Local Motors was approached by Joe Speed, at the time IBM’s Internet of Things leader, to collaborate on creating an open source connected car, together with IBM and Intel for the IMB Impact show in Las Vegas earlier this year.
A challenge it was and it opened a new world to a company not known for it’s lack of technology to start with! In order to get cars connected they had to update their knowledge and skills of technologies like
- Linux powered with Tizen IVI / Automotive Grade Linux www.tizenassociation.org automotive.linuxfoundation.org
- Intel open source Galileo board wired into the control harness via Arduino relay boards http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/do-it-your...
- Node-RED which is Node.js for the Internet of Things controlling the systems http://nodered.org nodejs.org
- open standard, open source Eclipse Paho MQTT connecting to IBM MessageSight in the IBM IoT Cloud on Softlayermqtt.org eclipse.org/paho @ibmiot
- leveraging IBM’s BlueMix open source Cloud Foundry instance with Big Data Streams, Hadoop, Cloudant and other technologies
- all visualization & remote control implemented with HTML5+MQTT (via HTML5 websocket) being designed with IBM Worklight Studio.
Challenges:
- We have control via Node-RED and MQTT of the Hazard lights, headlights, door locks, and windshield wipers.
- What cool demo should we do at the IBM IMPACT event to mimic real world needs or show off the capabilities of open source IoT and Cloud in things that roll?
How could we implement this cool open source technology into our projects here at Local Motors?
And this is what it all created: The Rally Fighter in it’s glory!
