IOT2TANGLE: End of year review

Before 2020 ends, we want to capitulate on some of our most important milestones this year. In perspective, from the XDK110/MAM integration days by XDK2MAM to our current set of open-source codebase, a lot of things happened. In short, we are now building solid bridges between the new IOTA Layer 2 messaging solution (IOTA Streams) and IoT devices commonly used while developing proof of concepts, such as Raspberries, ESP32/8266, or STM32. On top of this, we are proud of the close relationship we constructed with companies such as Bosch, STMicroelectronics, and Espressif. Finally, but probably the most important thing, we engaged with the IoT community and had developers (many new to IOTA) using our tools to integrate their projects with the Tangle.

Adoption, adoption, adoption

All efforts from our side go to boost IOTA adoption. During this year, we learned that this combination of 1) open-source tools ready to use out of the box, 2) continuous dialogue with the leading IoT companies, and 3) engagement with the IoT developers community to validate and improve our work is the key to success. Only by developing these three fronts in a balanced way, you will get a shot at being used as a de-facto solution for whatever you are working on.

We are proud of our work until here and excited for what will come in 2021, when IOTA may change the crypto space forever.

IOT2TANGLE in a nutshell

I2T focuses on delivering open-source tools to enhance IoT developers' experience while implementing IOTA on their projects. They don't need to worry about coding Rust or to upgrade such code as the Streams protocol evolves: instead, they keep their Gateways upgraded and all that is handled by us.

To this end, we built a solution based on different modules.

• Code needed by different IoT devices such as the Bosch XDK110, Raspberry, ESP32, STM32, etc., to send data gathered from 7 sensors to the Tangle. These sensors are BME280, MPU6050, BH1750, Acoustic, and we refer to them as the I2T Sensors stack. You can use only some of them or easily add others from our code. Regardless of the board or set of sensors, the data will be sent following the I2T Standard.
• Code to allow boards to retrieve data from Streams channels.
• A Streams Gateway acting as the listener for the above boards. Our Gateway will receive all data sent to it as long as it is compliant with the I2T Standard. Once the data is received, the Gateway will publish it on a Streams channel. IOT2TANGLE tools are fog-oriented: we delegate the work needed to send sensor data from boards to an instance run in the Fog layer (A Raspberry Pi, for instance).
• A Streams subscriber application to read data published by a Gateway on a certain channel.
• Different connectivity methods (HTTP/MQTT/BLE) so your sensors can communicate with the Gateway according to your needs.
• Buffering instances (Keepy) to handle granular data scenarios on the Tangle.

What’s on the pipeline?

2021 will be a year full of challenges. We will continue on the path of integrating new IoT devices as we go deeper into the research of Rust for Embedded Systems. I2T needs to provide both edge and fog solutions so sensor data can be sent to the Tangle from the boards themselves or a fog-level device.

We are moving forward with our engagement with leading IoT companies, and hopefully, 2021 will bring some partnerships and collaborations. Once Coordicide is delivered, companies manufacturing chips will want their HW to run IOTA. We are already researching and talking with these companies about this and, the chances are that by the time the Coo is removed, we will be running some projects in collaboration with a few of them.

Finally, we are planning to start an I2T commercial branch offering services to provide IoT companies with our solutions and all needed IOTA infrastructure (Nodes, Permanodes, Private Tangles, Gateways) to integrate their existent IoT applications with IOTA. This way, we keep producing open-source tools and actively contribute to the adoption process simultaneously.

Stay safe. 2021 will be our year!