(SME = Small-to-Medium Enterprises)<p>If manufacturers could connect with their own products, once on the market, the resulting data could help with production audits, new product design and predictive maintenance, just to name a few.<p>Converting a physical object into a smart thing (i.e. one which is remotely manageable)  involves the following necessary but not sufficient tasks: sensor and hardware selection, firmware development, device remote control. Thus, these kinds of projects are likely incompatible with the SME’s idea of what a good investment could be.<p>This is why we are starting with prototypes: proposing lightning projects (in the order of 10-20 days) so that SMEs can effectively test the benefits of having their products connected, before deciding to move to a complete solution.<p>To speed up the prototyping process we are developing Iottly, an IoT platform with the following goals:<p>- To simplify device communication and remote control<p>- To shorten iteration cycles for deployed IOT systems to facilitate hypothesis testing in the field.<p>How it works:<p>Iottly provides an easy-to-install agent to enable a remote device to communicate and receive Over-The-Air firmware upgrades. Currently, the agent is written in Python and has been tested with the Raspberry Pi.
Once the agent is installed, the device can be deployed on the field. No specific requirements are made for the networking setup (port forwarding etc). The protocol (at present XMPP) enables true bi-directional communication.
Any further implementation of new functionalities can be performed and tested remotely thanks to the online development environment and the sandboxed agent which runs the code on the remote device.<p>Online demo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.iottly.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;demo.iottly.org</a> (you need a Raspberry Pi or you can try it with a virtual device running as a Docker container).<p>Iottly is Open Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iottly" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;iottly</a><p>Our website: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tomorrowdata.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tomorrowdata.io</a>
Apply HN: Iottly – IoT prototyping for aftermarket product analytics for SMEs