October 2019

Written by Jason Shepherd, LF Edge Board Member

On October 7^th and 8^th, I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural EdgeX Open Hackathon in Chicago. EdgeX Foundry is focused on facilitating interoperability between devices and applications, regardless of underlying hardware, OS, and connectivity protocol. The project is ultimately about creating a de-facto standard open API that binds together a preferred mix of open source and commercial value-add.

Once EdgeX hit 1.0 status in June with the Edinburgh release, the community started planning the EdgeX Open Hackathon series for leveraging the framework in customer-valued use cases.

The inaugural EdgeX Open, hosted at the Tech Nexus coworking space in Chicago, hosted by LF Edge, EdgeX Foundry and RILA

Six teams participated in this inaugural event, representing HAVI, Intel/Intuiface, Johnson Controls, UST Global and Volteo in addition to a small independent team of registered individuals. Pre-work was allowed but a “secret ingredient” (Iron Chef-style) was introduced the day of the event to level the playing field a bit. In this case, it was a camera using Intel’s OpenVINO computer vision and image recognition model to output an object recognition algorithm to an API. Teams were able to earn extra points by integrating this technology into their solution stack.

Read on for how the hackathon went down!

Day 1:

The first day began with pitches from top sponsoring companies Dell, HP and Intel on what EdgeX Foundry means to the IoT market. Nicholas Ahrens of the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) talked about the importance of innovation in retail and then Brad Corrion of Intel walked the teams through the objectives and introduced the secret ingredient.

Brad Corrion walking through the event rules

During my pitch, I had the pleasure of announcing that the EdgeX Foundry project recently hit a million total microservice downloads since the April 2017 launch. To get a sense of the accelerating momentum, half of these downloads occurred in the past two months!

With intros completed, the developers got to work. Most of the teams brought a plethora of devices to work with including cameras, sensors, scanners and a thermal printer and many had done some pre-work. Numerous developer attendees had never used EdgeX before and all were able to get the framework running quickly. Once the set-up was completed, they started with their integration of various devices and application stacks to build out their use cases.

Teams diligently working on their solutions

The participants had their choice of one of three use cases, or an open category:

1. Advanced loss prevention – leveraging EdgeX to correlate computer vision events with telemetry from sensors such as RFID and transaction log data from Point-of-Sale systems for improved loss prevention/theft detection
2. Dynamic personalized retail experience – leveraging computer vision and sensor data to drive an improved in-store customer experience based on individual shopper preference
3. Inventory management – using data from sensors and scanners (hand-held and/or drone-based) to improve inventory accuracy
4. Open category – any retail-centric use case deemed valuable by end users

While it appeared that most of the users picked the open category, the reality is that they did variants of the three main use cases. The teams wasted no time getting to work (actually many were working during the intro pitches…) and the room was bustling all day with activity.

From top (counter clockwise): Team Havi, Team Johnson Controls, Team Skanna

The UST Global team came up with an innovative solution for highly perishable food using Augmented Reality (AR) and RFID to enable grocery store associates to point a smartphone at fresh meat and produce displays to see products that are nearing or beyond the expiration date, i.e. “How fresh is the meat?” This would benefit the grocery store in terms of streamlining how they find, sort and discount expiring food, and benefit the consumer in terms of choosing between either the freshest products or benefiting from dynamic price markdowns or food nearing the expiration date. They came prepared, complete with props including fake chicken nuggets and lamb chops, making me hungry every time I walked by their table.

The UST Global team working on their solution for “How Fresh is the Meat?”

Day one wound down with a whiskey tasting which reminded me of the face-to-face TSC meeting in Edinburgh a year prior where we also ended the first day with a whiskey tasting. I sense a theme here!  Whiskey sommelier Anthony Dina selected three boutique whiskeys from the “edges of the earth” – one from a small batch distiller in the US, one from Scotland and one from New Zealand.

Whiskey from the edges of the earth

We then had some tasty Chicago deep dish pizza, followed by the “EdgeX Open Mic” – a community music jam.  Tony Espy (Canonical) and I worked up a variety of singalongs and managed to get a handful of folks belting out Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline and John Denver’s Country Roads, plus he and I did some pretty decent versions of Radiohead’s High and Dry and Jeff Buckley’s “Halleluiah”… especially considering this was only the second time we’ve played together (the first being an open mic night in Edinburgh during the Fall 2018 EdgeX F2F TSC).

Tony and I belting out the jams

Several folks came up to us afterwards and talked about how they played instruments spanning guitar to saxophone. At the next EdgeX Open, we clearly need to prepare more in advance and get a full band together, or perhaps we should just serve a little more whiskey beforehand! Or, both?

Day 2:

Day two started early with the teams continuing to build out their solutions unified by the EdgeX framework. Around 11am the judges we’re introduced – Eran Harel from AppCard, Nicholas Ahrens from RILA, Juan Santos from Tavistock Group, Mark Stutzman from Area 15, and Scott Gregory from HP. The judges subsequently spent time with each team to learn about their solutions before deliberating.

Hackathon Judges

Each team was then able to formally pitch to the judges and all participants in a final presentation that walked through their solution, what ingredients they used and how EdgeX was used for integration. The judges deliberated a bit more and then we had the closing ceremony, during which the winners were announced… and… drum roll… here they are!

The Intel/Intuiface team meeting with the judges

1^st Place – Team Volteo: An inventory management and loss prevention solution that used RFID sensors and networked cameras for accurate inventory management and to record door exit events by combining POS transaction data together with merchandise movement tracked by RFID sensors and cameras.

Team Volteo

2^nd Place – Team Intel/Intuiface: A predictive self-service checkout assistance solution that used RFID and computer vision to trigger an alert when a customer failed to scan items within a reasonable time and/or based on OpenVINO emotion detection during customer interaction with the kiosk.

Team Intel/Intuiface

3^rd Place – Team UST Global: An AR and RFID-based solution to track ultra-perishable goods in grocery stores and allow for dynamic pricing, e.g. how fresh is the meat? They developed an AR mobile app to scan food aisles and provide details on freshness, current price, etc.

Team UST Global

And this wasn’t just for bragging rights – 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place winners received $5000, $2500, and $1000 in cash respectively!  As co-founders of the EdgeX Foundry project, Jim White and I had the pleasure of handing out big checks during the award ceremony, summarily checking off a to-do on my bucket list!

Congrats to Team Volteo for winning the Grand Prize!

Thanks to our sponsors!

It has been an honor for me to participate in the EdgeX community over the years and this event was no exception. Big thanks to the LF Edge and the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) for hosting the event, and to sponsors Canonical, Deep Vision, Dell Technologies, HP, Intel, IoTium and ZEDEDA who also provided their commercial offerings for the developers to use in their solutions as well as tech support on-site. Also, a shout-out to the planning committee which included volunteers from Dell, HP, IBM, Intel and the Linux Foundation.

EdgeX Foundry community leaders helped answer questions and more during the hackathon

Looking forward

The concept behind the EdgeX Open Hackathon is for it to be a global franchise series. Other markets in discussion for future events include manufacturing, smart cities, oil and gas, utilities/energy, agriculture, healthcare and beyond.

Stay tuned for more detail on the next installment, for which we also plan to include more about the overall LF Edge value prop by pulling from other enabling projects within the umbrella, combined with sponsor content. We’re thinking manufacturing in the Spring 2020 timeframe, likely aligned with an industry event such as Hannover Messe in a nearby town in Europe.

In the meantime, download EdgeX and build something great!

By Jason Shepherd, LF Edge Governing Board member and IoT and Edge Computing CTO, Dell Technologies

Founded in 1996, Technotects is an IoT technology consulting firm with broad domain expertise in industrial use cases. When one of their industrial equipment OEM customers independently realized the power of the EdgeX Foundry framework, Technotects planned and executed a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) with one of their customer’s typical process skid use cases.

This blog walks through the successful PoC, including what the solution entailed and Technotects’ experience working with the EdgeX platform. We’re seeing more and more of these types of real-world applications go public in the community on the heels of the EdgeX Foundry “1.0” Edinburgh release.

The use case

The use case for the PoC is monitoring sensor and pump information from a process skid used in a variety of applications, including agricultural, flavors and fragrances, pharmaceutical, petro-chem and food/beverage industries. Technotects’ goal of the effort was to prove that the EdgeX Foundry platform, combined with commercial value-add from the ecosystem, can provide an Internet of Things (IoT) solution stack that can address the unique interoperability challenges that industrial applications present, such as a mix of connectivity protocols and near real-time I/O processing, all while giving them the freedom of choice by being decoupled from proprietary, single-vendor solutions. In turn, this would allow their customers to improve their overall solution architectures, reduce runtime royalties and accelerate their time-to-market.

EdgeX-enabled Dell gateway utilized in the Technotects PoC

Technotects’ initial interest in EdgeX Foundry was the flexibility offered by the open ecosystem and the potential of reducing excessive runtime licensing fees per deployed host node, based on the combination of a proprietary edge application framework, edge historian and both southbound and northbound connectivity. In addition, they were attracted to the ability to make build-or-buy decisions with EdgeX without being locked into any specific choice for connectivity or applications value-add services.

The PoC basics

For the PoC, Technotects leveraged a Dell Edge Gateway 3002, Photon OS and VMware Pulse IoT Center, Edge Xpert from IOTech, RedisEdge from Redis Labs, Project Iris from RSA Labs, both AWS and Azure cloud platforms (hosting Redis for data backup) and a custom-built edge management console. Refer to the figure below for a block diagram of the setup and read on for more detail on how the effort came together.

IIoT Edge Stack Block Diagram for the Technotects PoC

Solution deep dive

For the EdgeX foundation of the stack, Technotects chose to work with IOTech’s Edge Xpert offering – a commercially-supported variant of the open source code that is available from the project GitHub within the Linux Foundation. Their use of Edge Xpert enabled them to focus on the integration with their customer’s preferred value-add software components rather than dealing with the open source code. They found IOTech’s documentation to be clear and the initial installation to be quick and straightforward – benefits when using a commercial variant that has additional hardening and packaging. Of course, using a commercially-supported variant versus simply downloading the open source code is a matter of personal preference.

EdgeX is completely neutral to OS, underlying hardware, protocol and programming language, and for this PoC, Technotects chose to leverage the Dell Edge Gateway 3002 and both Ubuntu from Canonical and Photon OS. Photon OS is an open source, container-optimized Linux distribution that has been nested within VMware’s vSphere offering for some time. Technotects was able to run their console, communication drivers, Edge Xpert and all the other referenced value-add software components in Docker containers in both operating systems, all without issue. They find that having the flexibility to deploy on any combination of hardware (x86 or ARM) and operating systems (Linux or Windows) in the field depending on customer need is valuable.

For southbound connectivity, Technotects leveraged a hybrid model. The process skids leverage a programmable logic controller for process control and for this PoC, Technotects used a commercially available Ethernet/IP driver to communicate with it. In turn, they connected this off-the-shelf, licensed driver package into the OPC-UA Device Service native to EdgeX. To connect to other devices on the skid, Technotects used the Modbus TCP protocol from IOTech’s Edge Xpert offer, written using the native EdgeX Device Service SDK. With the plug-in Device Service model, any combination of devices and protocols can be readily added in the future as needs evolve.

The solution architecture is a great example of both 1) how existing connectivity stacks can be used alongside native EdgeX Device Services in a hybrid model and 2) that in the EdgeX model, even connectivity written with the open EdgeX Device Service SDK can be monetized. Commercially-supported variants of EdgeX Device Services are likely to be attractive to end users with mission-critical use cases that involve bespoke and/or proprietary protocols in that support for this southbound connectivity often requires institutional knowledge gleaned from reverse engineering.

Meanwhile, end users can benefit from a growing number of open source Device Service options available within the community and increasingly Device Services that are supported by sensor makers for greenfield applications, coming with the sensor just like a keyboard comes with a driver for a PC. (Side note: There are numerous additional opportunities in development in the EdgeX ecosystem, although I must be sensitive to NDAs until they’re made publicly available). Net-net, the value of the open, vendor-neutral EdgeX ecosystem is in providing developers and end users with choices based on whatever is most valuable for their business.

Technotects leveraged VMware’s Pulse IoT Center to manage and monitor the underlying gateway hardware, OS and the EdgeX application framework above. VMware Pulse is a massively scalable, platform and application-independent solution for onboarding, managing, securing and monitoring IoT devices and gateways. System update campaigns can be applied in bulk and admins are alerted to any issues with their devices deployed out in the field, all in real-time. While VMware Pulse can be used standalone with its embedded device agent, it’s especially powerful when used in concert with the EdgeX framework. Any preferred console to manage applications and the underlying host system can be used with the EdgeX framework, with application-level functionality being enhanced by taking advantage of the EdgeX System Management Agent (SMA).

Technotects found the northbound connectivity to both Azure and AWS available in IOTech’s Edge Xpert to be very easy to configure. This highlights a key benefit of the EdgeX framework – decoupling investments in southbound data ingestion from any given cloud to enable choice over the long term, including realizing true-multitenancy from the edge. With the addition of support for multiple application services in the recent 1.0 Edinburgh release, data related to infrastructure monitoring and management can be sent to their management console of choice (in this case VMware’s Pulse IoT Center), whereas data related to the process for data analytics and taking action can be sent to any combination of on-prem or cloud-based application stacks of choice.

For local data persistence, Technotects chose RedisEdge over the MongoDB reference database that has been the baseline in the project until the recent 1.0 Edinburgh release. Technotects found it very easy to replace MongoDB with RedisEdge with no functionality differences, thanks to the work of Redis Labs in terms of making it an available plug-in within the EdgeX ecosystem. This is yet another example of how EdgeX is truly open and vendor-neutral, enabling users to leverage any enhancing functionality of their choice.

Finally, the PoC explored RSA Labs’ Project Iris active threat monitoring solution. Iris is a container that plugs into the EdgeX framework (and any other stack that supports containers) to profile baseline behavior for the stack and connected devices and then uses machine learning to detect anomalies. In turn Iris create alerts linked back to RSA’s popular Netwitness offering.

Conclusion

In closing, Technotects found EdgeX Foundry easy to work with and was able to successfully replicate their customer’s use case for process skid monitoring by leveraging the commercially supported framework from IOTech and value-add from Canonical, Dell, Redis, RSA and VMware. The flexibility to simply plug value-add into the open, vendor-neutral EdgeX foundation will provide both Technotects and their customers with more options in the future and help mitigate lock-in to proprietary edge platforms.

The EdgeX project has matured over the past two years to the current 1.0 state, and if you’re one of the thousands of end users that has been quietly prototyping with the platform, we welcome you to come forward and share your story on the project website through a blog or simple testimonial statement. The more people that come forward to share their success stories, the faster EdgeX will become the de-facto standard interoperability framework for the IoT Edge and the more we can all focus on innovation rather than reinvention!

Thank you for your time, and now’s your time to download the code or contact any of the providers in the ecosystem and build something great! Perhaps, as many have, even start your own business model around the EdgeX framework – just think of what Android did for scaling out an application and services ecosystem for mobile devices.

f you have questions or comments, visit the EdgeX Foundry Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #community channel. Or, join the LF Edge Slack Channel and share your thoughts in the #EdgeX channel.