MORE ABOUT IoT

New technologies often find applications in rather unexpected domains. Take for example LoRa, Sigfox and similar IoT technologies. While everybody is working on IoT temperature and humidity sensors for their homes, the real problem is to know if a rodent has been trapped somewhere deep down inside a large building or industrial site. The goal is, of course, to avoid sending out a maintenance engineer to check empty traps.

Distrelec Ltd, leading European distributor of electronics, automation and measurement technology has added the new Spresense range by Sony, manufacturer of consumer and professional electronics, to the webshop.

This is an article from Microchip on a solution that enables large ecosystem of PIC MCU applications to easily add secure cloud connectivity to next-generation designs.

Distrelec, leading European distributor of electronics, automation and measurement technology, is excited to launch their very first free webinar series. Launching on the 27th February 2019 at 1500 CET, the first webinar will be hosted in association with leading supplier of test and measurement devices, Tektronix.

The integrity of embedded systems can be ensured through the use of cryptographic methods in a clearly defined process and a secure hardware device for key management and state storage. With CodeMeter, Wibu-Systems offers a smart card-based protection system, which is available for industrial interfaces. CodeMeter supports common operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, Linux as well as Windows Embedded, Real Time Linux, VxWorks and PLCs like CODESYS and more. It contains a secure implementation of symmetric and asymmetric encryption methods (AES, RSA, ECC) as well as hash functions (SHA-256), functions for signature validation (ECDSA) and a random number generator. CodeMeter includes all the available tools needed to implement all the steps described above for integrity protection, software protection and the prevention of code tampering.

As we move further into the era of Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), greater emphasis is certain to be placed on automation. With machine vision technology becoming ever more sophisticated, there is huge potential to improve manufacturers’ quality levels while also accelerating throughput rates. The scope of this technology is broadening all the time too. New applications are destined to play a bigger part in our everyday lives, taking care of object detection/recognition in our cars’ ADAS systems, enabling facial-based security mechanisms to be integrated into portable electronics, and countless other key tasks.

The IoT has the potential to create huge value from the real-time data collected from sensors and embedded systems in any network. But with the increased value comes risk. The ability to connect with practically any device over a network connection makes it possible for malicious users who spend every day probing for vulnerabilities and weaknesses to find many more targets. When they find a way in, they can bring entire networks down, steal data and blackmail the owners. A report by Kaspersky Labs based on a survey of hacking activity around the world estimated attacks had been staged on more than 40 percent of all industrial control system computers in the first half of 2018 alone.

Dragino is a manufacturer of IoT hardware, specialised in Linux IoT/VOIP, Arduino Yùn add-on boards and LoRa modules and gateways. One of their latest products is the LSN50 long-range LoRa sensor node, designed for outdoor use.

Even though the Internet of Things or IoT has been buzzing for a while now, it still remains somewhat inaccessible to many people. The Sunfounder IoT Shield Kit reviewed in this article tries to change this by providing easy-to-use add-on boards for the popular Arduino platform. With the kit anyone with a bit of electronics and programming experience (and some perseverance) can create an internet-connected object.

The Internet of Things (IoT) will see connectivity applied on a far bigger scale than anything we have seen before. With the prospect of tens of billions of connected nodes being deployed to serve a vast and increasingly diverse variety of critical functions, one of the biggest challenges that engineers face will be protecting the huge quantities of sensitive data that will be transmitted.