IoT gateway competition shifts to second phase

20th March 2017

Mick Elliott

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Datasheet

RS Components is sponsoring a competition from the Hackster developer community, based on the SIMATIC IOT2020 open gateway. The idea for the competition is for engineers, makers and students to come up with innovative applications and solutions based on the open and highly flexible IoT gateway.

Sponsored by RS and others, including Tektronix, Weller and Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of Arduino, the total value of prizes for the contest is worth more than US$7500 with a first prize of US$4800.

Already up and running, the contest has now moved into its second and final phase and is due to close at the end of April 2017. The competition was initiated at the beginning of February 2017 with the first phase lasting one month in which entrants had to submit their initial concept idea for a potential industrial IoT or home automation application based around the IOT2020.

By the end of February, the competition had received approximately 250 registrations and more than 80 idea submissions.

In the second phase, completed submissions from the participants will need to flesh out their initial concepts to offer more detailed design information, potentially including wiring diagrams, programming and descriptions and/or videos of the build-up of their end application.

At the closing of the competition, the submissions will be reviewed by Peter Oakes, a leading engineer and programmer and the initiator of the competition, together with RS and Massimo Banzi of Arduino, who will be looking to select the most imaginative and disruptive ideas.

RS is the sole authorised distributor, globally, for the IOT2020, which is an open and flexible industrial IoT gateway that can be used to retrieve, process, analyse and send data to almost any kind of device or network. Offering a variety of interfaces such as Ethernet, USB and micro SD, the product is compatible with open-source software including the Arduino IDE and Yocto Linux, and can be programmed using high-level languages such as Java, C++ and JSON. The IOT2020 is also expandable with Arduino shields and via an on-board PCIe port.

Heiko Luckhaupt, Industry Sector Marketing Manager at RS, said: “Even though the IOT2020 is primarily targeted at students, makers and geeks, it has the potential to find its way into smaller industrial IoT applications, as well as the growing home automation market, and potentially other applications nobody has thought about yet.”