Internet of Things Applications

The success of Amazon's Echo, the voice-controlled speaker that can also control many Internet of Things devices, has spurred many people to dip into the world of the connected home. Using Belkin WeMo switches, users can automate every power and light switch in their home by speaking, check if their doors are locked with the right lock or lower the temperature of their thermostat. However, to fully recognize the scale of IoT, one must think of its history, that while there wasn't necessarily such an easy-to-use interface as we are used to today, there were still centralized points at which multiple devices were controlled. The scale of IoT at the infrastructural level is hard to imagine, with one data center alone having hundreds of potential 'points' to talk to.

This, among many other challenges in IoT, is why Apple's former Head of Infrastructure Strategy, Design & Development, Scott Noteboom, founded Litbit, a company that created the open source RhythmOS to talk to the many different "dialects" of new and legacy machines. One core issue of many IoT devices, which includes industrial devices that can have a 20-year lifespan, is that they all use different operating systems, which may be unupgradeable or replaceable. Amazon Echo mastered this on a much smaller scale, learning to "speak" to different points in the home such as Nest thermostats or Philips Hue light bulbs. By making RhythmOS open source (meaning that anyone could potentially code a dialect for the operating system), Noteboom is doing this at a scale of millions of points. It creates an attractive operating environment for humans and machines to interact with each other, and adds a layer of security to the internet of everything, as Litbit calls it, that is necessary.

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