Maps and Tags for Navigating the IoTempire

There are multiple communities, topics, and interests in our IoTempire. To allow you to retrieve relevant information, our authors are trying to tag and order them by the following tags and taxonomy. You can use any of the emphasized (italic) words as a (hash-)tag to search our articles and pages.

  • Groups and communities:

    We know that there are several active groups among our readers and supporters. We are trying to list these here. If you have a notable article or project from one of these communities or if we have forgotten any and you want to be listed here, please contact one of our main authors or mention it in our forums.

    • iotarts: everything about combining IoT and arts or about artists using IoT.

      • digitalindentity: sub-project of iotarts around interactivity with displays helping the viewers to reflect on their identity.

      • making: Everything about makers and doers, 3D printing, and DIY projects. Arts and/or technology related.

      • videos: creating documentation and instructional videos is very important for driving this community. People working to help us produce high quality content are a very valued part of this community.

    • entrepreneuring: IoT has the potential to disrupt the progress of our civilization in several positive ways. However, in a market oriented society it takes brave and compassionate entrepreneurs to seize the opportunities enabled by IoT. We hope, we will see lots of ideas in a competitive but fair environment coming to live and want to enable a healthy exchange, support, and knowledge for people embarking on the entrepreneuring adventure.

    • edu/education: As IoTempire was founded around education environments, providing instructions, learning materials, and workshops as well es teacher training and exchange, education is at the heart of the IoTempire community. All teachers and students of IoT related fields as well as their projects or IoT related designs are welcome here.

  • Frameworks:

    Networking or integrating several things together into reasonable systems and making them fulfill a service demands software. This software can either be completely developed from scratch or frameworks can be used to facilitate and minimize the amount of software to be created to do the actual networking and integration.

    • iotempower (formerly ulnoiot)

      is the brainchild of one of the founding authors (ulno) of IoTempire. It was initially envisioned as a pedagogical tool, but is slowly maturing into a competitive product and gains industrial relevance. Apart from having a strong focus on being easy to teach, it also has a strong focus on privacy and security. It allows to build IoT solutions which do not collect user data and are very resistant to attacks.

    • node-red: Node-RED is used as part of IoT Empower and is perfect for any edge/IoT networking and system integration tasks with an amazingly easy to learn visual interface. IoT Empower augments Node-RED by an easy way to set-up device nodes (the actual devices interacting with our physical world).

    • arduino-ide: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

      Everybody's favorite when starting to work in the Internet of Things domain seems to be the Arduino-IDE. There is such a huge repository of ready-made software projects that can easily be installed and customized with this IDE making it the natural choice for lots of hobby projects. However, when deploying multiple nodes of a systems and connecting a huge number of devices, the maintenance of a swarm of devices becomes cumbersome. We suggest, also taking a look at IoT Empower, node-red, PlatformIO and/or Mongoose OS at the point you encounter these requirements.

    • platformio: https://platformio.org/

      PlatformIO is not as well known as the Arduino-IDE but comes with the same libraries as Arduino-IDE (and more). however, it has an incredibly much better integrated development environment (IDE), where you can actually write code and get contextual help. Its user-base is a bit smaller, but it supports more micro controllers and better management of multiple boards. As you can do everything what you can do in Arduino-IDE also in PlatformIO, we highly recommend to check it out if you like Arduino-IDE.

    • mongoose-os: http://mongoose-os.com/

      Mongoose OS is a IoT Firmware development framework. It allows very simple and still secure firmware updates for micro controllers directly connected to the internet (OTA).

      It assumes a star topology setup of your IoT systems and does not embrace the layered gateway concept favored in IoT Empower.

    • others:

      • let us know which other environments and projects you would like to see listed here (or even better, write a small review article about one and send us the link or ask us to publish it here).

  • home automation

    • node-red: see above. Apart from being a good integration tool for general IoT projects, Node-RED is frequently used as an internet independent home automation integration solution.

    • iotempower: see above. Out of the same reasons as for Node-RED and because of its origins in home and building automation classes, IoT Empower is very well suited to support home and building automation.

    • home-assistant: Home assistant is a very popular open source home automation framework based on Python with a very strong and active community. It supports most current home automation devices.

      The device management part of IoT Empower integrates well with Home Assistant.

    • openhab: For our friends preferring Java, OSGI, and eclipse, openHAB is a good choice as home automation framework. It's a little older than home assistant, also has a strong and active community, and also supports the integration of most home automation devices.

  • security: too often overlooked, lots of commercial offerings ignore security concerns adding to an already significant amount of cyber threats. One of our concerns here at IoTempire is awareness building and creating counter measures for the IoBT (Internet of Broken Things). Please check out our available resources regarding security.

  • privacy: similar to security, privacy is nearly always ignored when designing products and systems for the IoT. Building awareness for privacy in IoT systems and offering solutions that honor privacy is also a significant concern for our community. Also check the same respected links in our resources as already mentioned in security.

  • community building: We intend to use this tags for projects that

    • enable disrupted groups

    • feature persons or institutions that became local enablers

    • provide neighborhood help

    Respective projects will be listed on our news feed and featured in our project list.

  • class and workshop: check out our teaching material and class and workshop offerings in the service section.

  • sdm4iot: Story driven IoT service and system design. An agile IoT system design strategy, making sure you build the IoT system, you want to build. Check our educational offerings to know more.

  • scenario: We are always on the lookout of nice IoT systems and projects. We will report on our new findings (or please point us to some if you think we should report on them) in our news section. We will list some of these permanently in our featured project list. We hope the listed use-, business-cases and scenarios will allow you to come up with new ideas for your own project (that you hopefully later will share with us to list here).

  • podcast and video-cafe: We are offering small videos and podcasts of expert discussions in our IoTempire Video Café. They corresponding videos and podcasts are announced in our news feed.