Using Eclipse and Lua for the Internet of Things with projects Koneki, Mihini and Paho

The Internet of Things (IoT) or Machine to Machine (M2M), is a technological field that will radically change the global network by enabling the communication of virtually every single object with each other. Studies state that more than 50 billions objects may be connected to the Internet by 2020. In a near future, everything from a light bulb to a power plant, from a pacemaker to an hospital, from a car to a road network will be part of the Internet.

While this revolution is already happening (your house or your car may be “connected” already!), there are still lots of barriers to its growth, especially since existing solutions are almost always proprietary, and cannot interoperate easily.

There are several very active M2M initiatives at Eclipse aiming at lowering these barriers, all under the umbrella of the M2M Industry Working Group. Last year, projects Paho (communication protocols for M2M) and Koneki (tools for M2M developers, in particular a complete IDE for Lua development) were created, and in July 2012 project Mihini was proposed to establish Lua as a reference platform for building M2M and IoT solutions.

The purpose of this talk is to give you a clear understanding of the aforementioned Eclipse projects, as well as to show you that real M2M solutions can already be developed thanks to them. We will briefly introduce the Lua programming language, explain why it is a good fit for embedded M2M development, and then demonstrate the development of an actual working solution making use of the Mihini framework, a Paho MQTT client, and the Koneki tooling. The use case will also leverage Open Hardware such as Arduino and a BeagleBoard, therefore you can expect nice demos!