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On a recent visit to Vodafone UK HQ in Newbury Vodafone developer took the chance to catch up with Nicholas Herriot, Solutions Architect, Vodafone Group R&D. During the last year Nicholas has focused his work on embedded devices, energy and the 'Internet of Things' (IoT).

 

See what Nicholas had to say below and checkout the short video interview I shot where Nicholas took the opportunity to demo some of his recent work here.

“It's been a real eye opener to see advancements in micro controllers - and I believe the time is right in two areas for a new revolution which is silently taking place before our eyes.

Those areas being: Wide area connectivity and associated cost to the user. By most peoples standards it’s hard to deny that you can get connected to a network in most populated regions around the world.

The other big change is the relative cost of processors. And the saying "it's as cheap as chips" really is a beautiful pun. Processor and transmitted 'bit' cost are now asymptotically heading towards zero.

For me that means the area of machine to machine (M2M) is now in a growth phase - and by that I don't mean caused by government legislation, enterprise customers managing assets remotely or large corporations deploying remote systems - which is all true. I mean that this ecosystem is about to grow rapidly via work done by very small and medium sized companies and or individuals. We can see proof of that from the explosion of systems like Arduino - where in 2005 they started from '1' to 2010 over 200,000 units per year.

There are some things that need to be in place to make this ecosystem fly in my opinion. You need to have:
1) A central place where everyone can get a coherent, managed and tested code base.
2) It needs to be open and community based.
3) It needs to grow and develop with that community.
4) In reliability it needs to be as good or better than commercially driven proprietary products.
5) Cost is a factor - it has to be very cheap.
6) In terms of connectivity - it has to be outstanding, it should just work and be easy to connect by what ever access technology.

I do not believe all of those issues have been cracked.
During the last year we have worked on Arduino and Mbed devices - evaluating and deciding what would be a good partner if R&D were to try and assist this community in some area. We decided to help provide and work on a software library for Mbed that would help developers connect those devices to our network.
Our work is not complete, however we are at a stage to show, build and demonstrate prototypes. In this blog article we have submitted a vide, in it we attempted and succeeded to build a functioning door access system using a smart phone, a COTS electronic door lock, a 3G dongle, an Mbed controller and associated power supplies. It took us 3 days to go from nothing, writing the code, acquiring components and showing the prototype. This would not have been possible even 5 years ago.

In the next six months we will be writing articles explaining how we progress with this - what we are doing - what API's we plan on releasing - and release dates for the library.

We would like to hear thoughts from developers on what we are doing, how we are doing, what things we could do better and what other features we could add to this type of system to make it better for them in developing embedded applications.”