10 Most Popular Open Source IoT Frameworks
While IoT is still a buzzword to a lot of people, IoT frameworks just take the complexity up a notch. However, we’re here to simplify things. Before we dive into what some of the open-source IoT frameworks are, let’s comprehend what it means.
What are IoT Frameworks?
Like you know, the Internet of Things is not a single element. It’s an ecosystem — an infrastructure of connected devices communicating with each other over the internet. When massive data generation and transmission across diverse devices, there has to be one place where everything is collated. This collation is essential to make sense out of the data generated.
This is where IoT frameworks come in. In simpler words, IoT frameworks are the components that make data transmission seamless.
The fundamental components of IoT frameworks include:
1. Hardware Devices
Includes sensors, controllers, micro-controllers and other hardware devices.
2. Software Applications
Involves written applications to configure controllers and operate them from remote and do more.
3. Cloud and Communication Platforms
An inevitable part of IoT over which all communications happen.
4. Cloud Applications
Written applications that bind local hardware devices and cloud-based devices.
Top 10 Open Source IoT Frameworks:
1. KAA IoT
Kaa IoT is one the most efficient and rich open source Internet of Things cloud platform where anyone has a free way to materialize their smart product concepts. On this platform, you can manage unlimited number of connected devices with cross device interoperability. You can achieve real time device monitoring with the possibility of remote device provisioning and configuration. It is one of the most flexible IoT platform for your business which is fast, scalable and modern.
2. MACCHINA.io
macchina.io IoT platforms provides a web enabled, modular and extensible JavaScript and C++ runtime environment for developing IoT gateway applications. It also supports a wide variety of sensors and connection technologies including Tinkerforge, bricklets, Xbee and many others including accelerometers. This platform able to develop and deploy device software for automotive telematics and V2X, building and home automation, industrial edge computing and IoT gateways, smart sensors, or energy management systems.
3. ZETTA
Zetta is a server oriented platform that has been built around NodeJS, REST and a flow based reactive programming development philosophy linked with the Siren hypermedia APIs. They are connected with cloud services after being abstracted as REST APIs. These cloud services include visualization tools and support for machine analytics tool like splunk. It creates a gero-distributed network by connecting end points such as Linux and Arduino hacker boards with platforms such as Heroku.
4. GE PREDIX
GE’s platform as a service software for industrial IoT is based on the concept of cloud foundry. It adds asset management, device security and real time, predictive analytics that also supports heterogeneous data acquisition, access and storage. GE predix was developed by GE for its own operations and consequently has become one of the most successful of the enterprise IoT platforms and with the recent partnering of GE and HPE, the future looks even better.
5. ThingSpeak
ThingSpeak is another IoT platform that lets you analyse and visualise the data in MATLAB and eliminates the need to buy a license for the same. It helps you to collect and store sensor data in private channels while giving you the freedom to share them in public channels. It works with Arduino, particle photon and electron and many more applications. It is used mostly for sensor logging, location tracking and alerts and analysis. It also has a worldwide community which is quite helpful in itself.
6. DeviceHive
DeviceHive is yet another feature rich open source IoT platform which is currently distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and is free to use and change. It provides Docker and Kubernetes deployment options and can be downloaded and use it with both public and private cloud. It allows you to run batch analytics and machine learning on top of your device data and more. Various libraries, including Android and iOS libraries are supported in DeviceHive.
7. Distributed Services Architecture
DSA is an open source IoT that unifies the separate devices, services, and applications in the structured and real time data model and facilitates decentralized device inter-communication, logic and applications. Distributed service links is a community library which allow protocol translation and data integration to and from 3rd part data sources. All these modules are lightweight making it more flexible in use. It implements DSA query DSL and has inbuilt hardware integration support.
8. Eclipse
Eclipse IoT platform is built around the java/OSGi based Kura API container and aggregation platform for M2M applications running on service gateways. Kura is a framework based on the Eurotech’s everywhere cloud IoT framework and is often integrated with the Apache Camel. Some of its major sub projects include the PAho messaging protocol framework and the Eclipse SmartHome framework.
9. Open Connectivity Foundation
Open Connectivity Foundation platform is an amalgamation of the intel and Samsung backed open interconnect consortium organisation and the UPnP forum which is working hard to become the leading open source standard group for IoT and its OCF IoTivity depends on RESTful, JSON and CoAp. OIC was created in July 2014. The first version of OCF 1.0 was release on September 2015 for the core framework, smart home device, resource type, security and remote access capabilities
10. OpenHAB
OpenHAB IoT framework is capable of running on any device that is capable of running a JVM. All the IoT technologies is abstracted by the modular stack into “items”, and offers rules, scripts, and supports for persistence — the ability to retain device states for a period of time. It offers a variety of web-based UIs, and is supported by major Linux hacker boards. It is deployed on premise and connects to devices and services from different vendors.
Conclusion
So, these were the top 10 open-source IoT frameworks. By now, we are sure you have a clear understanding of what IoT frameworks are, the different frameworks available in the market, their pros and cons and their applications to projects. If these feel daunting to you, we recommend getting in touch with an IoT development company like us.
We are a specialist IoT services provider, have been working on a few IoT platforms and have setup a completely new, highly motivated team of IoT engineers who passionately want to be part of the next-generation technology! Feel free to share your inputs about this article in the comments section.
Project Developed By Techtic
Originally published at https://www.techtic.com on January 19, 2018.
