Nitrogen - An IoT Platform for Makers
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This document introduces Nitrogen, a platform for connecting IoT devices and managing communication between them and applications. It discusses challenges around discovery of devices on the network, allowing communication between devices and apps, authenticating devices and users, authorizing access, and developing applications. Nitrogen uses a message-based system and isolated reactors to securely connect devices like lights and switches to user phones and apps, while preventing access from rogue or unauthorized entities. Developers can create and distribute Nitrogen apps through npm to control devices from the cloud or local networks.
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Nitrogen - An IoT Platform for Makers
- 1. A platform for makers Tim Park @timpark
- 19. nitrogen.io 7
- 21. type: lightCommand on: true type: lightCommand hue: #ff0000 type: lightState on: true type: lightState hue: #ff0000 ……..… Message Based
- 22. Nitrogen manages devices and apps and secures communication between them. Light Lighting App Light Switch Light User’s Phone Rogue Light Nitrogen Service Bad User
- 29. A Nitrogen application is just an node.js module. You publish and distribute applications via npm.
- 30. The Nitrogen Reactor provides an isolated execution environment for these applications. Reactor vacation-lighting Cloud Reactor Device hue-bridge
- 32. Service Reactor hue-bridge Light Zigbee Reactor vacation-lighting vacation-lighting module hue-bridge module Raspberry Pi Cloud Hue Light Bulb #2 Hue Light 1 Hue Light 2 Bridge Zigbee Light Zigbee Hue Light Bulb #1 npm Hue Bridge Ethernet
Editor's Notes
- For decades, this has been our conception of a computer It has a screen an input device
- Over the last decade, computers have morphed into something that was always with us But were still basically were devices with screens and some form of input device.
- There is a lot of thought going on in the industry on how to extend this model forward. Smartwatches are one idea.
- But I believe the next big thing is computing coming to the ordinary things in our life and making them better. In this world, things like the humble light bulb are woven into applications.
- Where the user interface for these applications is not a touchscreen nor a keyboard. But things like the light switch that already exist. In this model computing becomes both much more pervasive but also more invisible.
- This revolution is being fueled by open hardware. Here is a Raspberry PI, which is an incredibly cheap and incredibly capable device. It can run a full operating system and also has GPIO pins for interfacing with hardware.
- The Raspberry Pi is just one of a blizzard of these sorts of devices. This is the Espruino, it can run JavaScript directly, with a custom written JavaScript interpreter.
- And this is the Tessel, which allows you to run node.js apps on-device.
- Making hardware accessible to software developers has lead to an explosion of connected things made by makers. The Kickstarter project “Good Night Lamp” is a great example This is a great example of something simple that this concept of pervasive computing has enabled. It is just a light, but with a twist. It is a light paired with another light over the internet. So instead of the switch turning on your light, it turns on the light at the other end of the internet. So you can give this to a loved one and let them know that you are thinking of them. This is a good example of a real world device made smarter with connectivity.
- I have a long personal history with devices, starting with a humble device that helped people browse the web on their television.
- Eventually, I ended up in the Android team at Google worked on a fairly well known platform there.
- Before becoming part of a startup called Nest Labs that worked on building smart connected devices for the home. What all of these experiences taught me is that while its easy to prototype something, when you go to do this for real, you face some really hard problems.
- What I learned from these experiences is that there are a set of key challenges in the internet of things. The first is discovery. Let’s say we want to build an application that managing the lighting in our home. We want to it to be able to ask our own personal internet of things for switches and lights. So the first challenge we have is being able to express those capabilities on devices and be able query for them.
- What I learned from these experiences is that there are a set of key challenges in the internet of things. The second is communication. You want to be able to build applications that enable things to communicate with each other. Let’s say you want to turn on two lights with a particular light switch in your house. You want something, let’s call it an app, that automatically fans that one switch message out to three control events out to your two lights. Likewise, you might want your phone to be able to turn and off the lamps.
- The third key challenge is authorization. You don’t want a rogue light to be able to pretend to be one of your lights.
- And the third key challenge is that you don’t want unauthorized devices or users to be able to control our devices. We need an authorization system that prevents the bad user from controlling your lights but enables you (and maybe your friend) to control them.
- And what does it mean to write an application in this world. How does the application receive switch events How does it control the lights
- I’ve been working over the last year on a personal project that experiments with solving these issues. Built on node.js, it leverages the increasing pervasiveness of JavaScript to execute anywhere. I’m a maker myself and I built this for myself to provide all this infrastructure so you can ocus on the application or device you are building. I also built this for people new to software to make it easier for them to get into working with open hardware and building networks of things. Apache 2 licensed so you can embed it into your own projects.
- It is an Apache 2 licensed project.
- In Nitrogen, devices and applications communicate with each other with messaging. In our lamp scenario, we use lightCommand messages to turn on the lamp. And the lamp responds with lightState message to indicate its new state. These are agreed upon message schemas that allow you to interact with a Philips Hue lightbulb in the same way that you interact with a LiFX light bulb. You can think about this like Twitter for Devices.
- And so, combining all of these challenges together What Nitrogen does is provide a platform that authenticates and authorizes devices and enables them to communicate, in real time with other entities. At the same time, it prevents rogue elements from doing the same.
- Ok, so that’s how the pieces fit together at a high level. I thought I’d talk through now how one set of makers are using the platform. This is Tom Hartley and Alyssa Dayan, who built a kickstarter project called the AirPi as part of a high school project. It’s an incredible story of how accessible hardware is now. They are 17 years old and have designed, built, manufactured, and kickstartered a hardware device.
- Its called the AirPi The AirPi captures a large amount of data about your local environment: temperature, pressure, humidity, particulate, UV intensity. Capturing and securely sharing this information is very difficult engineering work, as those of you who have worked in this field can attest. And building applications against the data is just as hard. They are using Nitrogen to provide this so that they can focus on the hardware.
- The application that Tom is writing is to combine all of the environmental metrics on a map so you have a crowdsourced set of data. Here is a screenshot of my home device. The idea is to crowd source data beyond temperatures and into things like particulates into a rich, local, realtime view. By default, the devices that you have in your personal cloud are kept private. When you decide you want to share a device with an application, you authorize that application to be able to view it. Clicking “Add my AirPi” allows you to do that. It links to Nitrogen and asks for access to your AirPi devices.
- In this sense, it is a lot like how applications interact with Facebook. The user can see what the application is asking for and approve or deny the request.
- One of the things that surprises people about Nitrogen is that is makes an extensive bet on JavaScript.
- It makes a bet on JavaScript because the JavaScript ecosystem is exploding. By July 4th, JavaScript will be the largest ecosystem in the world, blowing past Java and I suspect, will never look back. What is driving this is its ubiquity. The advent of node.js brought JavaScript to the server and this served as the spark that has transformed it into the English language of programming. You might not like JavaScript or think it’s a clean language. But neither is English and it is the defacto language of business for the same reasons: a large number of people speak it and they can make money because they speak it. JavaScript is also easier than C or other languages for non-programmers to learn.
- In the node community we already have a way to distribute modules called npm. In Nitrogen, device and application modules are just npm modules that are published via node.js’s package manager.
- Ok, so know how distribute and install these applications, but how do we execute them? Nitrogen executes apps within an environment called a Reactor that hosts one or more devices/applications. A Reactor is responsible for managing the lifecycle of one of these applications: Installing them from npm Starting them with parameters and under the context of a particular security principal Upgrading them Etc. The model is the same between devices and the cloud. It also ensures that these applications can’t interfere with each other by isolating them in their own jailed container, shown here in yellow.
- The best way to understand Nitrogen is to build something. Let’s say we wanted to build an application that controlled a light using twitter. The first question that comes to mind is how do you distribute an application like that.
- So let’s look at all of this in the context of the Hue light I’m going connect up. I’m going to use a Raspberry Pi in this demo to connect and control a Hue light system. The Raspberry Pi executes a Reactor which is going to run a device application from npm called hue-bridge. This device application will go out and look for the Hue lights available here on the local network via a Philips Hue Bridge. I’m also going to install a application that controls one of these lights via Twitter. Its going to execute in the cloud where it can watch both twitter and send messages to the hue light through the Nitrogen service.
- To wrap up, I really believe that maker projects will be one of the biggest drivers of the Internet of Things. This is a picture of a recent NodeBots event where folks from the JavaScript community get together to build devices. Nitrogen provides the infrastructure for building devices like this so you can focus on the device and the application and not the infrastructure. And while this is playful and fun, what it is really preparing folks for is the real problems in the Internet of Things
- Like our farms
- Our cities…
- And our homes
- Thanks for listening You can learn how to get started with the platform at http://nitrogen.io There is a free hosted version of the platform that has been sponsored by Microsoft Ventures. And if you liked this, you should follow me on Twitter and send me feedback! I’ll be around for questions for as long as people want to talk about them – thanks again for listening.