Gadgetory

so Samsung brought us down to their Developers Conference 2016 we're not developers but we are interested in a lot of the same things that developers would be one of the top trends this year is of course the internet of things are IOT the difference this time is that the momentum finally seems to be really picking up for the first time ever there are more internet-connected devices than there are people in the world I really feel like I'm doing my share to make that happen by the way and as the install base has continued to increase there has been an exponential increase in software development so what if Samsung's big announcements is Arctic a three-tiered hardware offering the Arctic one Arctic 5 and Arctic 10 offering a range of functionality from pretty similar to an Arduino two capable of machine learning and the demo they did on stage while it might have had a bit of a cringey high school science presentation feel to it was really cool because the point was to demonstrate some of the amazing flexibility and openness of the software and cloud side of Arctic so they used resin io to push an update to nine devices simultaneously over the air without any loss of connectivity pretty cool so let's have a look at some of the other cool Internet of Things stuff that's on demo here at the developer conference so this is the auto it's actually very similar to a project I backed on Kickstarter a little while ago called the jebo that I pretty much back so that I could make fun of it when it arrived because it wasn't going to do anything near what the team was promising it would be capable of and was extraordinarily expensive but the key difference here is that Samsung is not positioning the auto as a retail product but more as a proof of concept for what their Arctic 5 processor can do so inside the auto you've got an Arctic 5 which is an arm-based processor you've got a high-definition camera a 320 x 240 pixel resolution screen in the front that it uses to express itself whether it's blinking eyes or little smiles or whatever else the case may be a powerful natural language engine the lights color correct please the lights color to green and the ability to interact with other devices through the Arctic cloud so in terms of demos they had it turning on and off connected lights they had it looking things up similar to what an Amazon echo would do you know who is George Clooney to which it would reply George Timothy Clooney is an American actor screenwriter producer director and activist thank you very much for that Otto it can wake up it can go to sleep and it can even do things like check on traffic for you if you're heading out somewhere and for whatever reason your phone is less convenient or whatever the case may be and it can take pictures for you just it can't necessarily do anything to make you look any better so this little number in front of me here is called the Eddie it was entered into the makers against drought competition it actually ended up in the top ten and is competing in round two where they're going to have to take this very prototype looking thing and turn it into something a little more commercially viable but the functionality is expected to be very similar just better what it is is a desalinator that is to say it removes salt from the water so they're targeting farmers specifically in California although the applicability would obviously be a little wider reaching than that who are buying brackish or importing agricultural water with a sullenly level that is too high for the crop that they're trying to grow so the way that it works is fairly straightforward from a you know I may need to get looking at a box perspective the water goes in the one side you've got these foam membrane and plastic sort of layers here that the water goes through and then you pump in voltage here and what you effectively get is highly concentrated salt water out the other side that pumps back around through the system and then desalinated water out the other side so they're not really measuring it in terms of like liters of water process per minute because we're not talking about making the water potable we're talking about targeting in particular crop so they used avocado trees as an example and they're saying they can handle about a tenth of acre per hour with the current system although by doubling the size giving it more membrane area they figured they could dramatically increase the output somewhere in the neighborhood of like thousands of litres per hour the way that it ties into the whole Internet of Things thing is that it's got a whole lot of cool stuff going here they've got an Arctic 10 that is handling the pumps the valves the salinity sensors and actually connectivity that allows you to check up on your system with the mobile app you can monitor it in real time you can see if there's a problem with the system and you can even generate reports so you can make decisions about how to manage your fleet of Eddie's or your crops over time so here I've taken over the affair Oh boof completely I've actually kicked all of their staff out and they've abandoned it so I can talk about what they're showing off and they call themselves an end-to-end IOT connectivity something anyway so basically they've got themselves a little development module right here that in a nutshell is a Bluetooth connected for GPIO connected doodad that you can either well in a perfect world integrate into a device at the time that you're designing it or as part of their demonstration of how their platform is open and will talk to pretty much anything you can actually literally solder it into an existing product or even use it to communicate with something running a Samsung Arctic processor like this one right here in a nutshell their goal is to simplify security they've got their own 256 bit encryption layer that sits over top of normal Bluetooth security and pairing using QR codes on every device so that connecting things to a smart home is easier than it's necessarily been in the past and on top of that they want to make it easier for the product developers to create interfaces for these products so they've got a cloud tool that effectively acts like you I Lego and you can basically say ok this connection right here controls this on off switch right here drag and drop a little box blip bloop on or off but it doesn't just do on and off it can actually talk spy to the device so you could do more complex things like say ok here's a motor power percentage value or here's a CPU temperature that you can report back to user and you can design your own UI around it or you can not totally up to you interesting so thanks for checking out our Internet of Things round up here at the Samsung developer conference 2016 don't forget to check out our Samsung developer conference 2016 playlist if you want to see our other videos and get subscribed if you haven't already