For the second consecutive year, Exosite had the opportunity to present at Sensors Expo & Conference, the leading sensors event in North America. The event is focused on sensors and has emerged as one of the largest and most important gatherings of engineers and scientist involved in the development and deployment of sensors systems.

Representing Exosite was Tom Dever. Tom has over 20 years of marketing and engineering experience. Currently, he serves and the Director of Business Development for Exosite and leads the charge, architecting system connected solutions for customers. After a 10-year stint as director at Intel he moved into the M2M/IOT space and has a passion for connecting humans and machines in intelligent new ways. His focus has always been on building new revenue streams for companies using the latest and greatest technologies.

This year, Tom presented on the topic, “Changing Business Models Using Cloud Services and Connected Sensors.” The presentation was geared toward real-world customers and examples of how companies are changing the playing field in their industry by connecting sensors to the cloud and using that data to make intelligent decisions. Specifically he addressed how companies can generate new streams of income, reduce maintenance cost for service departments and how connected sensors are changing the competitive landscape.

In addition to the presentation, Sensors Expo & Conference gave a few lucky Exosite team members the ability to get out of the office and meet face to face with engineers and scientist from all over the world and learn about the most up-to-date innovations in sensor technology.

http://www.ctt.vzwtechnologies.com/m2mtour

If you are interested in being involved in this meetup group, whether to attend or simply contribute or listen to what’s happening, you can join the Twin Cities MN group or hopefully find one in your community. The current plan is to have another meeting in June and hopefully find a larger space.
http://www.meetup.com/IoTTwinCitiesMN/

Exosite’s Foosball Avatars

The foosball table came from Costco and conveniently had goal sensors already built into the table. So, we grabbed an Arduino board & Ethernet shield and wired up goal sensors and Avatar sensors from the table. After adding a few lines of C code to send the raw values up to the cloud, the foosball table was online!

Internet of Things Foosball Table from Exosite on Vimeo.

Up in the cloud, we used an Exosite Portals free community account to add some lua scripts to process the raw data coming into the One Platform. The raw and post-processed data all gets aggregated under Avatars so each player has a history. This history is then used to create The Leaderboard.

The first version of the The Leaderboard was pretty boring – just some stats like Games Won, and Total Goals, etc… So, we came up with a way to create a Skill Multiplier that is used to weight the result. That, combined with the fact that the Top Player stat is only good for 7 days, ensures that the team pays close attention to their game playing strategy (for better or for worse!).

This was part of an update to allow users to log into their account directly from this area instead of first navigating to the login page. If you navigate to any public dashboard, pricing page, or any publicly available page excluding the login page, you will see this improvement.

For details about what else we changed in this release, check out this link: http://support.exosite.com/entries/23106906-Portals-0-7-14-Release-January-25-2013

With wireless connectivity (WiFi, cellular) almost everywhere, it’s become trivial to connect to the Internet from wherever you are. While this trend allows you to stay up-to-date with your Facebook and Twitter feeds, it also means that the devices you use on a day to day basis can connect easily to the Internet. A connected ‘device’ can be pretty much anything that has a microprocessor in it…that’s right, those little things that are in cars, household appliances (from coffee machines to refrigerators), home security systems, smoke alarms, smart phones, computers and more. If you stop and looked around, it’s very likely you can see at least a few devices with microprocessors in them. If you haven’t seen products that allows your plant to tell you when it needs to be watered, or ones that allow you to remotely feed your pets, you will soon. The growing prevalence of cloud devices (devices that you can interact with in the cloud) and web sensors signal a revolution that is referred to as the “Internet of Things”.

Parrot's Flower Power; a web-connected plant monitoring device

Most people today have at least one cell phone. The cell phone market is a mature market – even though there are still hundreds of millions of cell phones sold every year, the number of cell phones in the world will be more or less equal from year to year, regardless of how often people change or update their phones. The market for Internet of Things devices is in its infancy. The average household in the USA has 25 electronic devices, and although today very few of these are connected to the Internet, the CES trend shows this will quickly change. In addition, devices such as thermostats that were previously “passive” are now being enhanced expressly for the purpose of having an Internet connection because of the connectivity to the home-owner. As this trend marches across the private and commercial sectors, connected devices will be found in every company, every farm, every factory, every industrial installation…you get the picture. The deployment of connected devices and web sensors is at a tipping point.

Connecting devices is what Exosite does: enabling companies to connect their Internet of Things products to the cloud, to each other, and to their users. We want you to be able to understand your world better, making it more convenient to access information that would help you make decisions about your environment…either one that you are in day to day, or one that you need to monitor remotely.

Our off the shelf connectivity products allow you to quickly prototype and then deploy products with new modes of interaction and connectivity: Would you like to trigger an email every time your front door is opened between a certain time period? Want to easily data from your factory floor into your customer’s hands? Want to be able to remotely switch your devices on and off from the Internet? Is the challenge of energy monitoring and load balancing a factor for your systems? Do you need easier ways to perform software updates?

All of these modes of interactions can be done by connecting off-the-shelf hardware to our cloud data platform. We support a wide range of hardware, starting with the hobbyist-favorite Arduino, to commercial cellular modems, to popular development kits from Texas Instruments, Renesas, ST Microelectronics and Atmel. We enable you to get going fast, and also provide engineering services to jump start the development of cloud-enabled devices (and the back-end enterprise-class cloud data base system) that offer convenience, security, or other solutions to their end-user…

Get in touch if you have any questions or comments!

The custom widget coding is done in Javascript and HTML, anyone with some web background can create their own widget that has access to devices and data from their Exosite account. When you go to create a custom widget, it also provides you with a number of templates to start with, several of these use Google Chart APIs.
Let’s look at an example. Here is the original off the shelf graph provided by Exosite.

It’s nice but what if I wanted to customize this a bit. The first thing I could do is start a custom widget, grab one of the drop-down templates for a Line Graph and make it size of 4×2 (Portals is on a 1×1 grid system). Here is what you get. This example template code uses a Google Chart API by the way.

Now let’s say I want to change the color scheme, along with some mouse over functionality. I get to this.

Obviously this is a simplified example, but users now have the power to go build their own widgets and create the UI for their needs. Vendors and OEMs can use this to build page templates, what we call Domain Dashboards, to create their own web app, completely branded and customized for their products application.

The full view of my widget migration on my Exosite Portal dashboard:

Documentation for Custom Widgets

Reference code for the custom widget used in this article (the black background version)

Don’t have an Exosite account? It’s free to sign up for a community account. Sign up

What does this mean?  In Exosite’s One Platform, clients (which represent devices and users and accounts, anything that has data and/or ownership) may have Lua application scripts inserted that can acccess all of that client’s data and resources.  So, in a simple example, if you were sending raw sensor data (let’s say it is an analog value 0 to 1023) you could run a script that waited on new values and then converted that analog value to degrees Fahrenheit and store it into a different data source, or keep a running average in another data source.  You could insert a function call to one of our dispatches (SMS, Email, HTTP, Twitter, etc) to push the data to someone or something that may need it.

These scripts can be as complex as required and multiple scripts can be inserted for every platform client.   Algorithms can be written to process data, advanced escalation functions could be created to handle alert conditions, and simple parsing routines could take a package of data and parse it out. For product vendors, scripts will be cloned for Model Types, so as every new device is enabled you can kick-off a script that provisions with a cellular provider(set plan, activate), writes data into a manufacturing database (who, when, where, etc), and even tweets about it (yes we support a twitter api in scripts).

To learn more,  you can check out our script documentation and examples repository.  In Portals, you will find the ‘Scripts’ link on the manage menu.  All scripts provide status (stopped, running, etc) and have a debug function to print out debug information which is useful for development.

• Script Documentation / API
• Example Scripts

Script Editor

Here is a simple example that converts an analog voltage to degrees F from a Thermistor.
Example

local analog = alias['analogTemp']
local temp = alias['temp']
local B = 4450.0 --K
local R25 = 100000.0 -- Ohms

local function ntcTherm (rMeasured, beta, r25)
 local To = 298.15
	local r_inf = r25 * math.exp(-beta / To)
	return beta / math.log(rMeasured / r_inf)
end
local function celsius (tempK)
	return tempK - 273.15
end
local function fahrenheit (tempK)
	return (celsius(tempK) * 9.0/5) + 32
end
debug("starting")
while true do
	local ts1 = analog.wait()
	debug("Got a new value!")
	local analogvalue = analog[ts1]
 -- Convert Analog Voltage to Resistance
	local rPullup = 100000.0
	local adcScale = 1023
	local Rmeasured = rPullup * analogvalue / (adcScale - analogvalue)
	local tempK = ntcTherm(Rmeasured,B,R25)
	local tempF = fahrenheit(tempK)
	temp.value = tempF
	email("person@example.com","New Data",string.format("New Temperature is %d", tempF))
end

This Portals release brought mostly some bug fixes to the custom widgets that were giving a few of our users some problems. We fixed a memory leak issue that was causing browsers to crash…we tracked it down to an infinite loop that was treating memory the same way that Cookie Monster treats cookies!  That pesky problem should be gone now, but if you experience any problems, please let us know.

Check out some of the other features, improvements and bug fixes for this release in our knowledge base.

Cloud Connectivity Part 1: Creating a Dashboard, Adding an Event, Creating an Alert
Cloud Connectivity Part 2: Chatting with Your Device; Creating a Cloud Script
Cloud Connectivity Part 3: Sharing Your Data
Cloud Connectivity Part 4: Advanced Scripting