InoThings ++ Professional IoT Conference - what was and what will be
Hi, Habr!
Almost exactly a year ago - at the end of January 2018 - we tried to hold the first professional conference for developers of devices, systems and projects of the “Internet of things” InoThings ++ 2018.
Apart from the fact that it was the first for us - except for small trial sections on IoT on Highload ++ and RIT ++ - we tried to make it sufficiently stand out against other IoT conferences, which are now quite a lot.
InoThings ++ is a conference for people doing real projects in IoT. We have no reports with Gartner charts and forecasts of market growth in billions of dollars, there are no beautiful presentations about the immense state support and the struggle for the status of the most intelligent city. We invite to speak only those who really work with their hands - and can tell about it.
In this case, by developers we understand not only programmers and electronics engineers, but also project managers - business representatives, whether they are system integrators or end customers interested in either sharing their experience or finding out how things are going in different directions of IoT, where watch and what to expect.
Under the cut - a story about what happened a year ago (with videos of all reports), and what to expect in a month and a half - and most importantly, whether you need to go to InoThings ++ (of course, you need to).
InoThings ++ 2018 was held in two streams - a total of 16 reports. Usually, following the results of the conference, we decode 4-5 reports for Habr, which seemed the most interesting - but in this case it seemed to me that, on the one hand, everyone deserves attention, and on the other hand, to a stranger who was not at the conference, orient himself in looking for the right In brief theses it is rather difficult and inconvenient.
Therefore, I will post below all 14 records of reports, accompanied by their small comments on the essence of the report. All reports are freely available in the playlist on YouTube , and this is a full-fledged video with very good quality, and not just the voice of the speaker put on the slideshow of the presentation.
NB: The locations of the speakers are as of January 2018.
A wonderful story about life situations for those who are just planning to immerse themselves in the development of embedded systems - about how strongly hardware, software and external services are tied to each other, how unexpected problems can arise from this combination and what is the myth of “this is an open source?” , the library is ready, and if anything, the community will help us. ”
The best question from the audience at the end of this story was - alas, no longer on record - “And how to explain to the management, which requires from us, as from ordinary programmers, precise deadlines, that we have a lot different here, and you never know in advance, where mined? ".
Of course, it is possible to talk on this topic endlessly, and for an outside ear it sounds like such “engineer bikes”, half-entertaining, half from the series “well, I don’t fall into this.” And then on Habré come articles filled with pain from devices, thousands of hacking into the same DNS, which its owner suddenly decided to turn off, or projects that stopped for weeks, because the Chinese in the supplied module changed the model of the flash drive.
Another report on the topic, on which there is too little 45 minutes - the topic of time synchronization. Even on large "real" computers, it is not so simple, although decades of software development have made the problems quite invisible for the user (but not always noticeable for the programmer) - on the systems in IoT, with their unstable communication channels, various methods of obtaining at least any time sync and low-power microcontrollers, on which about Linux for many, many years, do not even have to dream, solving a banal query “we want a real-time message on the device with an accuracy of 1 second sign it "could lead to separate good research.
And here, as in many other areas, the developers are divided into two categories - some do not know the answers to questions, others do not even know about the existence of questions.
How to go from second to first? Listen to Anton!
Not by LoRaWAN, IoT is alive, and not even by draft national standards. For telecom operators and manufacturers of classic telecom equipment, this market is not just there, but very much alive, from the good old M2M SIM cards installed in tens of millions of cars, security systems and other hardware to the emerging LTE-M and NB-IoT.
Alexey, in fact, tells how all this is seen in Ericsson - the development of the market, the needs of customers, and the ways of technical development.
Under the rather general name, Mikhail actually tells very specific things about a very specific market - Sierra Wireless is one of the largest manufacturers of modem modules, including for NB-IoT / LTE-M technologies.
Actually, the whole story is about what new technologies bring to us from the point of view of end devices, their characteristics, operating modes and in general everything you need to know not only the electronics developer, but even the project manager in a good way. Just to understand what will happen with the market and with the devices on it in the coming years - what can be hoped for and what is possible and what is too early to promise to customers.
Your humble servant talks about what data transmission technologies in IoT already exist in nature - and why you shouldn't count on a “silver bullet” that will solve all problems in all industries, become a single standard, ensure compatibility of everything with everything ...
Unfortunately, the idea that it is only necessary for everyone to come together and agree on a single standard, and then everything will be fine, still alive - in some places with the words “national standard”, “GOST” and “import substitution” that are pleasant to many ears.
In the report on the example of specific technical advantages and disadvantages of various systems, often going into the basic physics of the process, I show why this will not happen in any foreseeable future. For each specific solution, it is necessary to consciously choose the technology that is optimally suitable for this particular case.
If I talked about LPWAN networks in general, then Vlad reveals in more detail one of the directions - mesh (mesh) networks. For many, they are associated exclusively with ZigBee / Z-Wave and “smart homes”, but in practice, mesh networks are a separate broad topic, with their own standards, which are not always interchangeable, their own implementation features.
Moreover, even the field of application of cellular networks has long gone beyond the boundaries of the “smart home” - now industrial projects are being built on them, and lighting control over large sites, and much more.
One of the big topics in IoT is the topic of power supply of devices: one of the advantages of modern IoT technologies is the ability to produce devices of the “glued and forgotten” category, that is, for example, sensors that do not require any maintenance for years.
The main problem with this is the battery - and, of course, customers are asking, and the developers are looking for the possibility of using "green energy", that is, first of all, solar energy.
Andrei in the report talks not only about the products of his company, combining solar panels with thermoelectric generators, but also about what one can expect from such systems in the Russian (and Belarusian) climate - not everywhere and not always, let's face it, pampering the excess sun .
Just before the conference on resources dedicated to IoT, there was news - SAP and the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Combine (NLMK) launched a system of ultra-precise positioning of NLMK employees in real time. The system not only allows you to track whether the employee has not stopped for a couple of hours in the corner, but also, what is more important, whether people are in dangerous areas, in the path of the conveyors, close to technological processes with limited access.
The complexity of such a system is obvious to anyone who has ever worked with positioning in rooms - GPS does not work in them, positioning on mesh networks in general has not left the individual pilots, and positioning on BLE beacons does not suffer from high accuracy even in domestic and office space, what can we say about the metallurgical plant.
About the content of the report, I think it is enough to say that Konstantin is a person who personally, with his own hands, built this system on NLMK, so he can literally tell everything - from technical details to those arising from the introduction of administrative and business problems.
It is rather unusual to see a lawyer on the technology forum - however, the Kirill report became one of the most popular on Inothings ++ 2018.
In fact, there is nothing unexpected in this - it is enough to recall the same John Deere tractors, the manufacturer of which reminded buyers that the tractor is not quite theirs, at least not so much that they have the right to independently modify their firmware.
There is a Russian case in the report, and the present is one of the clients of Nevsky IP Law.
Does the manufacturer have the right to manage, at its discretion, the device purchased by the user? In what cases, on what scale, what does legal practice say about this? In order to assess the scale of the brave new world that is opening up before us, it is necessary to view it.
This lecture can be viewed as a continuation of the topic raised by Maxim Krentovsky - if Maxim spoke about the development process of software and hardware devices, then Andrei goes to the next stage - features of implementation and maintenance of the fleet of devices, when this park can potentially grow not only thousands. and up to the millions of hardware that need to be installed, commissioned, monitored, maintained and maintained.
We continue to move along the specifics of the development - if Maxim Krentovsky and Andrei Tsislav were talking mostly about the end devices, then Sergey proceeds to the top-level software.
On the one hand, at least to update the central software, developers will not have to personally go around 100,500 apartments in which their water meters are installed that are not remotely updated, because one update of 50 KB with a weight on their channel will consume half of their batteries, on the other - all we are aware of the many-day failures of large services, both public and commercial, resulting from the unsuccessful selection, unfolding curve and insufficient maintenance of seemingly standard and familiar software components.
Actually, in his report, Sergey tells us what is necessary - and most importantly, what is not necessary - to do in order not to get on Habr with another such epic failure story.
By the way, I have already been asked a couple of times - is it possible to submit two reports from one company at once? It seems to me that the three reports of Strizh respond to it - no, when selecting reports we don’t look at the number of submissions from one company, we look at their interestingness, uniqueness and relevance of the content.
Stanislav tells about the fact that the failure of any piece of hardware, any communication channel and any software is a question with words not “if”, but “when”. Everything breaks down. Sooner or later, but breaks. The only question is what will you do to break it less often - and what will you do when it has broken anyway (as well as how you know about it).
One of the big problems of the electronics development market is the shortage of good specialists. The development of IoT only aggravates this problem - due to the fact that IoT solutions are very strongly tied to technologies, business processes, technological processes, the economy and even the weather, their development turns into a complex interdisciplinary field.
IoT Samsung Academy is a big project of the Russian office of Samsung Electronics to open IoT laboratories in universities, where students could try to make simple, but real IoT-system using microcontroller cards, LoRa radio communication and other quite modern and relevant components .
The task of the IoT Academy is not only to grow future developers, but also to give students an idea of the very interdisciplinary field mentioned above, in which all issues, from legal to technological, are closely intertwined.
And we are completing the selection with actually two reports in one - Eugene talks about how the implementation of an IoT project may look like from the customer, why he needs it, what the project economics is, and what to do about it in general.
I’m talking about some of the technological difficulties of equipping a cow with sensors - and this is not a story about any specific devices, but again about the same interdisciplinarity of IoT development and a large number of conflicting requirements that are not always able to be met in a particular device without going to serious compromises.
But what awaits us this year - and should you run immediately to submit your report or buy tickets?
Of course, worth it.
Who do we see and wait as speakers?
Although officially InoThings ++ is called the “developer conference,” in fact, it is a conference for all involved in the creation, implementation and operation of the Internet of Things in all their forms. Last year it is clear that we don’t shy away from any areas, and in this the degree of diversification will grow even more, because there are more and more pressing questions that need to be answered - so, a year ago, few people seriously thought about the prospects for state regulation in IoT, And now this is one of the most relevant topics.
Therefore - be sure to come if you:
The conference is a place where you can not only listen to the speakers, but also, in the literal sense of the word, catch them by the elbow and interrogate them with passion for any questions related to their activities.
The reporting procedure is extremely simple, via the ontico.ru interface . After registration, you will need to select a conference and fill out the basic information about the report — theses, a couple of paragraphs of the description, the intended audience and the level of complexity.
To submit an application, a ready-made presentation is not required, we will ask you to send it closer to the beginning of the conference, so I have a strong request for the speakers - fill in the application now .
This will greatly facilitate the work of the conference program committee. To be afraid that you will write something wrong, not interesting enough or not beautiful enough, do not - we do not reject applications on formal grounds, if we have any questions, comments, or just someone from the PC members has doubts We will contact you and ask for additional clarification to us of what we have not understood.
Moreover, the publication of the announcements of this year’s reports will begin soon - and if you want to get into the front row, you must act now.
If you are not sure whether your topic is suitable for the conference theme - for simplicity, consider what is appropriate. “The Internet of Things” is a very broad concept, and as you can see from this article, we are open to almost any suggestions.
As for tickets for visitors, they are bought at this link . The price of tickets as the conference approaches is slowly but surely increasing.
The conference will be held on April 4, 2019 in the Information Space at Moscow, 1st Zachatievsky Pereulok, Building 4 - this is next to the Kropotkinskaya and Park Kultury metro stations.
Almost exactly a year ago - at the end of January 2018 - we tried to hold the first professional conference for developers of devices, systems and projects of the “Internet of things” InoThings ++ 2018.
Apart from the fact that it was the first for us - except for small trial sections on IoT on Highload ++ and RIT ++ - we tried to make it sufficiently stand out against other IoT conferences, which are now quite a lot.
InoThings ++ is a conference for people doing real projects in IoT. We have no reports with Gartner charts and forecasts of market growth in billions of dollars, there are no beautiful presentations about the immense state support and the struggle for the status of the most intelligent city. We invite to speak only those who really work with their hands - and can tell about it.
In this case, by developers we understand not only programmers and electronics engineers, but also project managers - business representatives, whether they are system integrators or end customers interested in either sharing their experience or finding out how things are going in different directions of IoT, where watch and what to expect.
Under the cut - a story about what happened a year ago (with videos of all reports), and what to expect in a month and a half - and most importantly, whether you need to go to InoThings ++ (of course, you need to).
InoThings ++ 2018 was held in two streams - a total of 16 reports. Usually, following the results of the conference, we decode 4-5 reports for Habr, which seemed the most interesting - but in this case it seemed to me that, on the one hand, everyone deserves attention, and on the other hand, to a stranger who was not at the conference, orient himself in looking for the right In brief theses it is rather difficult and inconvenient.
Therefore, I will post below all 14 records of reports, accompanied by their small comments on the essence of the report. All reports are freely available in the playlist on YouTube , and this is a full-fledged video with very good quality, and not just the voice of the speaker put on the slideshow of the presentation.
NB: The locations of the speakers are as of January 2018.
Maxim Krentovsky, ReLabs - “The pain of developing software and hardware systems”
A wonderful story about life situations for those who are just planning to immerse themselves in the development of embedded systems - about how strongly hardware, software and external services are tied to each other, how unexpected problems can arise from this combination and what is the myth of “this is an open source?” , the library is ready, and if anything, the community will help us. ”
The best question from the audience at the end of this story was - alas, no longer on record - “And how to explain to the management, which requires from us, as from ordinary programmers, precise deadlines, that we have a lot different here, and you never know in advance, where mined? ".
Of course, it is possible to talk on this topic endlessly, and for an outside ear it sounds like such “engineer bikes”, half-entertaining, half from the series “well, I don’t fall into this.” And then on Habré come articles filled with pain from devices, thousands of hacking into the same DNS, which its owner suddenly decided to turn off, or projects that stopped for weeks, because the Chinese in the supplied module changed the model of the flash drive.
Anton Sysoev, Svyaz engineering M - “IIoT: designing systems of the industrial Internet of things. Time Tracking
Another report on the topic, on which there is too little 45 minutes - the topic of time synchronization. Even on large "real" computers, it is not so simple, although decades of software development have made the problems quite invisible for the user (but not always noticeable for the programmer) - on the systems in IoT, with their unstable communication channels, various methods of obtaining at least any time sync and low-power microcontrollers, on which about Linux for many, many years, do not even have to dream, solving a banal query “we want a real-time message on the device with an accuracy of 1 second sign it "could lead to separate good research.
And here, as in many other areas, the developers are divided into two categories - some do not know the answers to questions, others do not even know about the existence of questions.
How to go from second to first? Listen to Anton!
Alexey Kovalev, Ericsson - Telecom for IoT: from RAN to CORE
Not by LoRaWAN, IoT is alive, and not even by draft national standards. For telecom operators and manufacturers of classic telecom equipment, this market is not just there, but very much alive, from the good old M2M SIM cards installed in tens of millions of cars, security systems and other hardware to the emerging LTE-M and NB-IoT.
Alexey, in fact, tells how all this is seen in Ericsson - the development of the market, the needs of customers, and the ways of technical development.
Mikhail Glukhovchenko, Sierra Wireless - IoT technologies for mobile networks and devices
Under the rather general name, Mikhail actually tells very specific things about a very specific market - Sierra Wireless is one of the largest manufacturers of modem modules, including for NB-IoT / LTE-M technologies.
Actually, the whole story is about what new technologies bring to us from the point of view of end devices, their characteristics, operating modes and in general everything you need to know not only the electronics developer, but even the project manager in a good way. Just to understand what will happen with the market and with the devices on it in the coming years - what can be hoped for and what is possible and what is too early to promise to customers.
Oleg Artamonov, Unwired Devices - LPWAN Competing Technologies
Your humble servant talks about what data transmission technologies in IoT already exist in nature - and why you shouldn't count on a “silver bullet” that will solve all problems in all industries, become a single standard, ensure compatibility of everything with everything ...
Unfortunately, the idea that it is only necessary for everyone to come together and agree on a single standard, and then everything will be fine, still alive - in some places with the words “national standard”, “GOST” and “import substitution” that are pleasant to many ears.
In the report on the example of specific technical advantages and disadvantages of various systems, often going into the basic physics of the process, I show why this will not happen in any foreseeable future. For each specific solution, it is necessary to consciously choose the technology that is optimally suitable for this particular case.
Vlad Zaitsev, Unwired Devices - Cellular networks: tell me who your neighbor is and I will tell you who you are
If I talked about LPWAN networks in general, then Vlad reveals in more detail one of the directions - mesh (mesh) networks. For many, they are associated exclusively with ZigBee / Z-Wave and “smart homes”, but in practice, mesh networks are a separate broad topic, with their own standards, which are not always interchangeable, their own implementation features.
Moreover, even the field of application of cellular networks has long gone beyond the boundaries of the “smart home” - now industrial projects are being built on them, and lighting control over large sites, and much more.
Andrey Dyusmikeyev, Medium - Energy Absorption for Powering Autonomous Sensors
One of the big topics in IoT is the topic of power supply of devices: one of the advantages of modern IoT technologies is the ability to produce devices of the “glued and forgotten” category, that is, for example, sensors that do not require any maintenance for years.
The main problem with this is the battery - and, of course, customers are asking, and the developers are looking for the possibility of using "green energy", that is, first of all, solar energy.
Andrei in the report talks not only about the products of his company, combining solar panels with thermoelectric generators, but also about what one can expect from such systems in the Russian (and Belarusian) climate - not everywhere and not always, let's face it, pampering the excess sun .
Konstantin Nekhaev, Geyser-Telecom - Accurate positioning of personnel on the example of particularly dangerous production
Just before the conference on resources dedicated to IoT, there was news - SAP and the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Combine (NLMK) launched a system of ultra-precise positioning of NLMK employees in real time. The system not only allows you to track whether the employee has not stopped for a couple of hours in the corner, but also, what is more important, whether people are in dangerous areas, in the path of the conveyors, close to technological processes with limited access.
The complexity of such a system is obvious to anyone who has ever worked with positioning in rooms - GPS does not work in them, positioning on mesh networks in general has not left the individual pilots, and positioning on BLE beacons does not suffer from high accuracy even in domestic and office space, what can we say about the metallurgical plant.
About the content of the report, I think it is enough to say that Konstantin is a person who personally, with his own hands, built this system on NLMK, so he can literally tell everything - from technical details to those arising from the introduction of administrative and business problems.
Cyril Mitigin, Nevsky IP Law - How IoT will hack our legal system
It is rather unusual to see a lawyer on the technology forum - however, the Kirill report became one of the most popular on Inothings ++ 2018.
In fact, there is nothing unexpected in this - it is enough to recall the same John Deere tractors, the manufacturer of which reminded buyers that the tractor is not quite theirs, at least not so much that they have the right to independently modify their firmware.
There is a Russian case in the report, and the present is one of the clients of Nevsky IP Law.
Does the manufacturer have the right to manage, at its discretion, the device purchased by the user? In what cases, on what scale, what does legal practice say about this? In order to assess the scale of the brave new world that is opening up before us, it is necessary to view it.
Andrey Tsislav, Swift - Development of IoT devices - something that is not written in the books
This lecture can be viewed as a continuation of the topic raised by Maxim Krentovsky - if Maxim spoke about the development process of software and hardware devices, then Andrei goes to the next stage - features of implementation and maintenance of the fleet of devices, when this park can potentially grow not only thousands. and up to the millions of hardware that need to be installed, commissioned, monitored, maintained and maintained.
Sergey Aksyonov, Swift - Anti-patterns of developing software systems for the Internet of Things
We continue to move along the specifics of the development - if Maxim Krentovsky and Andrei Tsislav were talking mostly about the end devices, then Sergey proceeds to the top-level software.
On the one hand, at least to update the central software, developers will not have to personally go around 100,500 apartments in which their water meters are installed that are not remotely updated, because one update of 50 KB with a weight on their channel will consume half of their batteries, on the other - all we are aware of the many-day failures of large services, both public and commercial, resulting from the unsuccessful selection, unfolding curve and insufficient maintenance of seemingly standard and familiar software components.
Actually, in his report, Sergey tells us what is necessary - and most importantly, what is not necessary - to do in order not to get on Habr with another such epic failure story.
Stanislav Elizarov, Strizh - Almost reliable solutions
By the way, I have already been asked a couple of times - is it possible to submit two reports from one company at once? It seems to me that the three reports of Strizh respond to it - no, when selecting reports we don’t look at the number of submissions from one company, we look at their interestingness, uniqueness and relevance of the content.
Stanislav tells about the fact that the failure of any piece of hardware, any communication channel and any software is a question with words not “if”, but “when”. Everything breaks down. Sooner or later, but breaks. The only question is what will you do to break it less often - and what will you do when it has broken anyway (as well as how you know about it).
Tatyana Volkova, Samsung Electronics - IoT Samsung Academy - what can we give to the market?
One of the big problems of the electronics development market is the shortage of good specialists. The development of IoT only aggravates this problem - due to the fact that IoT solutions are very strongly tied to technologies, business processes, technological processes, the economy and even the weather, their development turns into a complex interdisciplinary field.
IoT Samsung Academy is a big project of the Russian office of Samsung Electronics to open IoT laboratories in universities, where students could try to make simple, but real IoT-system using microcontroller cards, LoRa radio communication and other quite modern and relevant components .
The task of the IoT Academy is not only to grow future developers, but also to give students an idea of the very interdisciplinary field mentioned above, in which all issues, from legal to technological, are closely intertwined.
Evgeny Belov, MTS; Oleg Artamonov, Unwired Devices - Digital Livestock: How and Why?
And we are completing the selection with actually two reports in one - Eugene talks about how the implementation of an IoT project may look like from the customer, why he needs it, what the project economics is, and what to do about it in general.
I’m talking about some of the technological difficulties of equipping a cow with sensors - and this is not a story about any specific devices, but again about the same interdisciplinarity of IoT development and a large number of conflicting requirements that are not always able to be met in a particular device without going to serious compromises.
InoThings 2019 ++
But what awaits us this year - and should you run immediately to submit your report or buy tickets?
Of course, worth it.
Who do we see and wait as speakers?
- Developers of electronic devices, ready to talk about issues and solutions in areas related to the "Internet of things"
- Developers of both embedded and high-level software for IoT systems
- System integrators who are ready to talk about the practice of implementing IoT projects, the problems that have arisen and the economic effect
- Customers who have already implemented such systems, and are ready to share their impressions and warn against errors
- Experts who are ready to talk about legal issues, technologies, ways of development - and all the other common questions, the understanding of which is vital for the implementation of IoT-systems
Although officially InoThings ++ is called the “developer conference,” in fact, it is a conference for all involved in the creation, implementation and operation of the Internet of Things in all their forms. Last year it is clear that we don’t shy away from any areas, and in this the degree of diversification will grow even more, because there are more and more pressing questions that need to be answered - so, a year ago, few people seriously thought about the prospects for state regulation in IoT, And now this is one of the most relevant topics.
Therefore - be sure to come if you:
- Software or electronics developer who wants to listen to his colleagues and chat with them
- Project manager or sales person who wants to hear the views of both developers and end customers
- IoT systems architect who wants to understand technology development prospects
- Top-manager of a large business who looks at the prospects for the introduction of IoT with interest, but does not understand where to go and what the consequences will be
The conference is a place where you can not only listen to the speakers, but also, in the literal sense of the word, catch them by the elbow and interrogate them with passion for any questions related to their activities.
The reporting procedure is extremely simple, via the ontico.ru interface . After registration, you will need to select a conference and fill out the basic information about the report — theses, a couple of paragraphs of the description, the intended audience and the level of complexity.
To submit an application, a ready-made presentation is not required, we will ask you to send it closer to the beginning of the conference, so I have a strong request for the speakers - fill in the application now .
This will greatly facilitate the work of the conference program committee. To be afraid that you will write something wrong, not interesting enough or not beautiful enough, do not - we do not reject applications on formal grounds, if we have any questions, comments, or just someone from the PC members has doubts We will contact you and ask for additional clarification to us of what we have not understood.
Moreover, the publication of the announcements of this year’s reports will begin soon - and if you want to get into the front row, you must act now.
If you are not sure whether your topic is suitable for the conference theme - for simplicity, consider what is appropriate. “The Internet of Things” is a very broad concept, and as you can see from this article, we are open to almost any suggestions.
As for tickets for visitors, they are bought at this link . The price of tickets as the conference approaches is slowly but surely increasing.
The conference will be held on April 4, 2019 in the Information Space at Moscow, 1st Zachatievsky Pereulok, Building 4 - this is next to the Kropotkinskaya and Park Kultury metro stations.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/440706/