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June 1^st to 2^nd saw OverTheAir taking place at Bletchley Park. Representing Vodafone at the event were Nicholas Herriot and Ashley Mills from Vodafone Group R&D. Below is Nicholas’s trip write-up from the event.

OverTheAir is a neutral space where hackers, academics and commercial organisations can get together and be creative! There were a number of big players at the event including Google promoting their new Google + API, Facebook doing much of the same, Blackberry with their new QNX operating system and it's platform, Lego Mindstorm, Blue Via, AppsFuel, Marmalade and many more new kids on the block! It's an unbelievably competitive and exiting space!

Vodafone and ARM (http://www.mbed.org ) were there to seed the developer community with a software library that will go beta in the coming months. The library allows developers to connect rapid prototyping embedded controllers with USB datacards sold in our shops. It allows easy connectivity to the long tail developer interested in what many people call the 'Internet of Things' (IoT). It's a market place that's expanding rapidly with devices like Arduino who started the trend off and now mbed with their cloud based compiler, on line repository and source control mechanism.

The event was sold out - with more than 600 developers taking over the Bletchley Park mansion. I'm shocked they allow us this level of freedom in such a historic place. The Vodafone and ARM guys hung out at the rear of the building where we took over an area and setup up 10 hack stations with a range of sensors, laptops (Windows and Linux), 3G datacards, embedded controllers, resistors, IC's, meters, screens and ... wait for it....... two soldering iron stations complete with two types of solder (lead and lead free). And to save anyone asking - YES we had permission to use soldering irons, but we had to use heat matts - NO we did not set any fire alarm off, or burn anything! Bletchley park is still intact and the tables are burn hole free!!!

The other motive for attending the event was to raise awareness to what we are doing, gather opinions from developers and get some beta testers to test with the software stack and modem. To that end we had 30+ people sign up to be on the beta program. If any Vodafone developers would like to join in and do work on the mbed embedded controller please go here to find out more : http://developer.vodafone.com/labs/m2m-connectivity/

Part of our pitch required us to build some cool but crazy demos!  To that end we built two things which used the mbed and the 3G dongle. One was a small but complete tiny door which contained a proper Yale lock and OTS solenoid opener. We connected our dwarf door the mbed and dongle to allow people to open the door by sending specific text messages to the door. You can see some pictures here:

The door had a simple mbed with dongle attached on the side for control:

The other item we build we nicknamed 'The Big Question'. It's basically a big wooden question mark which we took to each of our three talks. It contains an embedded controller and dongle mounted on the front. On the 'dot' of the question mark we mounted a small receipt printer. This allowed members of the audience to text in questions for the team to answer. You can see the building of the question mark here:

The question mark went everywhere! And proudly got mounted on the Vodafone developer banner, where you can see the questions being SMS'd to the device.

We also put up a challenge for the hacking community to build the best embedded hack that brings together an aspect of a person’s life and that embedded object. There were a total of 13 entries 4 of which we liked a lot. However there can be only one - it was agreed that our prize went to the 'Dude Where's My Car' embedded hack!  You can read the other challenges here: http://overtheair.org/blog/programme/hackday/

Our challenge was here: http://overtheair.org/blog/2012/05/29/the-vodafone-embedded-hardware-hack-challenge/

And the winning app by Ali Bros and Dylyn Jones is here: http://dudewheresmycar.me/

You can view a short interview we had with the winners. Both boys were hacking on this the whole night!

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89jV8AfrSeM&feature=plcp
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJlfz4lcuWo&feature=plcp

The Vodafone and ARM team presented three talks. One early on Friday to set the scene, introduce what we were about and welcome people to join us in the embedded hack room. This was presented by me where the culmination of the talk was to get a member of the audience (expert hacker) to race a 12 year old girl in getting the proverbial 'Hello World' demo working on an embedded controller. So it who would win! The idea was to show how mainstream programming the controllers is becoming. You can read about our presentations here:

• http://lanyrd.com/2012/over-the-air/stkmq/
• http://lanyrd.com/2012/over-the-air/stkmr/
• http://lanyrd.com/2012/over-the-air/stkmt/

Unfortunately the only video we have is of the second talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=192FYfb75GM&feature=plcp. 
The first slide deck is here: http://prezi.com/0y2mckg80my4/copy-of-m2m/. Our hacker beat the 12 year old girl, but by only 40 seconds!

So what next for this project! We expect to attend many more events this year, the software will be released and open source in Autumn. What really would be a major win is to pull concepts and ideas into commercial products and drive the evolution of a platform to allow M2M control for our customers. The way we see it in Embedded Devices R&D team is that there is a space for a network operator to provide this whole end to end service in the M2M space. Where a generic reference design and flexible platform allows our customers to customise their M2M solutions in a quick flexible and simple fashion.

If anyone has any questions you can either post on the forum, or you can text 'The Big Question' at: