of yours might want to know that these layers are not strictly stacked, OSI-types of layers, but rather composed of flexible building-blocks that can be used or not depending on your application requirements.

The presentation is a short summary of these layers, their implementations and evaluations. The first 30 slides is the content that was actually presented during the defense, the rest of the slides are backups that go slightly more in depth on various building-blocks.

Enjoy, feedback is always very welcomed and, as said, stay tuned here for the written thesis.

A few weeks ago, I started posting a series about the project we were working on while at MIT: applying the Web of Things patterns and blueprints to the RFID global network (EPC Network). Better late than never, here is the last part of the posts series: Physical Mashups.

Physical Mashups are applications unifying the Web of today and tomorrow’s Web of Things. Tech-savvies, i.e., end-users at ease with new technologies, can create Physical Mashups by composing virtual and physical services. Following the trend of Web 2.0 participatory services and in particular Web mashups, users can create applications mixing real-world devices such as home appliances or sensors with virtual services on the Web.

Thanks to the deployment of the EPC software stack in the cloud and the implementation of a RESTful architecture for RFID, we can now implement Physical Mashup editors for enabling users to flexibly model use-cases of RFID infrastructures. Let us think for instance of an Electronic Article Surveillance system (aka EAS). For this use-case, we design new mashup building-blocks:

These modules were implemented as building-blocks a modified version of the nice Clickscript mashup editor. Reducing interfaces of the EPC Network to Web interfaces enables each building block to be implemented with a small amount of JavaScript code. Using these building-blocks and other basic blocks, we can implement several EAS use-cases within a few clicks. As shown in the figure below, the building-blocks of the RFID mashup editor communicate with several components of the EPC Cloud Infrastructure. First, the RFID-reader block subscribes to the t-pusher HTML5 WebSockets push service using a particular reader ID (e.g., exit-gate). As a consequence, it gets pushed all the RFID events for this reader. The EPCIS block is then used to check whether the pushed RFID number (i.e., EPCs) represent goods that were already sold. To check this, the block uses a RESTful HTTP request on our open-source EPCIS Webadapter.

If it is the case, nothing happens. If it isn’t the case (i.e., the goods were stolen), the Video Camera block is triggered. This components represents a Webcam that can be used to take snapshots through a RESTful API. The URI of the snapshot is then sent to all subscribers of a particular topic (i.e., URI) through t-Pusher. As an example we developed a small mobile Web application with Sencha Touch which subscribes to the topic and loads the corresponding image alongside with the EPC number of the stolen good (see mobile phone in the figure below). Such an application can be used to push information about the theft to all staff members in a store.

Once a mashup has been successfully created and tested locally with Clickscript, it can be exported to our Physical Mashup Engine where is it going to be deployed remotely executed. This illustrates well the benefits of transforming every standard in the EPC Network to offer RESTful Web APIs: development is streamlined to Web development and cross-integration with existing services on the Web (e.g., social networks, visualization tools, could infrastructures, mashups) becomes very straightforward.

The full use-case was tested in a lab deployment at the MIT Auto-ID Labs featuring a standard gate (LLRP) RFID reader and an off-the-shelf Webcam as shown in the figure below. The average observed RTT (round trip time: from the reader, to the Amazon Cloud instance, through the mashup engine and finally to the mobile Web application) was around 1 second. However, it is worth noting that this RTT stronlgy depends on factors such as the available connection bandwidth, the type of instances used on Amazon EC2, the current load of the cloud appliance, etc. Since these factors cannot all be controlled this is a real challenge for IoT / WoT applications in the cloud and we are eager to hear about your real-world experiences in the comments!

For more details about the project, have a look at the published paper or the slides below:

Why do we write this, as in why would you care and what it means for the WoT community? First, we’ll finally have the time & focus to bring this community to a whole new level. Second, so that you know we do care a lot about wot.com and plan to reshuffle things here quite a bit over the next few weeks – it’s just that writing and finishing our research took all our time. Third, it will be time to introduce more and more code and material that people could use, and get a more concrete platform out here. Fourth, even if it looks like we’re copy pasting each other’s life with Dom, I just needed to reassure you that we’re still two different persons and didn’t merge into a single semi-gingery entity (yet..), and especially we’ll join forces to build and hack some damn fine projects soon.

More importantly, that means we’ll be able to come back to blog a little more often (once our defense is over – that is) and share our thoughts as we evolve from academia into real-world, industrial, and entrepreneurial projects and and… (oops, maybe I’m saying already too much, so I stop here).

Stay tuned – more to follow soon!

Reading such CFPs makes me feel like at some point we should merge these workshops (WoT, ATI, Touch the Web) and create a Web of Things conference all together… what would you, WoT researchers think of that?

For now, let’s publish the ATI cfp:

Ambient Things on the Internet – ATI 2011

A workshop to be held in conjunction with Web Information System Engineering (WISE 2011)
October 13th – 14th 2011, Sydney, Australia

Abstract:
Advances in RFID, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, sensor technology, and similar standards are competing to connect the physical world with the virtual world, via. the Internet. Various alliances like the IPSO (Internet Protocol for Smart Objects) and the FIA (Future Internet Assembly) are promoting the Internet of Things (IoT) as the next advancement of the Internet. While the Internet is poised to lay the foundation for connecting all things, the Web is mutating to provide services for the physical world, giving birth to Web of Things (WoT). The WoT is the platform on which applications are built for accessing and harnessing the vast amount of inherent information that is prevalent in things around us. The ongoing integration of physical and virtual worlds, creating ambient environments, poses many opportunities as well as challenges. New applications and services, bridging the virtual and physical worlds, have already emerged in various domains like business, healthcare, and infrastructure. These new developments however, raise many research questions: interaction, security, collaboration, context, discovery and privacy of physical things in the virtual world. These and many more are yet to be fully addressed.

This workshop aims at gathering researchers from the field of Internet applications and Web based Infrastructure to discuss new opportunities and hurdles to leverage the possibilities of Web applications and services accessing the physical world. We intend to discuss the recent developments and target researchers from academia and industry to join hands in this emerging research area. The workshop will lead to identifying new directions and setting the scope of developments in this area. The participants will be enlightened with intellectual discussions, highlighting the advances in technology that bridges the physical world and the digital world. The “Ambient Things on the Internet (ATI)” workshop solicits contributions in line with this vision that are original, unpublished and not currently under review by another conference or journal. We invite researchers, application developers and designers to share their ideas and visions on what the future of the Web and networked things will be.

Specific topics include (but not limited to):
• Infrastructure of Ambient environments
• Communication systems and architectures for the Internet of Things
• Web composition of physical things
• Innovative applications for the Web of Things
• Robustness of environment management with the Internet of Things
• Future technologies bridging the physical and virtual worlds
• Business models and processes for the Internet of Things
• Impacts on the security, privacy and risks on the physical world
• Applications and interaction for social networking of physical things
• Location and discovery of things on the Internet
• Smart objects
• Case studies in areas of Education, Healthcare, Agriculture, Logistics and Transport

Web Sites:
ATI 2011
WISE 2011

Important Dates:
Abstract submission: Aug 21st, 2011
Paper submission: Aug 26th, 2011
Notification of acceptance/rejection: Sep 20th, 2011
Submission of camera-ready papers: Oct 7th, 2011

What are the killer apps of the Internet/Web of Things?

A simple and not exactly rare question, so I came up with a number of traditional answers taken from our previous work and prototypes such as: drastically simplifying home automation and expending the cross-devices possibilities, making end-user things programming a reality, allowing (real-time) and tracking of every goods on the planet, making cities/transportation/agriculture smarter, linking objects and people through social networks, finding your keys anywhere in the world, etc, etc.

I also gave him a number of links to great startups in the field and briefly described some of their products: Evrythng, IoBridge, ThingWorx, Sen.se, Koubachi, Mirasense, OpenPicus, the Sun Spot crew, etc, etc, etc!

No way! He was still not finding a true killer app in those. My take is that although the world is almost ready for the Web of Things, we (as a community) still have to get a bit more down to earth, thinking beyond platforms about very simple use-cases that we can implement today already and that people can relate to.
Suggestions anyone? Let’s kick off the discussion!

Enjoy the article online as well:

	Read the article online >
The Internet and the Web of Things

But for this to happen, “we need a hub to receive all the sensors” according to a recent blog post. I disagree. We don’t need one hub, we need many hubs. But even more so, we need the ability to establish direct connectivity between anything electronic and applications. Exactly in the same way as one can search and download specific stuff from particular users that have it in a p2p network.

We have been exploring the field of home automation since the early days of WoT, and we have prototyped several versions of a fully web-based “smart home gateways” that allows the integration of heterogeneous embedded devices into high-level interactive, mobile, and event-driven Web applications. Our first iteration was built with Samuel Wieland [4,5] project, and then superseded by Aparat [3,6], done by another former student Vlatko Davidovski with whom we designed a modular framework (based on OSGi) to easily create applications, develop new devices drivers, that supported Web-based messaging (both pubsubhubbub and Comet), microformat-based resource and device discovery over HTTP, among other features. With another student (Andreas Kamilaris) we have designed in 2009 HomeWeb, a Web-based framework for integrating sensor networks on the Web and afterwards extended it to the home automation domain [1]. We also recently published a journal paper on this work as well [2].

As we’re nearing to IPv6 (dooms)day (actually passed it), more and more routers and networks will be switching (or at least supporting) it, and this will pave the way to better adoption and ripening of the market for Wi-Fi and other IP-enabled consumer electronics. On top of this ecosystem of interconnected devices, a Web-based framework that facilitates development and distribution of applications will clearly unlock the potentials and an open market that drive us away from the currently dictatorial and closed solutions in this domain. At least this is what we hope for.

Clearly, the biggest challenge ahead (and one that I keep seeing only marginally addressed in our research field so far) is security, authentication, and devices sharing. If your whole house is connected to the Web, there are major risks involved as virtually one could entirely control your house (turn off security systems), spy by monitoring all your movements (or hot summer nights via surveillance cameras), or do even more critical things such as lock elevators, close doors, and so on.

The security issue leads us to the following question as to what would be best? An open source security solution that everyone knows and can improve upon by eliminate bugs (thousands pair of eyes are better than a few), with the risk that any hacker can find out exactly how the whole system works? Or a black-box proprietary closed-source system that is hard to analyze and crack, which might be in fact more bugged? Also, how one can combine various modalities for securing that you are really “you” and you are at your home (RFID can hacked, mobile phones can be lost, pin codes can be transmitted). Also, what will be the role of biometric ID solutions (retina scanners, etc)? As long as authentication data is sent by an application over the network, then it can be forged with another “software emulation”, how this could be prevented?

We would love to have your opinion on these questions and feel free to join our discussion in the comments (or on our LinkedIn or facebook pages). We’d really appreciate if you would share with us projects and services that you think can solve this issue.

1. Andreas Kamilaris, Vlad Trifa and Adreas Pitsillides. The Smart Home Meets the Web of Things. Int. J. of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 7(3), 2011. [pdf]
2. Andreas Kamilaris, Vlad Trifa and Andreas Pitsillides. HomeWeb: An Application Framework for Web-based Smart Homes. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Telecommunications, Ayia Napa, Cyprus, May 2011. [pdf]
3. Vlatko Davidovski (M.Sc. thesis at ETH Zurich). A Web-oriented Infrastructure for Interacting with Digitally Augmented Environments.
4. Samuel Wieland (M.Sc. thesis at ETH Zurich). Design and Implementation of a Gateway for Web-based Interaction and Management of Embedded Devices.
5. Vlad Trifa, Samuel Wieland, Dominique Guinard and Thomas Michael Bohnert. Design and Implementation of a Gateway for Web-based Interaction and Management of Embedded Devices. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Sensor Network Engineering (IWSNE’09), Marina del Rey, CA, USA, June 2009. [pdf]
6. Vlad Trifa, Dominique Guinard, Vlatko Davidovski, Andreas Kamilaris and Ivan Delchev. Web Messaging for Open and Scalable Distributed Sensing Applications. In Proc. of the 10th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2010), Vienna, Austria, June 2010. [pdf]

Parts of our test-beds at ETH Zurich already run IPv6 (thanks in great parts to our local IPv6 champion, Mathias Kovatsch).

Of course, it is worth noting that we would even add more support to a 6LoWPAN world day, the stripped-down version of IPv6 that supports resource-constrained devices such as Wireless Sensor Nodes but IPv6 is already a good start!
How about a Web of Things day?

2011 is the year of many WoT realizations and this is reflected in the, we believe, rather thrilling program of WoT 2011. Here is a brief preview of WoT is to expect

Morning: after a short welcome introduction we will deep into real world architectures with three papers discussing how smart things can actually be Web-enabled and what are the architectures and technologies that make it possible.

We will then discuss the Social Web of Things as well as the Semantic Web of Things with three papers illustrating how things are blending with the social graph and leveraging the semantic Web.

Afternoon: after a nice lunch, full of HTTP requests here and there, we will be discussing actual deployments of the WoT as well as its concrete applications. Four papers will be presented, ranging from how business processes can leverage the WoT, cloud computing and REST to how users can be put at the very center of the Web of Things.

Finally, we will have a great and open demo session where the participants will be invited to demonstrate concrete and working (well half-working is ok as well) WoT prototypes.

The fact that this year is the year of WoT realizations is also reflected by the fact that a number of companies, developing, deploying and selling WoT technologies will be present.
Hans Scharler from ioBridge will present their rather impressive Thingspeak platform. ThingWorx will present their professional platform for connecting the real-world devices to business applications.

This teaser would not be complete without showcasing the hackaton that we organize before the workshop (11.06.2011) where we expect lots of creative participants to build innovative apps on top of Web of Things prototypes and products like the Sun Spots (thanks to Oracle for providing them!) and the disruptive Sen.se platform.

Can’t wait to be there!

Full program of the Web of Things Workshop (WoT 2011) available here! and description of the hackaton here!

Learn to program embedded devices using the .NET Micro Framework and the Netduino Plus board. Then connect your devices to the Internet with Pachube, a cloud platform for sharing real-time sensor data. All you need is a Netduino Plus, a USB cable, a couple of sensors, an Ethernet connection to the Internet—and your imagination.

This looks lovely (other than the reference to the thing that starts with dot and ends with net and we’re looking forward to check it out. Especially as they just announced a hosted Yaler instance (try.yaler.net, register here to get an account), I guess to try the examples in the book, so that makes this book even crunchier.

In a recent post, we were explaining how in a project common to MIT and ETH Zurich, we simplified deployments of IoT applications based on the EPC Global standards.

We operated this simplification by applying four of the Web of Things patterns: Cloud Computing, RESTful Interface, Real-Time Web and Physical Mashups.

In the first related post we described how we used Cloud Computing and RESTful Interfaces. It is now time to talk a little bit more about one of the other pattern: the Real-Time Web.

Real-Time Web: HTML 5 WebSockets to Enable Near Real-Time Applications

Early on, experts of the RFID domain asked us to enable mobile or Web clients access to the raw data directly pushed by RFID readers. The challenge here is that the Web was designed mainly as a client-pull architecture, where clients can explicitly request (pull) data and receive it as a response (we have a paper about the matter, here!). This makes uses-cases where near real-time communication is required rather challenging. As an example, a typical use-case is one in which we would like to push events that are being recorded by an RFID reader directly to a mobile browser application for monitoring purpose.

Here, the “Real-time Web”, one of the most recent blueprints of the Web, can be leveraged. The Real Time Web encompasses several new techniques that can be used to push events directly to browsers. We focus on two of these here. The first one, called Comet (also called HTTP streaming or long-polling) is based on the concept of long-lasting HTTP connections and keep-alive messages. While this is supported by most browsers and HTTP libraries, it works by using an existing loop-hole. More recently, Websockets (part of the HTML5 drafts) were proposed. Websockets propose duplex communication with a single TCP/IP connection directly accessible from any compliant browser through a simple Javascript API. The increasing support for HTML5 in Web and Mobile Web browsers makes it a very good candidate for pushing data on the Web.

For the EPC Network, we created tPusher, a service that combines a RESTful API with a Web-socket and Comet server. Using
a RESTful API, clients can subscribe to RFID event notifications for a particular reader by using a URL such as:

http://.../t-pusher/reader/READER_ID

This initiates a Websocket connection with the server on which RFID events recorded by READER_ID will be pushed.

Our implementation is based on the great Atmosphere framework. Atomosphere is a Java abstraction framework for enabling push support on most Java Web servers. One of the advantages of this approach is to be able to deploy tPusher on recent Web Servers such as Grizzly, which are highly optimized to push events on the Web because of their usage of non-blocking threads for each client. In order to support browsers or other clients that do not support HTML5 Websockets yet, we use a client-side abstraction Javascript library called Atmosphere JQuery Plugin which falls back to a Comet connection in case Websockets are not supported by the client.

To better understand the impact of tPusher in the context of RFID apps let us talk about our demonstration: When setting up RFID readers or maintaining existing deployments it is valuable to have a direct feedback of the tags observed by a particular reader in order to monitor the manufacturing process or to debug the readers. In the current implementations of the EPC software stack this would require to use and configure a (expert) monitoring tool such as the Fosstrak LLRP Commander on a desktop computer. Thanks to the RESTful interface to the Real-Time Web capability of tPusher, the tags observed by any reader can now be directly pushed to any browser or HTTP library.

We developed as Mobile Web page that can display them in a user-friendly manner. The page uses HTML5, Javascript with the Atmosphere JQuery Plugin. All code required for such a page to subscribe to events pushed by readers through tPusher and display them fits within 5 lines of Javascript. The code is shown below:


// called whenever an event is pushed :
function callback(response )
{alert(response.responseBody + response.transport) ;}
// subscription to the events of reader "exit1 "
$.atmosphere.subscribe (
"http://EPC_CLOUD_APPLIANCE/t-pusher/reader/exit1" ,
callback , $.atmosphere.request =
{transport : ’ websocket ’ }) ;

Add some bits of Sencha Touch HTML and CSS and you get a nice, user friendly mobile Web application within a few hours of work. The app does not require any installation (just access a URL!) and works accross mobile Web browsers (e.g., iPhone Webkit, Android Webkit / Firefox mobile, etc.)
.

In a next post we will talk about the last pattern: Physical Mashups.

For those who can’t wait, you can already sneak into the presentation of the full project below.