IFA Berlin with the AllSeen Alliance
Last week wot.io was excited to be traveling to Berlin, participating in the AllSeen Alliance booth at IFA. IFA Berlin is one of the largest consumer electronics and home appliance shows in the world, and it was an amazing experience.
The AllSeen Alliance's AllJoyn framework is designed to provide easy communication and interoperability between devices on a proximal network, like a typical home with a WiFi network. To show how different types of products, all running AllJoyn, can work together, the AllSeen Alliance booth at the show had a shared network with a dozen member companies all participating.
AllSeen Booth Demos
The booth had an amazing array of smart AllJoyn products including:
- Switches from LeGrand,
- Lights from LIFX
- Plugs from Powertech
- Sensors from EnOcean
- Air purifiers from Heaven Fresh
- Programmable boards from Dog Hunter
- A refrigerator from Electrolux
- TVs from LG
- Speakers powered by Qualcomm chips
- Device control interfaces by Innopia
- Data Service Exchange by wot.io
- Interdevice rules and management by Two Bulls with Higgns
All of these products had AllJoyn built into them, making them discoverable, allowing them to send notifications, and making it possible to control and program them. And because they all spoke AllJoyn, controllers from one company, like the switches from LeGrand, could be configured to manage any of the other devices.
Cloud Services
In addition to providing the specification for all of these devices to communicate on the booth network, AllJoyn also has a provision for allowing communication between local devices and the cloud with their Gateway Agent specification. This allows devices to securely interact with cloud-based applications, such as:
- Affinegy, providing cloud interfaces to local AllJoyn devices via their CHARIOT platform
- Kii, providing device management and cloud services
And, of course, wot.io. Working with Two Bulls, we were able to get a feed of all notifications being sent across the local AllJoyn network. Every time a device sent a notification, it was routed to Firebase where we then pulled it into the wot.io operating environment. We then configured some data services to show what you might do using various notifications.
We wrote a script in scriptr.io to parse the incoming messages and look for specific notifications. To make it interesting, we joined a few events together, sending a temperature reading back to wot.io each time we saw a "refrigerator closed" event. This allowed us to show a real-time event in the booth and still have something interesting to graph.
We then routed the incoming temperature reading to Circonus and graphed it. We also added some randomness to the temperature readings to make the graph more interesting and show some of the things you can do with scriptr.io. The resulting graphs clearly showed all of the activity during the day, and had some unexplained refrigerator open events over night!
It was great to work with our fellow AllSeen Alliance members to put together so many compelling demos of the smart home that is already a reality.
Other coverage of the AllSeen Alliance at IFA Berlin: