IOT — Android Things @ Auspost

In October of last year I ran a conference at Australia Post featuring the next frontier of technologies IOT, AI and Voice Assistant from Google. We know from the past that Google won the browser war with Chrome, the mobile war ended with a armistice between Apple and Google and the Cloud war is still being waged with Amazon well in front of Google and Microsoft. Three new fronts have also opened up - IOT which is being battled out between Samsung, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. The voice assistant war is in full swing with both Google and Amazon aggressively marketing and selling their devices. Nearly all the major software companies are now involved in integrating AI into their products. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all seem to have decent offerings to use AI as a service with the fight for market share only starting to take place.

It’s an interesting time to be in IT and watch these battles take place however it will many years until we know who the actual winners will be. Maybe even some of these new markets might fail to take off but only time will tell.

With an interest in IOT and to expand my skills I thought about doing a hack on Google’s Android Things platform. The big selling point of IOT to me is that it essentially any software company can venture into hardware. The IOT kits available today let you quickly and cheaply prototype solutions without engaging an external hardware manufacturer. Hardware is really hard to do but with the IOT certified kits and IOT platforms its means that any of your developers can now program these devices without any special skills or deep hardware knowledge.

There were number of reasons I decided to choose Google’s platform over the others.

1. Android is now running on over 2 Billion devices and the Android thing’s OS is based on a cut down version of Android. This makes skilling up for Android Things a lot easier if you already know Android and there is already a huge number of Android developer on the market to tap.
2. The platform can remotely push a new OS and app to your IOT device so you can easily manage all your devices and updates.
3. Android Things has a certification program so if a hardware component is certified then it should just work (plug and play).

So I got together with some colleagues at Australia Post and put together a team to do a hack on Android Things at the Australia Post Hack day. The hack involved making the public post boxes and P.O boxes smart so they could essentially detect mail and notify their recipients. We also decided to enter it in a competition at hackster.io and you can read the write-up here. For our efforts, we also came away with a bounty of $100 USD and t-shirts for the team.

From left : Wenchao, Mark, Raggie, Kevin & Joe