IIoT – Ireland Internet of Things

History of IoT in Ireland – what it is and where it’s going

By Beth Flanagan, CTO and Founder, Togán Labs 

Beth ‘pidge’ Flanagan is the former release manager of the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded at Intel’s Open Source Technologies Center. She is a well known open-source software developer, project maintainer and a respected contributor to the OpenEmbedded, the Yocto Project and Oryx Linux (among many other projects). Based outside of a small village in the rural west of Ireland, Beth now runs Togán Labs, a proudly Irish start-up developing some of the core technologies which underpin the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 (or ‘Embedded Device Manufacture’ as it was known when she started out!)

In this series of articles, Beth looks at some of the fundamentals of IoT from the standpoint of a developer who has been working in the field long before this term existed. She explores how some IoT hype might differ from reality and then moves on to take a look at where the real innovation is happening and what IoT really means for Ireland?

We shouldn’t really need to sell the value of folk music to an Irish audience! The idea of being free to riff- and build-on what has come before is something fundamental to Irish culture.

Open source is to technology, what the folk tradition is to music and art. It is the ability to build freely on what has come before and to share ideas: collaborating as a community to get further, faster. In the case of software, this means sharing the underlying source code in which the software is written; allowing anyone to read, use, change and redistribute it.

At first glance, putting your hard work out there for others to share around, may seem more than a little crazy. But although few of us realise it, OSS is now working behind the scenes in all aspect of our daily life: inside our phones and smart devices, inside the server farms and applications which run our businesses, even holding up the fabric of the Internet.

Billion-dollar global corporations (Red Hat, Mulesoft, MongoDB, Elastic) have grown from giving away OSS. But perhaps more significantly, the centibillion tech giants which define our age (Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, Uber, Air BnB…) would not exist in the way they do today, had they not been able to build on OSS.

IoT is just a part of the Internet, and it too is now being built on OSS.

In the first article in this series, I explored how the rapid reduction in the cost of microcontrollers and microprocessors is changing the nature of what consumer devices are and can be. But within this, I skirted over an equally important, parallel change: both in terms of development costs and technical potential.

This is the shift from microcontrollers – simple, low power CPUs, hardcoded to perform a single task; towards microprocessors – that are effectively small, full-functioning computers or servers, combining CPU together with a fixed amount of RAM, ROM (memory) and other peripherals – all embedded on a single chip.

(Just to avoid any claims of misrepresenting the facts here: there are still many areas where the simplicity of a microcontroller is still the right choice. (Most commonly in life-critical systems within medicine, the automotive or aerospace industry or in simple closed-loop control systems).

However, even while microcontrollers can be cheaper in raw hardware terms, with simple microprocessors now available at under one Euro, this aspect of cost is now negligible. The more significant cost of putting compute power into most devices is now the development cost: programing the chip and ensuring the program is small enough, stable enough and reliable enough to last the ten-plus year life expectancy of most hardware devices.

And this is where open source comes into play. In a very big way!

Put a microcontroller in a new device and you need a dedicated embedded electronics programmer (a costly skillset in short supply) to write all the most basic functionality from scratch. The cost of building your prototype or minimum viable product (MVP) is massive. Moreover, your device is likely to have very simple functionality that will remain fixed for its lifetime.

But build your device around any one of the commonly available, low cost microcontrollers and suddenly you are in a whole new place. Not just the world of Linux, but the whole universe of open source applications, tools, frameworks, languages and general loveliness that surrounds it!

Everything is there and ready to add highly sophisticated IoT functionality into your device. You want to connect it to the internet; someone has sorted a TCP/IP stack. You want to add a screen, some other peripherals; the necessary drivers will no doubt be available for Linux. If you want to write a bespoke software application to run on your device; you can install Python or Golang. Not only do these widespread languages have a more plentiful supply of, less-costly programmers, they have vast banks of ready made libraries and components which can already provide much of the functionality you need.

OK, Lego block metaphors have been done-to-death in technology space. But for consumer electronics, the move from the microprocessor to the microcontroller is like the difference between the simple geometric 1970’s blocks and the kind of Lego that kids have today: bespoke parts themed after the latest blockbuster movie, mini motors, sensors, actuators, robotics and … this metaphor is almost too good … modern Lego has in-built programmable microcontrollers that run Python!

What all this means for aspiring start-ups here in Ireland, is that taking part in technology revolutions is getting cheaper.

The cost of creating a new company during the industrial revolution: the level of investment in machinery, property need to move from ideas to production, restricted market access to the already-wealthy or those with access to significant investment.

As we moved into the original IT revolution and then into the dot.com era, those costs were continually reduced. However, the need for proprietary IT hardware and software still proved a significant barrier for new market entrants.

But as the Internet matured, it brought with it a wave of new, accessible open source technologies, allowing entrepreneurs to build massive service and software businesses with far lower levels of investment. And it is from here that the garage culture emerges: with college drop-outs creating global social media giants in under a decade. Open source within IoT brings this level of market accessibility to the emerging world of smart, connected devices. It is becoming perfectly possible to prototype a device and add intelligence (which is increasingly the real value in hardware) from a garage or kitchen table.