IoT news of the week for April 15, 2022

Diligent Robotics raises $30M: Diligent Robotics, a company in Austin, Texas that is building the Moxi robot designed for hospitals, has raised more than $30 million in funding. I’ve loved this company and its robot for years, ever since I took a group of fifth graders to the UT Engineering school and ran into a Moxi demo. However, Moxi isn’t designed for interacting with patients. The robot has a storage box, wheels, and an arm so it can handle blankets and towels and deliver equipment around a hospital, sparing nurses. Moxie also introduced me to the concept of having to design spaces for robots. Moxi struggled with traditional doorknobs, for example, which means hospitals that wanted to make full use of the robot needed to change over to lever latches if they wanted Moxi to get into storage closets. (Mobi Health News)

Built Robotics raises $64M for autonomous construction vehicles: This is a funding story and also a story of how a smart startup took the pandemic as an opportunity to focus on a specific market. In this case, Built Robotics has decided to focus on building a smart exoskeleton that attaches to excavators and makes them autonomous. This strategy of attaching a sensor-filled platform to existing equipment is a pretty common one and a smart way to position a startup to develop a better next-generation product — or get acquired by one of the original makers of the equipment for which the startup is building gear. (TechCrunch)

U.S. government warns of potential industrial control attacks: The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Energy Department have warned that industrial controllers from Schneider Electric, Omron, and OPC Unified Architecture are vulnerable to attacks by an unnamed nation-state. Security firm Dragos has worked with federal agencies to alert customers and users of affected ICS and SCADA devices to update and monitor their systems for an attack they are calling PIPEDREAM. The reported vulnerabilities have not actually led to a breach, and were apparently discovered before attackers had a chance to use them. However, given global tensions and the high value of wrecking havoc on a country’s energy grid, the alert is worth paying attention to and acting upon. (CISA)

Sigfox sale delayed by a week: The sale of French Low-Power Wide-Area Network Sigfox has been delayed until Thurs., April 21 to give Singapore’s UnaBiz, one of the leading bidders, time to get the French government to unblock its bid. France requires government approval for foregign firms to enter the country, but denied that approval to UnaBiz, which has approval from Sigfox staff and management for the takeover. Clearly politics are at play, especially during an election season inflamed by a nationalist candidate, but it’s a shame to see an IoT network caught up in the mess. (Enterprise IoT Insights)

Semtech releases new LoRa chip for satellite tracking: Semtech, the chipmaker behind the LoRa long range, low-power radio technology, has added more capabilities to its latest TK chip. These new capabilities, such as multi-band radios that work in the sub gigahertz and 2.4 GHz bands, will enable LoRa to work in more places and to track things using satellite networks. There are an increasing number of satellite connectivity companies seeking to combine LoRaWAN and satellite networks to build low-power WANs that can stretch around the globe. This new chip will help. (Semtech)

What’s a Peloton worth? I can’t help but watch as connected bike company Peloton shifts its subscription model and confirms my thinking that most people are unaware of what it means to purchase a connected product, where much of the value derives from cloud services. With a new subscription strategy to lower the hardware costs of the bikes while raising subscription prices is underway, existing bike owners are also getting it with a 13% subscription price hike. Which is why this site wrote an article asking if now is the right time to sell your Peloton. I am more curious, though, about what price people will sell their Pelotons for. A quick scan of Craigslist in the Seattle area shows plenty of bikes for sale for between $900 and $1800, depending on the model, but I have to wonder who will want to buy a connected bike that is tied to a $44 monthly membership fee. Will consumers decide that they should spend less on the hardware and more on a monthly subscription they can dump in a few months? This is a giant subscription hardware experiment, and I can’t wait to watch it play out. (Grow)

On the importance of good state information: The folks over at Golioth, an IoT platform, have been really beefing up their blog lately. Sure, it’s a marketing tool, but it also provides cogent explanations of several concepts and issues in the IoT. I’m highlighting the blog that the company has posted about the challenges of providing consistent state information between devices and the cloud. This is an underappreciated problem for industrial, enterprise, and home IoT, especially when it comes to environments with poor connectivity. So if you’d like to understand the challenge, check it out. (Golioth)

Understanding how to retrain and recruit a new workforce for industrial and utility jobs: It’s no secret that workers in the industrial and utilities workforce are pretty male and pretty old. Yet as the companies employing these workers invest in digital transformations, they are struggling to attract and retain workers for this new environment. This article focuses on the utilities worker, articulating the news skills workers need to have and new jobs that companies will have to hire for as formerly physical labor becomes more about understanding workflows and managing data dashboards. As a bonus, the article is by Claire Rowland, who is a former podcast guest and IoT product designer. (LinkedIn)

Syntiant’s TinyML chip beats Arm cores on benchmark test: When it comes to processing a simple wake work word quickly (1.8 milliseconds) and using the least amount of energy, Syntiant’s NDP120 chip outperformed Arm’s Cortex-M7 cores by 17.7 milliseconds. This isn’t terribly surprising since Syntiant’s boards are literally designed to maximize performance per watt, delivering the most they can using the least energy possible. Meanwhile, Arm’s Cortex M7 cores are designed for more general purpose jobs. I’m highlighting this not only because I’m obsessed with the role that TinyML will play in IoT (and computing in general), but because I think there will be a big demand for specially designed silicon for TinyML jobs. (EETimes)