IoT London Meetup

I was a speaker at IoT London last night. This is a really popular meetup with over 4,000 members and as is apparently the norm for this meetup, last night's event was significantly over subscribed, so we had a full house. From a poll taken, the attendees were a diverse bunch; software people, hardware people, designers, investors and press.

Kicking things off.....

The IoT London format is that you get 10 minutes to speak and 10 minutes for questions. I'd chosen to deliver a summary of new Bluetooth features from the recent 4.2 release plus a few which are imminent and one which is further down the road map but important to IoT.

I used my Thalmic Labs Myo gesture controller to control my presentation for the first time and overall it went quite well with only a couple of glitches which I'm inclined to put down to user error. It's a tool and you have to learn to use it properly. It's a nice demonstration of a Bluetooth Smart device with a custom profile too.

Gesturing with Myo to advance to my next slide!

 In summary, I talked about the ways in which Bluetooth Smart devices can now be connected to the wider internet; via the new RESTFul APIs for gateways, using the HTTP Proxy Service or by implementing 6LoWPAN over Bluetooth using the Internet Protocol Support Profile. I also talked about security improvements including the adoption of the Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman key agreement protocol for super-secure pairing and improvements in power efficiency relating to the resolution of private MAC addresses by trusted (paired) devices. Finally I mentioned the data throughput increase that 4.2 makes possible (up to 2.5 x faster) and gave a sneak preview of the standardisation work the SIG have kicked off relating to mesh networks over Bluetooth Smart.

Kirstin Hancock from Blue Maestro followed me and gave us an update on the Blue Maestro success story! And we closed with a talk from resin.io. I spent an enjoyable hour after the presentations were over, talking with a steady stream of people with all sorts of things to ask or discuss. A best of breed meetup I'd say.