Tim Kannegieter

Interesting article here on NSW Health: https://www.pulseitmagazine.com.au/australian-ehealth/4395-nsw-health-rolling-out-wireless-core-platform-for-mobility-and-iot

Windows IoT Core Services has been announced building on the original launched in 2015. See https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/06/05/windows-10-iot-tomorrows-iot-today/#OhHzc9pFA4Y6gc3C.97

See https://developer.android.com/things/get-started/kits

Ours is not the only community or website aiming to document and explain the subject of the Internet of Things: Following are some other sites: Postscapes has an Internet of Things Handbook.

Two-way communication in Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) is automatically better than one-way communication, surely? Not necessarily, according to the presenter of our next webinar on remote sensing. In fact, there are cases where one way sensing is a far superior approach, such as most metering applications. In preparing for this webinar I met with Mark Halliwell, Business Development Manager at Taggle Systems. In discussing Taggle’s approach to IoT, their decision to focus on one way sensing really stood out. The reasoning is pretty simple. There are many applications where you simply don’t need two way communication and having it introduces more complications than any benefits it might bring. For example security is much simpler with one way communication as there is no way an external attack can be launched on a device via the network. Secondly, power consumption is much less, as the device does not have to be constantly listening out for messages. There are many other nuances in the one-way vs two-way debate, which Mark will address in the webinar. But one other feature of the Taggle system really stood out. Unlike most other LPWAN systems out there, the entire technology has was developed in house, here in Australia. This is not surprising when you look at the pedigree of the founders, which includes the developers of the world’s first 5GHz WiFi integrated circuits. Image: Taggle's MRC-1 transmitter designed for use with the most common water meter in use, the Elster V100. Curtesy Taggle One thing for sure is that competition in the automatic meter reading industry is rapidly heating up, with just about every IoT vendor and LPWAN consultant pitching to gain market share. This is particularly so in the water industry which is opening up rapidly with utilities across the country and globally rushing to capture the benefits of IoT, which include everything from cost reductions in meter reading to deferment of capital intensive investments in upgrading water infrastructure. With such competition, it’s no longer enough to simply offer IoT solutions. They need to be superior to other IoT solutions and this is where Taggles believe it has an advantage. By developing the technology in-house, from the chip level up and focusing on the one-way approach, it is able to optimize the solution at all levels. Taggle has made a big bet on the question of one way versus two way communication and it appears to be paying off. Mark claims they have the largest IoT deployment in Australia, currently taking over 3 million water meter readings per day. The company has also embraced the growing “as a Service” movement, by owning and maintaining its own LPWAN network so the customer only pays for the data and associated services rather than owning its own communication infrastructure. Software packages are provided that process the data for reporting and visualization purposes, including apps for end users. A great case study on a Taggle deployment at Mackay Regional Council (MRC) was reported in Utility Magazine, which featured some impressive results, way before the term IoT became trendy. In 2016, a demand management campaign coupled with the Taggle system saw individual consumer water consumption in Mackay reduce from 240L/d to 210L/d, contributing to the estimated deferment of a new water treatment plant from 2020 to 2032 and helping hold price increases to zero. In that same year, around 1500 lead notifications were sent to customers and reducing the average duration of a leak from 150 days to 60 days. Of course there are many other applications of IoT technology in the water industry, such as monitoring and reducing excessive pipe pressure, reducing pumping costs, preventing sewer overflows, identifying infiltration of the system . I wrote up a good case study earlier on what South East Water in Victoria is doing and this this explores some of these areas in more detail.

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/7034977

LOL!! I have reposted this on the LinkedIn discussion group.

Next Tuesday 17 April, Umesh Bhutoria from EnergyTech Ventures will be delivering a webinar titled The Data Indigestion Crisis: New approaches to Energy Analytics. The successful startup from India is in the process of establishing its business in Australia, participating in a bootcamp program being run by Energy Australia. He company has developed an Insights as a Service business around energy analytics. I had coffee with Umesh to go over what he will present and was interested to find he is primarily targeting brownfield installations. When I questioned this strategy, he pointed out that the vast majority of installed systems managing energy consumption are largely underutilized, operating as alarm systems rather than being used to optimise energy efficiency. Umesh pointed to a number of issues such as the difficulty of having multiple data sources and a skill gap in knowing what to do with the data even if they had it. The main problem he says, is that companies often don't know what the actually want from their systems. He related one case where he won a contract over a large multi-national vendor because he told the client he didn't want their business if they couldn't see the difference in his approach. This encouraged the client to go back and work out their real needs. In this webinar, Umesh will begin with an introduction to Energy Analytics, outline the different approaches and then look at a case study of of one of the worlds largest Terry Towel manufacturing sites.

I’ve always been a bit confused about what a smart city actually is. When you talk to people in the field, you normally get vague answers about how the Internet of Things is going to transform cities. The basic idea is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness in the way we manage our community assets and services. Using the Internet of Things (IoT) we collect more data and analyze it to make smarter operational and strategic decisions. When pressed for examples, smart city enthusiasts usually point to specific point solutions around parking, water meters, energy monitoring, garbage bins and the like. But individually none of these make an entire city smart, right? For a while, I thought that smart cities must have something to do with interconnecting this large variety of point solutions, to get synergistic benefits through the likes of big data analytics and machine learning. However, the engineer in me knows just how complex such an approach is. It’s a great aspiration, and I’m all for it, but we are a long, long way from that. So it was refreshing to talk to Thinxtra’s VP Ecosystems & Marketing Renald Gallis about their Smart Council Program which recently gained a $10 million boost in funding from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to help roll out the Sigfox low power wide area network technology to councils across Australia. He confirmed for me that most smart cities are currently limited to point solutions. Thinxtra has partnered with a number of organisations to help them offer a variety of solutions for everything from manhole monitoring to prevent overflow, through to rodent infestation control. What I gained from that conversation is a realization that smart cities ARE about interconnectedness – but it’s more to do with people than technology. According to Renald, the key to smart cities and any other industry vertical, is the quality of the business relationships that sit behind the IoT solutions. When Thinxtra evaluates potential companies to bring their solutions into the Sigfox network, they look first to access the maturity of their thinking about IoT. It’s not enough to have a smart technology solution, it must also be at a price point that makes it viable and it must also be scalable. The company delivering the IoT solution must understand not just the technologies but the organisational systems required to sustain them in the field. It’s one thing to produce a few hundred devices. It’s another to produce tens of thousands devices and support them nationally or globally. Having confidence in the solution is a key part of what Renald calls "proof of value" which goes beyond a simple business case. He will be delivering a webinar on proof of value to this community on 3 April. Renald says there are a lot of “digital tourists” – individuals or companies that have an idea and dabble in the IoT space. However, they don’t really know what they want or fully understand the complex landscape of IoT solution providers. They ending up wasting a lot of time for everyone involved. So what makes a smart city is smart relationships between organisations that really “get” IoT. Smart relationships start with the quality of the organisations involved. Providers need to have all the backend processes to support the systems in the field. This will include partnering with reliable providers of connectivity, middleware and cloud systems. Because the ability to scale is important, the provider in the relationship should ideally be a big player in the market – nationally or globally. According to Gallis, start-ups need to be realistic about their ability to take market share and align themselves to the right global player as quickly as possible in the evolution of their product. Adopters of IoT solutions also need to have the right organisational systems in place to strategically address the way IoT will positively disrupt their business models and processes. Ideally, they will have an innovation department of some sort in place to both assess the technology and to shepherd solutions through to implementation. Smart relationships also relate to how city authorises encourage multiple point solutions to work together. Generally speaking the point solutions will be using the same kinds of technologies. Ideally, these technologies would be from the same providers, using the same platforms. However, in a competitive world, this is wishful thinking, especially for large cities. At this stage concepts like open data and an IoT friendly regulatory environment come into play and city authorities do need to play their role in facilitating smart relationship. So what IS a smart city? I’m thinking it is a vibrant ecosystem of technology providers and adopters across the city, working together to improve macro outcomes like livability, prosperity and sustainability. IoT sits at the heart of that, connecting technologies and organisations. It plays a role in brokering relationships between people from all fields and disciplines to work together in smart ways. As Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message” and today IoT is the medium. --------- Dr Tim Kannegieter is the facilitator of Engineers Australia Applied IoT Engineering Community.

The internet of things (IoT) is complex. Examined at an industry or national level, there are a huge number of variables and players, that it’s hard to even visualise how all the components will ever work together to realise the potential. However, we all have a vested interest in ensuring the IoT industry blossoms to reach its full potential. In the IoT Engineering Community, we have previously spoken about the technical skills required to develop the IoT engineering workplace. A key point identified is that it practically impossible for anyone one individual to become expert in all areas relating to IoT. A rule of thumb is that it take 10 years to become truly expert in a field. Well, IoT has dozens of discreet fields of equal complexity. To complicate matters further, the engineering of an IoT system is just one part of the picture. In a webinar on Tuesday 20 March titled Flattening the IoT Learning Curve, Frank Zeichner sets out the broader context of IoT learning. Learning at multiple levels, from individuals through companies to government. It’s all interconnected and none of these levels will get the full benefits without the other. He argues that the most valuable learning is that which comes at the edges of three broad domains relating to engineering, business and industry domains. Its only when an engineer truly understands the business imperative or vice versa for the C-suite, that we begin to develop skills that will truly make a difference. Similarly, both the business and engineering skill must be applied in a way that will work for that particular industry. The application of IoT is different in a variety of industries and while the technology may be the same, unless you understand all those complex variables in context of application your project will be on risky ground. However, the potential is there. The Food Agility CRC, which Frank discusses in his presentation, is aiming to shift the food sector from a $46 billion to a $100 billion industry by exploiting the potential of digital transformation, primarily though IoT. The IoT Alliance Australia, of which Zeichner is the CEO, has an Education and Skills Workgroup which is creating an education Framework to “provide a methodology for scoping, developing, and tracking the type of education engagement required to expand the IoT knowledge, skills and capability development delivered by education providers and professional bodies that intersect the IoT marketplace”. Learning needs to take place at the individual, organisational, industry and national levels. Unless we get practical progress in learning how to successfully exploit the potential of IoT at all these levels, we run the risk of a major lost opportunity as other nations aggressively push a coordinated agenda.