Abiquo at the Wireless Sensing Demonstrator Showcase 2008

Last July 1st the National Physical Laboratory held its Wireless Sensing Demonstrator Showcase in Teddington, UK. It looked as a wonderful chance to show our product to the many people this event will gather. We had a demonstrator spot granted to show how our platform allows the development of hardware independent applications. This solves the problem of dealing with hardware heterogeneity at application level, shattering completely the vendor lock and making the replacement of an existing device or the integration of a new one a neat and simple procedure.

The chosen demo application was called Virtual Office and included:

• Sign in and out of the employees through RFID tags
• A WiFi camera taking pictures whenever someone signed in or out.
• Lightness, temperature and humidity ZigBee sensors
• A tailor made notification system, through Twitter, e-mail and Bluetooth to keep the boss up-to-date on those event wherever he is.

The dream of each and every one of the employees in this world :)

For each functionality, we involved not one piece of hardware but two. We had two different RFID tag readers, one USB based and another ZigBee enabled. Two ZigBee sensors from completely different vendors and also an stand-alone ZigBee-TCP gateway and a USB one. Leaving aside the cool and useful features of the application, its most outstanding point is its hardware unawareness. We did not go nuts duplicating the hardware, we wanted to show hardware swapping. The application ran smoothly regardless the hardware composition active in every moment.

After going through all the steps, having our demo draft accepted, writing an article introducing the platform and the demo and developing it we could not make it to Teddington. Unfortunately, I was the designated demonstrator and health reasons made me impossible to travel on that date. Although it was impossible to foresee it, it is always a pity when a virus (a real one) tears down everything the team build and ruins a great chance to show our product to the world.

No matter how hard we apologize, we will still be sorry for the troubles. From here, we want to congratulate the event organization for its care along all the process and also thank them for its kind understanding the situation. We hope next year will be better.