Let’s face it: Explaining the Internet of Things and the advantages of direct communication between devices can be a dry and theoretical topic. So we decided to literally spice the whole story up and add a little bit of gamification to the issue: In future events we’re going to demonstrate our technology with a smart game of dice that communicates its result to a vending machine, releasing a pack of Lemonbeat branded snack chips in case players sucessfully rolled the dice.
One big challenge in the world of IoT will be to ensure devices from a range of different vendors to collaborate smoothly. One solution, and one that has proven the most popular up until now, is to connect each single device with a cloud service, collect the data and let a remote computer decide what to do next. But this is not always a very elegant way of doing things. First of all, you may need to tie in a number of gateways to collect data from the different devices which may all use different protocols. Secondly, by sending everything into the cloud first, you run the risk of higher latency. Thirdly, if the cloud server stops working or a glitch with the internet connection, the whole system may grind to a halt.
