Andy Carle calls it ‘The Chasm of Despair” – the continuous loop between getting funding for your fantastic startup idea and the many iterations prior to realise which throws you round and around like a rag doll on a white knuckle ride during which time you realise you are most definitely not production ready, you ditch all progress to date, realise you need to up skill and the look of excitement turns into that of a zombie.
The Internet of Things Conference delves into new technology for IoT including Big Data for devices, AI, Machine Learning, funding as well as additional training courses to provide advice and guidance for those looking to take their product from idea to production.
I would implore anyone that is thinking about or in the process of the hack of their lives to realise a product to watch this talk which rationalises the process of business and technical flow for your IoT project and could help, depending on where you are at, save a lot of time and heartache, or at least inject some efficiency and also explains Carle’s steel conviction that JavaScript is ready to become the de facto language for IoT development.
Carle talks about prototyping and approaching it from a user perspective before getting too committed to a platform, “the goal is to build prototypes that can answer questions, the whole point of building a prototype is not to get one step closer to the end. The point of a prototype is to get it in front of people, get authentic user feedback and find out what you’re doing well and what you could be doing better.”
Early decisions are crucial to the success of a project and Carle advocates software simulation as being key to choosing the correct technology (go to 9:12) as well as hardware simulation to see what the software would be like running on the device it is at this point that Carle says it is important to get serious about prototyping how sensors and motors will work as a user.
This is when the project should be ready for hardware prototyping which Carle explains is where a lot of people actually start, without any proof of concept.
Carle is the Project Lead for Kinoma Create at Marvell, (17:55) a suite of tools hosted on a custom tablet which aims to close many of the gaps for IoT developers highlighted in this talk. The Kinoma Create kit is aimed at including the JavaScript developer market and avoids having to spend time setting up environments, allows developers to prototype whilst using a language that is familiar and not having to go out and learn a lower level language.
Create is the result of more than a decade of work in creating a JavaScript framework, KinomaJS, for IoT which started from a project back in 2002 when Marvell wrote all the software for Sony Camcorders using JavaScript.
The device itself features a touch screen for easy usability with portals to be able to plug devices in and prototype, bringing IoT development into the age of apps and fingertip navigation to save time for developers, rather than hauling code along the command line in between research. Instead, Marvell have poured visualisation into IoT development and flushed out bare board development with Create as an open invitation to the masses of JS developers to come and conjure.
