IoT news of the week for Dec. 18, 2020

Honeywell acquires Sine to take its Honeywell Forge platform mobile: Industrial giant Honeywell said it has acquired Australian company Sine so it can boost the mobile capabilities of its Honeywell Forge automation and building management software. Sine makes visitor access software for mobile devices that is managed from the cloud. The deal’s terms were not disclosed, but it sounds like Honeywell will use Sine’s capabilities to bring Forge into a more mobile era. This is especially important in a post-COVID world where people don’t want to touch or otherwise physically interact with people or kiosks and compliance with things related to visitor logging is more important than it’s ever been. (Honeywell)

Forget counting stars, counting new satellite efforts is just as challenging: For those of y’all who get confused between SpaceX and Amazon’s Kuiper service, this blog post is here to help. It provides a breakdown of four low-Earth orbit satellite networks in the works. Such networks have grown in number as advances in building satellites (they are so small and modular now!) have made them cheaper to build and launch. And by launching thousands of them, these small satellites can provide global coverage for home broadband, IoT, and more. (Frank Rayal)

Companies can now build products with Z-Wave’s long-range radio spec: Fighting for relevance, the Z-Wave Alliance has invested in a long-range version of low-power mesh networking technology. The group announced the effort in September and now is ready to support companies that want to build Z-Wave Long Range (LR) devices. A demonstration by Silicon Labs, which makes Z-Wave chips, has shown transmission over a mile on a coin cell battery that is expected to last for 10 years. The Alliance also maintains that a network could support up to 4,000 nodes. This could be useful for industrial tracking, and even for smart home use cases such as mailbox sensors or driveway monitors. We certainly get plenty of questions about long-range, low-power sensors. So if you want to build with Z-Wave LR, Silicon Labs now has a module, and a certification program will launch in March 2021. (Z-Wave Alliance)

Another edge computing chip startup gets funding: This time it’s a Dutch company called Innatera that has raised €5 million ($6.1 million) in seed funding from Munich-based MIG Verwaltungs AG and the Industrial Technologies Fund of btov. The interesting bit about this particular startup is that it is basing its design on the way the human brain works. Plenty of companies, such as Intel and IBM, have been investing in so-call neuromorphic computing for decades because our brains are able to process so much information on relatively low power. Many of these efforts are still in the lab. However, Innatera claims it has been able to use a brain-inspired design to build small neural networks, and then run inference using those neutral networks at 10,000 times the performance per watt. That’s an insane claim and I need to know more. (Innatera)

Amazon’s modeling for more secure firmware updates for RTOSes: This paper gets into the weeds, but because there are billions of devices running RTOSes and a subset of those are essential, it’s an important topic. The paper describes how FreeRTOS tries to figure out problems with its over-the-air update system using modeling. Over-the-air updates for RTOSes help keep them secure, may offer new features, and are scary as anything because the devices running these RTOSes often can’t break without causing expensive or even catastrophic failures. The equipment monitoring nuclear power plants? It depends on embedded computers running RTOSes. Because devices running RTOSes operate in a distributed system without any communication among them, figuring out how an over-the-air update will deploy can be a challenge. So these engineers have figured out a way to model for potential problems during an update, discovering three in their particular efforts with Amazon’s FreeRTOS. (FreeRTOS)

Funding for another synthetic data startup: Tonic has raised $8 million for its platform to help companies turn real data into de-identified synthetic data to train their neural networks or build products. Synthetic data has become a hot topic in the machine learning world because it offers a less expensive way to get data to train algorithms. Tonic notes that it can also help with privacy. Instead of using actual user data, completely de-identifying user data, and then preventing it from being combined with new data to de-anonymize users, Tonic says it can protect individuals’ privacy while still enabling the development of AI services. (Tonic)

Home Assistant in a box and version 5: Home Assistant, an open-source home automation platform, held a user conference last weekend where the organization launched a physical device that runs Home Assistant (before this you had to download the software and put it on your own computer) and version 5 of the software. Kevin shares his thoughts on the move from super DIY to getting smart home automation platforms in a more consumer-friendly format. (StaceyonIoT)

My thoughts on the Amazon Halo: My Halo broke the evening I published this review, but it appears to be a fluke. So if you’re interested in Amazon’s tone-detecting wearable, check out my thoughts. I also am using the Halo review as a way to shift the way I approach writing product reviews. Since many of our smart devices represent an ongoing data-sharing relationship with a particular company, I’m trying to frame my thinking about them based on whether or not I like the terms of the relationship at the time of the review, and plan to revisit them as that relationship changes. We’ll see how that works out. (StaceyonIoT)

Body bots, bossy bots, and baddie bots are the alliterative future of tech: Ericsson’s annual consumer trends report is out, and it’s a contradiction in terms. The report tracks 10 technological developments that forward-thinking consumers anticipate we’ll have by 2030. This year’s 10 technological futures are variations of some guardian technical angel that ensures we stay healthy, helps us get our work done, and finds the best wireless signal for our current tasks — all while respecting our privacy and protecting our data. Those same consumers apparently also see a future in which malicious bots can mimic our behavior and infiltrate our networks to perform crimes or hide from the consequences of crime. If you’re looking to pen a sci-fi novel maybe check this report out for some ideas. (Ericsson)