DeviceHub.net, a Romanian project, won the hub:raum accelerator
After a development stage and several presentations of the project and guiding sessions with foreign specialists and ending with the final presentation held in front of a jury of experts and potential investors, the DeviceHub.net service was chosen the winner of the third edition of the Hub:raum final, from other projects from various European countries.
Hub:raum is an acceleration programme for such projects, and it is supported by Deutsche Telekom. It provides guidance and funding for this kind of unique projects, connecting their initiators with potential investors.
DeviceHub.net is a service which pleases my inner electrical engineer, being more related to interconnecting hardware components than other projects that made it into the final (and I will tell you more about them, including another Romanian project, soon).
The principle is as follows: you are a hardware developer and, for instance, you build a circuit or a device which measures how much coffee there is in a street vending machine, in order to know when to come and refill it or a device which monitors the GPS location of a car and further communicates it. For the great part of the developers the problem is where to send the data from these sensors, since they would need database servers, admins and a system to gather all the data in order to later analyse and display them in who knows what beautiful interface (as you collect thousands of GPS positions, but you show the user only a map of the route).
DeviceHub.net provides this service on their platform. The sensors will send data to the DeviceHub.net servers, where you can take them from and use them as needed. Basically, it is a cloud service for data from sensor, as well as for controlling different actuators and the number and the type of sensors that can be integrated is constantly increasing.
Coming back to the example with the coffee vending machine, now you can verify the values on the DeviceHub.net platform, without needing an own server to gather the data. This way, the development cost decreases a lot. Moreover, with DeviceHub.net you can connect for free 10 sensors and 5 actuators with a 5 seconds refresh rate, so you can develop and test for free small personal projects on their server.
**A very quick example of a personal project that comes to mind is the safety of the house.
**You buy a door opening sensor and about two motion sensors, you connect them to a Raspberry Pi which will send their input to DeviceHub.net, then you write a code for Android that accesses the DeviceHub platform and sends alerts to your phone if something changes. Up to 10 sensors and 5 actuators for free!
Another strength is the option to integrate multiple sensors. Working on the above example, add a sensor to the car, which sends the GPS location to DeviceHub.net. It does not matter that they are different types of sensors, that they send different data and so on - all data is gathered in the same place and can be used as you wish.
From this point of view, there is no wonder that they won. This is the kind of project that can be at the core of many other successful projects, especially when the Internet of Things is in discussion (personally I do not fancy this term and have long avoided using it). You can get more information and demos on DeviceHub.net.
The project is initiated by Constantin Craciun and Ionut Cotoi. The victory they’ve obtained the other day comes as a recognition of the project as a great idea and of the manner in which they have developed and presented it at hub:raum, but the real work is just about to begin with finding investors and partnerships with hardware producers. As far as I know, they already have 600 users and several companies have licensed the platform for in-house use, as some sort of a private platform.
Read more about DeviceHub.net :
official website
API and tutorials
I apologize in advance for the long and recurrent explanation. The truth is that this is the kind of service in the case of which those involved in development understand all about in 2 seconds or visit the official website and learn, whereas non-engineers don’t. So, I tried to explain it for non-engineers as well, what the idea consists in and why it is good.
