The Internet of Things at C4DI

Tonight I headed off to the C4DI for a developer meetup. It was nice to see a few folks I'd not met up with in a while, and even nicer to see that a few of our students had made it along to the meetup. These are really good events to get along to. You get to mix with local developers, drink free beer and see what's going on in software development. 

And you get to find out where the C4DI is, in a lovely and fast growing part of town. 

The talk was from Glynn Bird, a Developer Advocate from IBM. He gave a lovely talk about  the Internet of Things; starting with what constitutes an IoT device (a clue - it's not a clockwork gas meter) and moving on to future trends. Glynn reckoned that although IoT devices in the home sound fun- after all, who wouldn't want an internet connected kettle? - it is in the field of industry where they have the most potential.

We now have the ability to sprinkle connected sensors around any production process, from farming to nuclear power stations, and then use vast cloud based systems to crunch the resulting torrent of data. This should lead to huge improvements in the way that we do things as we use data that previously was either unavailable or discarded or just plain too hard to work with.

Glynn talked about MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport), a lightweight mechanism for routing data from sensor to client and suggested some technology (node-red and CouchDB - along with CloudAnt) that look very interesting

Very thought provoking stuff, with some great discussion at the end. Glynn is a fascinating chap to listen to - and he has a very useful website too. 

There are some very interesting meetups coming down the tracks. Anyone can go along, and everyone should. Sign up here.