Last week I was lucky enough to go along to meet Sydney’s excellent IOT crew in Surry Hills. The ideas, the hardware, the soldering irons, the flashing lights and the beer was flowing.

It seems everyone was interesting in two things.

  • How do I upgrade my house so it does awesome quirky stuff automatically?
  • How do I get involved in this upcoming $8.9 trillion market?

Let’s start from the top, again…

What is the Internet of Things?

Technically

In a nutshell, the Internet of things is the product of sensors, technology and networking all coming together to allow buildings, infrastructure and other resources to swap information. Today, the Internet of things and machine-to-machine data falls under the big data umbrella with projects just beginning.

Personally

Pete Brown on the DotNetRocks podcast put it well…

“Get fresh eggs when you want them and avoid the waste. Imagine every fridge on your street chatting with the local convenience store inventory.”

Interconnected automated vehicles. Everyone wants a car that can drive itself and coordinate to reduce pollution and increase safety.

How do you get involved?

All this exciting conceptual discussion about interconnect devices sounds very exciting but it’s still very early days. For a .Net software developer like myself it all seems a little far fetched. For some reason it’s a costly hassle getting a web server added to washing machine or fridge. Do I need that right now?

Technically

Buy an Arduino, a single-board microcontroller, from your local electronics store and write some C++ for it to think for itself.

Socially

Go to the Sydney IOT meetup next month. They explore new ideas with hands on examples. They share recent products and discuss their merits and success.

Join the success stories!

This is the problem. Small to medium sized IOT financially successful stories are hard to come by. Real world hands on popular IOT case studies are rare.

The low cost of micro controllers means there are many interesting art projects having some success.

Improving package delivery. Inventory tracking. Home automation. Sport, fitness and health. Energy and natural resource management. These are the sorts of projects that are giving IOT a shot.

Let’s abandon our mobile phones

When I think about IOT I think about smart interconnected devices, mobile phones. What’s the difference between IOT and mobile apps? It’s something i’ll continue to ponder.

All will become clearer when we abandon our phones, in the year 2020, and start our reliance on hidden embedded devices…

I’m looking forward to the next #IOTSydney. See you there!