The third Internet of Things World Conference took place in Santa Clara, California, USA on May 10-12. While large companies announced important new Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, the star of the exhibition hall may have been the Australian start-up Buddy's booth, which presented a demo of a smart city built with Legos and powered by IoT technology.
One of the more tweeted images from the conference was a slide from Buddy CEO Dave McLauchlan which quotes Michael Nelson, Professor of Communications, Culture and Technology at Georgetown Univerisy:
Trying to determine the market size of the Internet of Things is like trying to calculate the market size for plastics, circa 1940. At that time, it was difficult to imagine that plastics could be in everything.
Buddy's Internet of Things World press release subtitle is "Buddyville, a live Lego smart city, demonstrates power of Buddy Platform alongside a partner ecosystem including Gimbal, Marvell, Noveda, Ubicquia and Zentri" -- this gives us the background for the technology Buddy presented at the conference. The article also provides details about Buddyville:
Built with more than 13,000 Lego pieces, Buddyville is the hero of Buddy's exhibition space (Booth #112). It demonstrates Buddy's powerful and scalable backend data services combined with smart city sensors increasingly found in cities around the world today. Equipped with a central power distribution system, the miniaturized connected city's usage of energy -- electric consumption, and solar and wind generation -- is monitored, measured, displayed and controlled. Buddyville's capabilities include an earthquake detection system that triggers alerts and integrated emergency response; traffic management, including remote management of traffic lights; smart parking; and detection and notification of potential threats to public security and safety.
Buddy has a blog (latest post: "Calling all South Australian developers"), a developers domain, and the BuddyDocs Developer Hub. If you're interested in using Buddy, you can dive in with your IoT device. Buddy has APIs and SDKs for REST, Windows IoT Core, JavaScript, IOS, and Android.
Buddy also provides functionality for capturing telemetry from IoT devices and analyzing the data, service authentication, device management, event metrics, and more.
Buddy's REST API documentation provides an example of the platform's methodology. The overview states: "The REST API is intended for use with connected devices and for those who want to create highly-custom projects." The documentation provides details for initializing your application, creating and managing a user account, getting status, and working with files.
View the full BuddyDocs documentation hub for additional detail.