Billions IoT gadgets located in the tube to be manufactured in the coming years. The distributors are fighting to be delivering components to them.
To attract the support structure is an established tactic – it was a long time since the distributor was a pure component store. Meanwhile IoT area its own characteristics, focusing on product groups where there is a rapid development, such as sensors, wireless and energy driving. And large-scale operation of the IoT systems is a new challenge for classical elektronikonstruktörer.
There is also a difference in the customer base. in that IoT trend has emerged in parallel with hobbyisttrenden and grassroots financing.
Electronics magazine has browsed among the support functions distributors gather under IoT. Overall, covers the entire chain from training to system operation.
It is not a complete mapping without a sample.
We look in turn at what the distributors have to offer in training and design support, components and reference designs, as well as operation of the IoT systems and cloud services.
the lowest level of ambition of IoT aid can be said to have a tab that leads to its own IoT components in the online catalog. Larger distributors are looking PDF catalogs with their own IoT offering in various delnischer, such as wireless or standard card for the IoT.
On the next ambition is offered education: IoT introductions, blogs, white papers, surveys. The scope is growing with the distributor’s size. Arrow organizes seminar series, the customer if desired, and organizes itinerant events tillsammns with its suppliers.
RS Components Social Forum Desinspark has a comprehensive design centers dedicated to the Internet of Things, with videos, blogs, guides and white papers.
Also in the distributor Farnell element14 is a forum IoT department with much material for prototype construction and for DIY enthusiasts. Raspberry Pi and Arduino given much space, but there are also materials about development cards in their shadow from Texas Instrumentes, Infineon, Freescale and Silicon Labs.
On element14 is an IoT news flow that feels updated and as well as in RS DesignSpark is social forum with the opportunity to ask questions and start discussions, and share their experiences, which is also the distributors’ personnel involved.
Direct design assistance is long. Rutronik can serve as examples of how the support can be organized within the IoT area.
On the company’s website are two IoT doors to knock on. “Smart” is the entrance for those who develop their own circuit boards for sensors, IoT nodes and other terminal equipment in high volumes, typical consumer.
Here you will be greeted by expertise in wireless, chipset, power supply and sensors.
the entrance “Embedded” is for those who use standard cards and modules.
Tillämningen is typically the gateway and the vertical is industrial or professional equipment.
Here, you encounter specialists in the areas of wireless component, screens, card systems and data storage. They are the same field engineers on other specialty departments at Rutronik, the Wireless Competence Center.
The basic aim is to provide guidance in the chaotic IoT offering.
– We help clients understand what IoT means and what benefits it provides, says Bernd Hantsche, marketing manager for embedded and wireless at Rutronik.
the specialists you meet gives recommendations on components and development kits. Only in the wireless area includes the company’s portfolio of 35 manufacturers.
– Our customers can save lots of time on their own research and trying to find the millions of business opportunities in this market.
are jump starting the development kits. And commercialization assistance and logistics support when you reached that stage.
All this support and consultancy is free.
From Rutroniks perspective, the equation is simple: the better the customer succeed in their technology choices, the better product, the sooner put it on the market and the greater the volume.
– we help them avoid costly mistakes, and we help to get to market faster. We only earn money if our clients sell many copies of their products. This is why partnerships of this kind works so well. the same motivation and goals.
Thousands of Rutroniks customers operate in IoT area, and they will be more.
– We believe that all types of electronic devices ultimately will have its own IPv6 address. Both the old products toasters, washing machines and cars, and new as beacons, fitness bracelet and drones. So the market is huge, says Bernd Hantsche.
No one one-size-fits-all solution for the IoT has Rutronik not.
– We have realized that the demands of our customers, as disparate as the customers themselves, so we prefer to discuss each client’s individual needs.
the players in the IoT is not traditional. IoT developments rolls in parallel with a do-it-yourself trend, which means that many enreprenörer begins with the hobby cards Pi and Arduino and their modules. With these they throw up working prototypes in 48 hours.
– It has now become cheap to buy hardware and connect, and get started, says Stefan Wihlgaard, sales manager for the Nordic and Baltic distributor Digi-Key.
Customers can perhaps only to Kickstarter to check up interest in an idea, only then begin the design seriously.
one of the side effects of the mannequin making at Kickstarter is that the user interface will become more important. It is there from the beginning, instead of being something that stuck on the end. Smoke alarms are not only connected and get more sensors, but also becomes much nicer than the old off-white pucks.
It does not mean that these new IoT customers are novices. Here are engineers with day jobs who work on their own projects at night. And then there are newly unemployed engineers – think Nokia – forming startups.
Digi-Key has round the clock support, so even night owls can ask for guidance, although the new generation of increasingly can dig up their own information online.
– some send in all their ideas, says Stefan Wihlgaard.
A common model is to make the first generation of its IoT product of standard modules.
– It is critical to reach the market first. Then, to display the custom hardware to cut down costs and add features.
In addition, Digi-Key a variety of free tools and blogs. The company also operates community eewiki.net.
Component Suppliers usually have their own IoT reference designs. But distributors also can produce them.
The distributor Avnet (Avnet Memet-Silica) has launched three ARM-based sensor kits for connection via wifi, Lorawan respective Sigfox. For all three include both mobile application possibilities and cloud service Device Point.
The reference designs are the starting point for a platform called Visible things.
Avnet profiles itself against the hobby cards from competitors, “you can certainly do a lot with a Raspberry Pi, but lågkostnadsplattformar of that kind can not be used on an industrial scale, “says the company’s European marketing manager John Jones.
Even with Avnet’s designer support in terms of training and seminars. That support can help you to choose the components and to orient yourself on IoT market and IoT vertical the special requirements. You can also receive development assistance for hardware and software.
And then there’s free software for both sensor boards, gateways and cloud, in addition to that component manufacturers themselves give away or license.
The cloud is an important part of the IoT products are large systems, sensor monitoring of machines or telematics solutions.
In the cloud Managed nodes and integrate their sensor data for analysis. A dozen large and small clouds operators are keen to be involved in the game. The distributors have partnerships with them and also wishes to be the spider in the web to the extent you use various cloud providers.
Some distributors operate their own cloud services, as Acte with Connect Cloud, which uses Microsoft’s cloud Azure and Tele2′s mobile network.
One of the most sophisticated challenges in higher IoT systems interoperability. Minutes flora in IoT is overgrown and it will never be entirely pure because the new system is mixed with the old existing one can not demand that they support the new protocol.
Protocol Translation is a sensible solution for interoperability.
the distributor Arrow does this in a service called Intelligent services, which normalizes for example, control and sensor absolution to a common interface. Protocols MQTT, COAP, LWM2M, HTTP and UDP translated into invocations of standardized interfaces from the company Machine Shops.
The service is fresh. So far it has been used to make the gateways from three suppliers can be controlled the same command set.
The distributor Avnet use the term edge-to-enterprise to highlight the IoT interationen not even run out of the cloud, but also continues to the organization’s IT systems. The aforementioned platform Visible Things disclaims aim at the range.
Avnet provides an example of predictive maintenance. The machines have sensors that pumps data to the cloud makes an analysis and find that a machine is about to break.
There, the data processing time does not stop, but it must then – automatically – sent a repair order from the company company’s own IT systems to a technician.
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