After a (too) long period of not being able to visit events, I finally got the opportunity to attend a physical event. In fact, I visited 2 events in a week time, but with different purposes. During the first event, I was hosting a booth to showcase thin-edge.io, (more about that later) to the attendees. At the second event, I participated as an attendee which was also great. Being an attendee at a conference is even longer ago, so it was a nice experience again.
The first conference I was part of was The Things conference in Amsterdam. This conference is mainly about LoraWan and IoT. My connection with the Things Network goes way back. Seven years I was at an event where they announced the start and the first cheap LoraWan gateway. I will not explain what The Things Network is, you can read more here. 🙂
We as Software Ag were invited to the booth by TechData together with Cisco.
One of the demos we had was with a Lego wind turbine. This wind turbine had some sensors connected which were connected via a child device to thin-edge.io running on a Raspberry Pi. Thin-edge.io was mapping the data to the Cumulocity IoT cloud where we had an application running to make the data visible in a dashboard.
We also connected thin-edge.io to some cisco devices, like a GPS sensor, and temperature sensor. These sensors are Lora-enabled and connected to the Cisco cloud. We made a connection via MQTT to this cloud to receive the data. The data was made visible in the Cumulocity IoT cloud as well.
There were a lot of booths with just equipment like antennas, sensors, gateways etc., we attracted a lot of people with our wind turbine. A lot of people were interested in the software we used.
The second event I attended, was the IoT and Analytics Summit in Berlin. This was an internal SoftwareAG event. This was fully focused on developers. About 300 Developers from all over the world from different teams came together in Berlin. We started with some great presentations by the management and customers. Followed by various workshops we could choose from and great discussions with colleagues in the workstreams.
As this event was also focused on team-building. There was also a lot of time available to work with your team. Obviously, I was with the thin-edge team where we discussed various things about the way we work.
I think this was a very important event as many of the attendees work remotely, and some had never seen their team members in real life. That is why we had some teambuilding time, like dinners, a walking tour through Berlin and a closing party. During these get-togethers, I talked to many different people to know what they are doing and how we might help each other.
I liked both events very much, both were very well organized, I had good discussions, I learned new things and cached up with my colleagues and colleagues from other teams. The days were long, or the nights were short, but it gave me a lot of energy and new ideas.
Let’s continue this and I am heading to the next event which is hopefully soon!
I mentioned Thin-edge a few times, and maybe you did not hear of it before, so will explain a bit about what you can do with thin-edge.io.
In short, thin-edge.io is an open-source, cloud-agnostic IoT framework designed for edge devices with limited resources, so it can connect to multiple IoT Platforms, and it allows flexible logic executed on the device. It is optimized for a very small footprint and high performance.
It is easy to install the framework for resource-constraint devices. It has lots of capabilities like device management, child device support and a lot more.
You can get more information here.
As it is an open-source project, you can contribute to the project, see for details here.
For more information, or when you have questions, contact me or connect with us on Discord.
