Eight Key Open-Source Internet of Things Projects

by Darryl K. Taft

Node-RED is a tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services. Node-RED provides a browser-based flow editor that makes it easy to wire together flows using the wide-range nodes in the palette. Flows can then be deployed to the runtime in a single click. JavaScript functions can be created within the editor using the rich capabilities of the embedded Eclipse Orion.

Contiki is an open-source operating system for the Internet of things. Contiki connects tiny low-cost, low-power microcontrollers to the Internet, providing powerful low-power Internet communication. Contiki supports fully standard IPv6 and IPv4, along with the recent low-power wireless standards 6LoWPAN, RPL and CoAP.

The mbed platform provides free software libraries, hardware designs and online tools for professional rapid prototyping of products based on ARM microcontrollers. The platform includes a standards-based C/C++ SDK, a microcontroller HDK and supported development boards, an online compiler and online developer collaboration tools.

TinyOS is an open-source, BSD-licensed operating system designed for low-power wireless devices, such as those used in sensor networks, ubiquitous computing, personal area networks, smart buildings and smart meters. TinyOS is especially useful for microcontroller-based devices that have sensors or networking capabilities. It is designed for very resource-constrained devices, such as microcontrollers with a few KB of RAM and a few tens of KB of code space. It’s also designed for devices that need to be very low power.

InfluxDB is a time series, events and metrics database. It is written in the Google-developed Go language and has no external dependencies. That means once you install it, there’s nothing else to manage. InfluxDB is designed to be distributed and to scale horizontally.

Eclipse IoT is a set of extensible services and frameworks that application developers can use for building IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) applications. These services will enable features such as device management, wired/wireless communication, vertical solutions like home automation and more. Eclipse IoT provides tools and libraries for MQTT and CoAP, as well as OMA DM and OMA LWM2M device management protocols.

The AllJoyn open-source project enables devices in close physical proximity to locate, negotiate connections and interact with each other using peer-to-peer connections over a variety of transports. It is written in both C++ and C, depending upon the intended use case, and it provides multiple language bindings and complete implementations across various operating systems and chipsets. AllJoyn works across platforms ranging from Android to iOS, Linux, OpenWrt, Windows, OS X and embedded systems with limited memory and processing power.

Raspbian is a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware. Raspbian provides more than a pure OS: It comes with more than 35,000 packages, precompiled software bundled in a format for easy installation on your Raspberry Pi.