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#526 – Why IoT Is Difficult with Jonathan Beri
Welcome Jonathan Beri, founder of Golioth!
Today’s episode is sponsored by Mouser Electronics, who are discussing RISC-V. Check out their page on resources about RISC-V and how you can purchase kits that include chips using the open source ISA and learn more about how they can benefit your project.
- What makes IoT so hard? “It’s a system of systems”
- Commercial off the shelf (COTS) systems are whitelabeled hardware with custom firmware/software
- We use a brief example of a forest fire sensor using the ABC board
- Firmware and security models
- AWS IoT vs Azure IoT platforms
- Implications of choosing a cloud provider
- Jon has a background in hardware
- He started at Google working on Firebase. Later they attempted a “Firebase for Arduino” that did not pan out.
- He then joined Nest shortly after the Google acquisition, working on the communications.
- Procurement and planning was interesting for Nest, especially because they added sensors that weren’t available to the user / firmware right away.
- Thread is a protocol that creates mesh network on a wide range of radios
- Every device can talk to one another
- It uses 2.4 GHz and is built on top of 802.15.4
- How do thread devices get back to the internet?
- OpenThread runs on nrf52840
- Tutorial on OpenThread
- After Nest, Jon went to Particle and worked on embedded
- OpenThread based
- There were lots of adventures with early Cat-M1 on the Ublox R410B
- Particle bought RedBear, a Chinese startup with a lot of RF knowledge
- Hardware is designed by Mohit Bhoite, who has been on Embedded.fm and also is a circuit sculpture master
- Jon’s last job was at WeWork (RIP?)
- He wanted to learn more on the cloud side of things.
- There were a number of WeWork sites spread out over 600 buildings. Each of these has a physical security need (door locks, turnstiles, etc)
- The challenge is that his team didn’t own or have the ability to change the hardware
- Wanted to build the experience
- Proxy (startup)
- Going towards solving some of these problems
- Physical constraints
- ABC board
- Vertically integrated embedded platform
- Particle B523
- Hardware matters
- Android Things, now depricated
- Building scooters
- Nest door lock with Yale
- FreeRTOS with AWS
- Who do you hire to do the “in-between” hardware and the web?
- Reasons IoT products fail
- IT cares about setup, managing it, integrating into business process
- Enterprise cnversations and managing devices
- Fleet management
- Fleet stuff is normally for the business person
- Golioth
- Jon wrote about CoAP and how it works
- Chris wishes there is a site like BuiltWith…but for IoT devices
- Protocols are an arbitrage opportunity
- Internet is now standard part of RTOSes
- Mongoose
- Contiki
- Riot OS
- NuttX
- HALs (Hardware Abstraction Layers) or PALs (Platform Abstraction Layers)
- “Where’s the porting guide vs where’s the hello world”
- Find Jon on
- Zephyr slack
- The Interrupt (associated blog)
- Sign up for more info about the upcoming platform on Golioth.io
- More info about Jon’s stealth mode startup on Stacey on IoT
Thanks to our Patrons for sponsoring today’s show as well!