If the Internet of Things will be SOOO BIG why did Broadcom just quit the market? Cypress Semiconductor has made Broadcom an offer too good to refuse: US$550 million in cash for its wireless Internet of Things business unit. The deal covers the whole kit-and-kaboodle: Broadcom's Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee Internet of Things product lines, its WICED brand and developer community, and the relevant …
Along with Google Internet-Of-Tat -
"Nest's bricking of Revolv serves as wake-up call to industry.... Noting that the decision to brick Revolv "undermines any confidence customers can have in Google's hardware offerings,"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/06/nests_bricking_of_revolv_a_wakeup_call/
Exactly.
It is why they exited Blu-ray player silicon, lots of compatibility problems due to dodgy disc mastering and low profits with a lot of smaller customers.
Traditionally Broadcom are a high margin manufacturer and put it back into R&D to stay at the higher end of the market.
Remember when 3D TVs were going to be everywhere and we'd watch everything in 3DHD?
Except we don't. It was marketing hyperbole to sell more TVs and charge more for cinema tickets.
Now a lot of people actively avoid 3D (I'm one, makes me want to puke).
IoT really how many people can be arsed with a wifi kettle, fridge, plant pot, bog or any one of the other innumerable pointless gadgets that are appearing.
I'm sure there will be some use for IoT tech but it'll probably be a lot more mundane than the marketing guys make out. Like 3D it'll still be around but no one will really give a shit.
I guess Broadcom have sniffed the wind and seen the way this is going, get out while the hype curve is still high.
Yes, the market is hopelessly inflated with ideas of little or no utility. Nevertheless, I think there will be a market for connected sensors: think fire alarms that can call the fire service.
However, I also expect most of the development to be in factories and warehouses as proprietary systems are swapped for something more maintainable.
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"fire alarms that can call the fire service."
Seems unlikely.
The apartment block I'm in right now (in Wales, where they've started to take fire regulations relatively seriously) has recently had an upgrade to the communal fire alarm system to get compliant with current regulations.
Some folks had been mentioning wireless to avoid disrupting their precious decor.
The trade professionals all said "after several years experience with wireless, the industry has mostly concluded that affordable wireless is too unreliable and causes too many false alarms (of system faults), so unless there are specific reasons to choose wireless (which will make it *very* expensive to achieve the reliability), wireless is a non-starter.".
Stuff that doesn't need to be complicated works better when it's kept simpler. Who could possibly have thought that, eh.
Obvs not as important as as a fire alarm, but I recently came to the same conclusion for my home network.
After lots of money and kit over the years, I am back full circle with believing that in general wireless is bobbins and for my own setup, the cable is queen.
I've been finding for domestic use that even modest powerline kits have blown away the frustration and restored something like a usable network.
My one regret is not coming to this denouement earlier, and running CAT5e through the house while everything was apart for the heating going on. Live and learn I guess.
I think everyone would accept that having a device report its status is a useful thing to have and putting it on the internet makes sense so it becomes accessible from wherever it needs to be accessed. And if it can provide status it can detect when there's a problem can and alert people of that.
In itself that is no bad thing, and that is already widely implemented anyway. It is the unintended consequences, security and privacy risks, which are the other side of the coin. Increasing what is on-line and exposed, particularly putting it on the wider internet as opposed to LAN, using 'cloud' services rather than local servers.
There's a lot of hype for and a lot of knee-jerk reaction against IoT but, in truth, it's already there and will only keep growing.
I suspect that my 'luddute' attitude to IoT is not alone here.
I suspect most of us here are quite happy with the idea of networked sensors.
It's the "putting it all on the Internet" bit that sticks in the craw...
This IoT architecture saves you having to have some sort of server appliance on your network - but the security cost to avoid that seems somewhat excessive to me.
Vic.
Networked sensors can be a really bad idea, as I discovered with my car recently. At random intervals I'd get a series of fault warnings, but nothing was actually wrong. This proved to be a major headache for the garage as it became impossible to identify the sensor that was intermittently killing the network. It took them over a week to deal with it - fortunately under warranty.
Yes, because I need my house freaking out and telling me that I have a bulb out or that my laundry is done. IoT is for idiot consumers who think they are all "tech geeky guru" because they have a wireless thermostat. Kind of like management who push DevOps. And like DevOps, IoT makes me want to hurt someone.
The existing line of Cypress ARM microcontrollers are excellent candidates for the real "connected sensor" market (as opposed to the wishful-thinking of x86+Windows).
All that is missing is wi-fi.
On the other hand Pi-type hardware is good for local concentrators, and extends the Cypress range to more computery ARM processors.
I particularly like the Cypress PSoC 4 BLE that has a bit of programmable logic and 2 opamps in the package, and is very flexible in its power needs - good for energy harvesting applications.
No. Not for a long while. Too many companies are gearing up to enter into it (Intel, anyone?). The momentum is still building up. Or the bubble is being pumped or whatever you want to call it. There are a lot of companies who don't quite know what to do next now that their existing business models are having troubles.
Anyway, smart move by Broadcom, good for them. I hope they use the money for R&D of things we might actually need or at least can use in a sensible way.
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