Out in the Open: A Free Platform for Building Gear on the Internet of Things

The trouble with the Internet of Things is that the things dont really talk to each other.

New devices like the Nest thermostat, the Dropcam camera, and various wearables do a pretty good job of talking to the internet, letting you easily monitor and use them through online dashboards. But such tools would be so much more useful if they also traded information on their own. Its nice if you car tires let you know when theyre low via a web dashboard. But its even nicer if they can tell an air compressor exactly how much air they need and whose bank account to bill for it.

Thats the kind of digital utopia sought by the creators of Zetta, a new open source project that provides common tools for building internet-connected devices that can talk to each other, including everything from home automation contraptions to flying drones. Driven by a company called Apigee, the project made its official debut this morning.

Other projects and services seek much the same utopia. The average consumer can use a service called IFTTT to link devices like the Nest thermostat and the Philips Hue lighting system. More accomplished techies setup more complex interactions through Octoblu, formerly known as SkyNet, an open source system for controlling hardware over the internet. And behind the scenes, companies like Nest, now owned by Google, are now offering APIs, or application programming interfaces, for their devices that let the worlds developers create new ways of interacting with them. With Zetta, Apigee wants to help bring these kinds of APIs to far more devices.

Apigee has long been in the business of web APIs, which are basically ways for software developers to make one application talk with another. APIs are how companies plug their apps into services like Twitter, and increasingly, theyre how data scientists pull information from government websites for analysis. Apigee helps companies create and maintain APIs, and though it typically does this for more traditional online services, and it now wants to expand into the Internet of Things.

Basically, with Zetta, its offering tools that lets anyone build devices that can interact with the larger Internet of Things through APIs. This includes a set of specifications for creating APIsspecifications it is committing to the API Commons, a collection of designs that can be freely reused without license fees. But the company is also offering open source software that can run on devices, helping to handle much of the work that goes into an API.

According Apigee vice president Brian Mulloy, the strength of the platform is that its well suited juggle many different types of communicationsomething that can help link disparate devices. What our platform is really smart about is cross-mediating between different protocols, he says.

The Zetta software will run on cheap, low-end hardware such as the Raspberry Pi and the Beaglebone, passing messages from the hardware either directly to other devices or with servers hosted in the cloud or even your living room. Apigee will try to make money from the project by offering to host online services that plug into this software, but the software and its source code will be available for anyone to use for free.

The project is still in the early stages, but Tim Ryan, one of the creators of Internet of Things hardware platform called Tessel believes it can push this market forward. Building your own devices and APIs can be tricky, and theres no standard way of doing it, he says. Zetta could make that easier.

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Out in the Open: A Free Platform for Building Gear on the Internet of Things