The Great IoT Roll-Out

Today, is the largest roll-out of an open platform for the Internet of Things ever. So you have to be thinking, “How does this change my plans”

Today, millions of users are installing a securable open source IoT Platform. Users of Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 are eligible for free upgrade to Windows 10. Windows 10 includes an AllJoyn server as a core service.

The developers of digital controls in buildings have long been pioneers in the Internet of Things (IoT). For a long time, a strong concern was how to keep these systems off the Internet, especially as the level of security in these technologies was so poor. For the home hobbyist, the IoT began in with the release of the X10 protocol in 1975. X10-based systems were only embraced by hobbyists, because unless it was your hobby, you would never tolerate the drudgery and significant weekend time to configure and operate your systems.

Despite all the buzz, the IoT has been a confusing mass of non-standard protocols and custom applications. In 2011, Qualcomm presented AllJoyn as a common framework for interacting with the IoT. The code was later open-sourced and presented to the Linux Foundation. In 2013, the AllSeen Alliance was formed to encourage adoption of the AllJoyn platform.

The AllSeen Alliance is more than startups and communications companies, although there are plenty of those. Old line computer companies such as Microsoft and Lenovo are members. Building centric companies that shun open source, such as Honeywell are members. NREL has signed on. By now, each of your customers has probably installed some AllJoyn in a building.

AllJoyn complements the Message Queueing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), and open source bridges between the two are available. While AllJoyn is designed to handle discovery and message transfer over a proximal [local] network or local network. AllJoyn interfaces can support need from control applications to media streaming. MQTT is a publish/subscribe framework in which a MQTT broker acts as a public IP addressable node. Publishers and subscribers connect through the broker. MQTT was designed for remote monitoring and control for most part. Most deployments of MQTT deployments use WAN network atop cellular technologies.

Last week, the OBIX Technical Committee voted out OBIX 1.1 to what I hope is the final public review. The focus of the entire effort was improved interoperability of different code-bases through more abstract formal information models. Standardized encodings enable easy and accurate exchange of messages from XML to JSON, the protocol of choice for today’s web developers, and COaP, a newer protocol appropriate for very large sensornets.

All this get especially interesting when you consider Bindings rather than Encodings. One of the new Bindings defined in OBIX is WebSocket. The Smart TV Alliance has embraced OBIX encoded in JSON and bound to WebSocket as a means to communicate between consumer electronics. To a growing degree, MQTT is being used as a lighter weight, higher performance variant of WebSocket, with binding gateways also available in Open Source.

We now have some standards that stir the pot in a way the pot has not been stirred for a while. With wireless network companies supporting the AllSeen Alliance, we may soon see the open source AllJoyn as an option on your home router. A home router is a natural gateway between a proximal network and a Pub/Sub network. Less open solutions such as ZigBee will need to re-position themselves.

Larger systems using formal controls schemas, and probably OBIX, will soon look to AllJoyn as a way to extend their situation awareness. Natural bridges between the Consumer Electronics Association with the Smart TV Alliance platform and AllJoyn-based applications come from compatible bindings, compatible encodings, and open standards.

What will really turbo-charge this is the cross-platform development environment that comes with Windows 10. It can come as no surprise that Microsoft is releasing DotNet development tools for AllJoyn applications. ROTOR has long supported DotNet on multiple platforms, but support for the advanced development libraries that make DotNet so valuable on Microsoft platforms has been spotty.

This changes with AllJoyn component on Windows 10. Each version of the pre-production DotNet AllJoyn library has been released on the same day for Windows, Android, and IOS. At the end of June, 2015, the high-touch Microsoft development environment is now available to for all three platforms in all DotNet Languages.

Building system programming has always been isolated, and not really up to consumer and corporate expectations. The bar is now raised. Time to polish up your your IoT plans.

Big Data, Buildings, and the Internet of Things

Big Data is the hot new buzz-phrase for something that buildings system integrators have long struggled with. Last Thursday (3/29), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched its public initiative on big data for government, the Big Data Research and Development Initiative.

The purpose of big data is to support analytics, that is the massive crunching and correlating of data to find patterns. Early targets of the initiative include:

• putting the government’s own data sets into open formats
• pushing states to include a data or statistical literacy component in their education plans
• establishing ways to continuously collect data on prescribed topics as opposed to relying on temporary snapshots

The real time use of big data that is most commonly in the news click-stream and advertising analytics. This back-room technology only makes the news when there are privacy violations. Big data analytics are why Google is now in a death-match with Facebook, and why the European Union is in a privacy face-down with Google.

In government, the best known big data analytics are in security and crime prevention. Einstein systems gate all information in or out of each cabinet-level department, searching for patterns that indicate intrusion. The NSA and FBI are doing something with big data; the NSA may or may not be consolidating information on all internet communications at its Utah Data Center.

Buildings have long struggled with big data. They are not designed for storing or to processing too much. System instructions regularly warn to minimize trend reports. Product from a number of leading makers of environmental controls struggle with monitoring just a small portion of the buildings on the UNC campus. Building systems houses all aim at cloud-based analytics in their next release, but each that I have seen struggles with pushing information to the cloud. I have watched very fast networks struggling to handle data collection from a 100 buildings, and watched data edifices crack under the hundreds of gigabytes they produce each week.

We are just now entering the period in which the internet of things (IOT) becomes real, and the IOT stores its data in the cloud. Last month, Ninja Blocks (http://ninjablocks.com/) got its initial funding. Ninja blocks are consumer sensors that are as cheap as X10, and send their data to the cloud. Ninja blocks use open source hardware (download schematics from the site) to sense their environment: acceleration, temperature, current, humidity, motion, distance, sound, light and even capture video. You can create and sell your own Ninja Blocks to connect to the Ninja Cloud.

The Ninja Cloud connects this sensor information to social and cloud services. Sensor events can send tweets, SMS, or email. Ninja photos and video can move automatically into Facebook or Dropbox. The user plugs in a Ninja Block and then uses the web to develop scripts in the Ninja Cloud using point and click.

This may not be the same as energy management, but one of the more successful campus energy projects of recent years set up Facebook pages for buildings on the University of Mississippi campus. Students were encouraged to friend the buildings; systems in the buildings tweeted their energy use. The project raised Student awareness.

Ninja Blocks is a new company. They can probably do most of what they claim. Their team of entrepreneurial young engineers seems smart, quick, and committed. Their business plan is inspired using open source hardware to let others create new value sources for the Ninja Cloud. Still, I wonder whether their approach will scale well. They may hit the same wall that I have seen, when too many sensors are continuously logging too many points to the cloud.

Whether or not Ninja Blocks makes it, they are the future. Other start-ups, such as the Bluetooth-based, open source i-voltmeter will change the way we think sensors work. The data gathered by the internet of things will make its way to the cloud, where it will be Big Data. Building systems that do not participate will find themselves pushed aside.

The value of Big Data is in re-purposing and in re-use. The cost of gathering big data is going down, and will continue to go down. The Big Data from buildings will accumulate at an astounding rate. The value of Big Data will be in continuous re-harvesting for more information, the way click-streams and advertising are harvested again and again. Building operations and failure predictions are only the start.

Big Data from Building systems must learn to share well with others. This industry must consider its own version of the federal goals: open formats for data, better statistical literacy in systems, and the methods to collect and store very large volumes of data loom large. We may need to use the common semantics from Project Haystack as a common ontology for our big data. It will be mandatory to share with the Big Data from the IOT, both to accept IOT data into Building Clouds, and to send Building data into the IOT clouds, including the Ninja Cloud.

It will be a fast ride. Into the Clouds!