Elevator Pitch
In 2018 we will see a big change in the IoT landscape: based on LTE-m devices can connect to the internet over long distances and will be running off batteries for years. Learn about the principles and protocols involved and how to leverage JavaScript down to the hardware to build your own solution.
Description
This year I changed my job to an entirely new domain: building cloud-based infrastructure for low-power IoT devices that connect to the internet. I had to learn a lot about this new world in where fighting browser bugs now seems like a fun activity. If you add hardware, everything becomes ten times more complicated.
Since these kinds of devices are very resource-restricted (think Arduino), a new way of thinking about “clients” is necessary, and a new set of protocols. HTTPs is simply to resource-intensive and not suited for devices that for the most of the time will be hibernating. MQTT tries to be a lightweight messaging protocol which is optimized for high-latency and unreliable networks and in this talk I will walk you through the basics of the protocol so you can understand the core-concepts and get a head-start for implementing your first IoT prototype. MQTT implementations exist for all major operating systems and is supported by the major cloud providers.
In this talk I focus in MQTT since cellular IoT devices will be soon be the norm and these will support this direct, secure, IP-based connection to a an IoT service.
We will put this knowledge into use in the second part of my talk which focuses on building a simple IoT device using an espruino Wifi. I chose this device since it gives a good idea of what features and resource will be available in future LTE-m supporting hardware. And since we can use JavaScript to program it interactively I can demonstrate that building prototypes of IoT products is easy and fast.
Using the knowledge from this talk you will have all the tools needed to start building your own smart products that extend the reach of your software into the physical world.
Or you will just know how to build a fancy xmas tree decoration with a REST API that can show emojis.
Notes
I have already some experience giving talks, a list of previous talks can be found on my website. You can find recordings there as well. I work at Nordic Semiconductor in a team building a cloud-based management platform and therefore have very early insights into this topic. I won’t and can’t use this talk for selling our services, since it is not officially approved by our company. My focus is on inspiring curiosity. I try to be very inclusive in the way I give talks and I put a lot of effort into being beginner-friendly and very practical.
All slides and code that I will be showing during my talk will be open-sourced.