Ask HN: What would you want in an IoT platform? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you want in an IoT platform?

6 pointsNetOpWibby6 comments

Hello everyone,

I work at a startup that currently provides RFID solutions for mid-market businesses. We have an in-house API that interaces with Impinj and Invengo RFID tags and readers.

I have suggested to the team that we should also use our platform to enable developers to bring IoT into their own projects. My question for the HN community is, what would you guys/gals like to see in an IoT platform? Personally, I would like easy interfacing with my Raspberry Pi, but that's the extent to my hardware expertise.

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Had a look at the Invengo readers, they don't look like they are affordable enough for hackers - please correct me if I'm wrong. I would love to locate affordable multi-standard RFID readers.

I would like to see a compact, cheap RFID reader that connects over PoE (both passive and IEEE 802.11af spec). The unit would only have to read tags and either send the reading over MQTT and/or support HTTP - long polling or maybe even WebSockets.

Learning yet another in-house API, interface, etc is a stumbling block. That's why I prefer MQTT, it is well proven and easy to get going. Of course, the RFID reader would need to have a web interface for setup, diagnostics.

I will research more affordable RFID readers, thanks a lot for your feedback! Everyone else on the team has more knowledge about RFID in general than I do (I'm the newest guy on the team).

Hopefully, I'll be able to come back here later on this year with a beta product for people to try!

I'd like to see interoperability and compliance to ETSI M2M standard and W3 WoT [0] in any IoT project.

The W3 WoT CG https://www.w3.org/community/wot/ does a lot of work here which is still ongoing and community participation is needed and welcome (especially around security & privacy).

[0] https://github.com/w3c/web-of-things-framework

I've never heard of this framework, but it looks/sounds awesome. Thanks for sharing!

A cool IoT product that I'd like to see is maybe a decent dedicated dashboard (this may exist but I don't know about it).

I want a simple dashboard for viewing (optionally interacting) with IoT devices, SOAP, REST, MQTT, uPnP..

It could also have features like maps, graphs, and charts for data that are simple to integrate (expl. provide a ressource URI, or drag-and-drop,...)

I'm the one creating the front-end so I can personally guarantee that the dashboards will look awesome.

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