This is my seventh monthly IoT update. First, some snippets of news:

• Nice to see IoT featuring on the front cover of the Economist.
• The UK’s Digital Catapult produced a checklist for taking IoT hardware from prototype to production.
• Amazon claim that 85,000 devices now contain Alexa and (as if the world didn’t already have enough incompatible IoT radios) announced Amazon Sidewalk.
• Wi-SUN (sub-GHz mesh over 6LoWPAN over 802.15.4, used for metering etc.) now claims 100m devices.
• Did you know your iPhone 11 has a UWB radio in it?
• I remember how in the early days of Bluetooth the mantra was to hit a magic $1.00 additional BOM cost, to ensure ubiquity (which it did). Now the similar promise of a “$1 SigFox device” seems about to become a reality.
• Eutelsat is launching a few of its own IoT satellites alongside those of Musk and Bezos. 
• I'm hearing that NB-IoT is booming in Europe, with DT & Vodafone now offering roaming.
• Sierra Wireless outlined what they see as the 5 waves of 5G
• The EU Right to Repair will extend to 10 years in 2021 which will hopefully have a major impact on how consumer goods are made.
• Don’t forget physical security for IoT – this door lock can be drilled in 4 seconds.

• I’ve seen a big resurgence in Cleantech applications for IoT recently, and in a month when Bloomberg showed that solar and wind is now cheaper than fossil-fuels even without subsidy it’s interesting to see full home power management starting to become a thing. Our new Calculated Properties feature is great for doing calculations with power and energy btw (below).

• Happy to see us shortlisted for IoT Global awards - lots of other interesting players in there too.

More than 30 years ago, back in 1985, I did my 3^rd-year project at University on one of the first ever ARM chips and have had a fondness for ARM ever since. Their dominance in edge devices theoretically puts them in a great place for IoT but they have struggled to capitalise on this so far. Initially they tried doing everything themselves, more recently they've acquired some pieces (Stream for comms, Treasure Data for analytics) and announced Pelion as the overall platform name. At a recent Pelion update day I discovered these interesting nuggets:

• “We have around 1000 customers, half of which are deploying into the millions”
• “Our IoT business has doubled every year for 4 years, but still not huge”
• “We select for customers with 1m+ devices, but it takes 3y to get there”
• Pelion costs $3k/mo to support up to 10k devices
• There are now Pelion Edge gateways with Device Management, and a Linux variant of mBed – all free as they (wisely IMHO) plan to make their money entirely out of services
• The IETF ACE standard can provide secure local access to devices even when offline

This Autumn/Fall season started with a bang for DevicePilot with new customers in industries including commercial lighting, agri-tech, battery-charging, baby monitoring plus that good old IoT stalwart, vending-machines. Did you know that the first IoT device was a vending machine back in around 1980 when there were only about 300 machines on ARPANET? 

The DevicePilot Ecosystem is delighted to welcome some new partners:

• Yanzi the space utilization, occupancy, and indoor air quality monitoring solution
• SimpleHW with their simple, cheap and reliable Sigfox devices
• RadioBridge who design and manufacture long-range wireless sensors
• Allinno who offer a wide range of services to asset intensive industries, working with both long term asset owners and constructors.

We have now documented some use-cases for our Calculated Properties feature, for example:

• In a metering application, CPs can integrate power into energy
• For mobile assets, CPs can translate changes in (lat,long) into miles travelled

And finally, as we were using Google Translate to enjoy some mellifluous phrases from a French partner’s website such as “Do you want to start your IoT project serenely?” we were momentarily flummoxed by a mention of Camemberts … until we realised they are what we call “pie charts”!

Hope you enjoyed this update, as always please do drop me a line with your news.

-Pilgrim
CEO, DevicePilot