Does making each IOT node into a SAFE vault make sense?
If so is it a way to continue to fund MaidSAFE as a company aside from the GPL3 software?
Maybe this looks at vaults as ruggedized cells. SAFE is pretty organic in nature and this could be a strong pitch. Vault cells. The idea almost seems like a crypto atom. It sounds like the kinds of stuff people would want to build stuff out of.
Even people who don’t get privacy or philosophically agree with it can understand cell integrity and building tangible properties and characteristics out of it. It also sounds like a software soul for nanobots.
It’s something that could be tried, but most IoT devices are likely to be unsuitable for one reason or another, so it will be a small subset of nodes that would qualify I think.
Here’s a sample spec from one I was just looking at
Dual processor (each core running @ 160 MHz) + WiFi + BLE radio System on Chip.
★Network processor handles the WiFi/BLE connectivity and the IPv6 and IPv4 stacks.
★Main processor entirely free to run the user application along with the LoRa stack.
Maybe the IOT community might beef up memory and decrease latency for more nodes if they could see the pay off.
In Rifkins recent book Zero Marginal Cost Society, he posits his strong belief that the IOT will be the core of the next economy and a true revolution. That it will drive energy, comminication and transport.
Siemans and Cisco are two big players. What would they think? To me SAFE or an adaptation would make the IOT seem more credible.
For a lot of use cases that I’m personally interested in battery consumption is a significant issue, so the nodes spend a lot of time in sleep mode just waking up now and again to submit or recieve some data.
I’m not completely dismissing the idea, in many applications they’ll end up Wifi connected and mains powered, so there’s certainly some scope.
I tried to drive a beaglebone black running a simple program with solar and it was not good enough, it’s not far away though. @happybeing did manage some solar powered devices, but I think a larger solar panel and 12 volt batteries than what you are referring to here really. Solar is improving quickly though.
WRTnode is worth a look in combination with LiteOS:
LiteOS at 10kb can collect sensor information for a decade, powered by a pair of AA batteries.
The operating system can run on PC, mobile and IoT hardware. It requires zero configuration and automatically establishes a mesh network with nearby LiteOS devices.
To link the sensors running LiteOS to the servers, Huawei has launched the AR series of IoT gateways that feature Ethernet, Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G LTE, Bluetooth, ZigBee and even Power Line Communication (PLC) connectivity. These hardware platforms can be based on either x86 or ARM system architecture.
These and most IoT devices are designed to do very little processing, and to achieve low power consumption by being off / standby as much of the time as possible.
Unfortunately SAFE nodes need to be on, and doing significant amounts of processing, even just when acting as relays, so while we may at some point be able to utilise IoT devices, we’ll never match the low power consumption of devices that are achieved by things that just sample data at intervals and are turned off in the interim, or which are on, but doing very little most of the time.
Maybe the IOT conception would change slightly. I’ve heard that our universe functions on resonance. And by anology that resonance is more than just potential energy (analogous IOT sleep state.) That is to say that atoms (IOT nodes) do work even when they are not chemically interacting.
This link below has Jeremy Rifken a couple weeks ago discussing his version of the IOT which involves a energy internet, a communication internet and a transport internet wed to a new kind of contract and decentralized cooperatives. He says Angela Merkel commited to it and the head od China as well, just recently committing 82 billion in USD value to it.
Also he names the energy execs and firms that are in petrol ans nuclear that he got to drop the and swith over through a highbrid phase, convincing the they will make more money as they actually sell less energy in this flat system. What ever magic makes this work it will need good crypto hardening.
He also thinks that buildings are the nodes but they have to be retrofitted to %66.
