Headworx

I have never expected another significant dose of grist to my mill when I've recently learned about the ULE Alliance standing behind the new ULE (Ultra-Low Energy) home automation standard. Why do we need yet another standard is not clear for me, but the ULE Alliance Members certainly have a different opinion. May be they thought they were too big to join other alliances and have formed their own? There are technical reasons ULE may succeed. The #1 is the dedicated radio band. "The band is just of us, nobody will interfere" claim the Promoters and Contributors. "With ULE we have the range to cover an entire house without repeaters" say the engineers, which for sure is a benefit. Meshing and hopping networks are the nightmare of smart home implementations (they fail too often and they respond too slow). But reading the Technical Specification document I see almost nothing about the application layer standard . Meaning there are no such things as ULE Light...

The World has jumped on the IoT bandwagon. Everybody is on board: the big guys like Cisco and IBM, many small ones and most of the startups. Everybody is demonstrating the IoT tools, scenarios, applications. IoT is easy and flashy to demonstrate. But in the long run it is extremely difficult to reliably deliver on promise. Things and networks are breaking down on regular basis. Part of the reason is in the IoT each sensor / actuator node is optimized for cost (because ultimately there are millions or even billions of them). IoT is not like the big iron Internet backbone, where components are top grade and everything is redundant. Many IoT systems are exposed (by design) to harsh and changing environment. Take a parking sensor, embedded in tarmac. Cars are running over it. In Summer the Sun boils it, in Winter it is covered with snow and ice. It transmits data over already crowded, full of interference, radio band. The nodes in IoT networks are failing relatively often. Or stati...

In IoT everybody is discussing Z-Wave versus ZigBee versus 6LoWPAN versus... many other transport protocols. The discussion is not relevant. It leads us nowhere, especially with protocols like the 6LoWPAN, which by the way is the likely winner that will change nothing. Why? Because even if every grain of sand on the Planet is connected (thanks to 6LoWPAN) and has an IPv6 address, it will still be disconnected. Why? Because even if it can speak and listen when connected, it will not know the communications language. Things have been different in the Internet of Humans (the one we use a lot today). The Internet, as we know it, has been a transport protocol. The content has been human - readable and present in languages humans can understand. In the Internet of Things, we have no language. Connected things can transmit and receive signals but with very few exceptions they do not understand each other. Because there is no language, or unified application - level protocol. So fa...

It's been more than three years since I posted the Follow Me blog entry. Back in 2010 multi-device life was not as widespread as it is today. And things were not that obvious. Today they are: everybody expects synchronized context across all connected devices. And in most areas the context is becoming synchronized, thanks to the cloud systems standing behind the device families. From my own experience I can mostly speak about Android, which seems to be leading the pack. Unboxing a new Android device and getting it in sync is just a matter of providing the Google account credentials. Then everything happens in the background: apps are installed, passwords synchronized, even the saved WiFi networks. How natural it is to walk into a hotel you visited a year ago (with different device) and being automatically connected to the WiFi network using credentials stored back then. Not to mention such obvious things like the contact list (yes we needed the OTT providers like Google and Appl...