News

Eclipse Group Launches Second IoT Challenge

• By John K. Waters
• November 17, 2015

The Eclipse Foundation's Internet of Things (IoT) Working Group has announced the second edition of its Open IoT Challenge, which pits individuals and teams of developers against each other to see who can create the most innovative IoT solutions using open standards and open source technologies.

Anyone can participate in the Challenge, and any participant can win, but 15 projects will be selected to receive hardware starter kits, access to cloud services, and technical support. The first deadline for submission of project proposals is Nov. 23. A panel of judges announces which participants will receive the starter kits on Dec. 4. First, second, and third prize winners, who will be announced in March, receive cash and tech prizes.

The list of sponsors of this year's Challenge includes bitreactive, Eurotech, IS2T, Red Hat and Zolertia.

This contest is part of the Foundation's ongoing effort to build a community of open source developers and open standards around the Internet of Things, said Ian Skerrett, the Eclipse Foundation's VP of marketing. Skerrett leads the three-year-old Eclipse IoT initiative, which now comprises 20 projects and 31 companies.

"With the Challenge, we're targeting the maker, university developer, and independent developer community," Skerrett told ADTmag. "This is all about building a community around IoT, but also to encourage the use and evolution of open technologies and standards, which we believe will be essential to IoT's success."

"The reason the Internet is so successful is because it's based on open source and open standards," he added. "Anyone can spin up a Web site and work with other people's Web sites without asking permission and without paying for the privilege. We need to get to that place with IoT. It needs to be a permissionless infrastructure in which anyone can participate."

Participants are encouraged to employ such IoT open standards as MQTT, CoAP, Lightweight M2M, DNS-SEC, and OneM2M. They're also encouraged to use Eclipse IoT projects, including Eclipse Kura, Leshan, SmartHome, Mosquitto and Paho.

Participants are also strongly urged to blog about their activities during the Challenge, Skerrett said. The IoT Working Group aggregates the blogs on Tumblr.

Both teams and individuals can participate in the Challenge, though the prizes are officially awarded to designated individuals. Sixty participants entered last year's contest. Davide de Cesris won the grand prize last year with Carracho cloud-based vehicle monitoring solution. Emir Ercan Ayar and his team took second place with their IoNeeds project, which allows developers to turn a physical jar into a connected object that automatically reports when its empty and orders a refill online. Third place went to Lotte Lteenbrink's team for their watr.li project, which automatically monitors and waters office plants.