Wow. What an experience it was. We got to see many interesting prototypes using sensors and SAP HANA Cloud Platform Internet of Things Services. Here is the quick recap of the overall experience:
Hack-a-day was organized by Aaron Williamsat SAP d-shop on February 22, 2016. Around 40 people participated including SAP mentors, SAP employees and a couple of cheerful and bright kids as well. The event started with a session on SAP HANA Cloud Platform IoT services presented by my colleague Wei-Wei Lin from the SAP HANA Cloud Platform Product Management team. She explained what IoT Services are, what the typical use cases are, and then demonstrated how to get started with these services in the HANA Cloud Platform Cockpit. Then Nethaji Tummurufrom the SAP Innovation Center team talked about some inspiring ideas including different possibilities for developing demos using IoT Services and how they have built some innovative demos in their organization.
After that, participants were split into 8 teams. Each team had been supplied with multiple different sensors for monitoring things like pressure, heart rate, and temperature. During the next 4-5 hours, teams had to build some prototypes using these sensors, HCP IoT Services and Fiori UI. At around 4 PM, we started with the final presentations. Here I would like to show some of the cool ideas that won prizes in this hackathon:
1. Smart Chair: The idea behind this demo was to keep people active during their work hours and avoid the situation where they keep sitting on chair for long hours. In this project, the team attached some sensors to the chair that would continuously send data to HCP via IoT Services. There was a threshold level set for how many minutes person can continuously sit on the chair that once it was reached, will cause a vibration notification to be sent to alert person on the chair that he or she had been sitting too long and now it’s time to get up and away from the desk and do some other activity.
2. TAM CAM: This was another cool idea focusing on children diagnosed within the autism spectrum. With this project, the sensor can be attached to that child's shirt, where it will monitor various inputs like temperature, motion, and vibration, and keep that data stored on HCP. Parents can then analyze the behavioral patterns of the child based on this data, which will help them understand better under what conditions or after which threshold level the child behaves differently and they can further avoid such conditions in future.
3. Smart Health: In this project, the team created a prototype wherein there will be sensors attached to factory workers’ shirts that will monitor their heart rate and some other parameters. And based on this data, they can create a schedule as to how to allocate the shifts for each worker and take some precautionary measures if there are some abnormal readings.
4. Parks Management: This was another innovative idea that will help national parks to identify locations of patrons and keep track of them. There will be beacons installed in the park at multiple locations and sensors attached to the patrons’ shirts will continuously send data about their location to HCP. If a patron gets lost, park administrators can find out his or her location based on this data.
I got a chance to talk with some of the participants and here are some testimonials from the participants about their experience of using HCP IoT services:
1. Chris Rae- SAP Mentor
“First off, the SAP d-Shop space is fantastic for this type of event. The look and feel of the place immediately engaged the attendees. The facilities that they provide are second to none to allow participants to be creative.
I have done my fair share on innojams and hackathons, I can tell you that the concept of doing this in 5 hours although daunting, is absolutely possible using the HCP IOT services. I have personally played with pushing IOT data to HANA using custom xsodata objects and although it is easy to do, it was not as seamless as using the IOT services. It really did take the miracle out of why things work. Participants were then allowed to get on with the job of making electronics work and building the UI for the demo.
I facilitated an IOT workshop last year that took the attendees from having never seem the electronics platform (Arduino) to building a UI on HANA to represent the data in one day. I will be updating this workshop to now use HCP IOT services to stream the data.
Finally I must say that I am most impressed with the SAP Ecosystem for the overwhelming response to including my children in this activity. The event organizers and staff were more than willing to allow them to participate but did not pander to them. They were there as equal attendees just like everybody else. It really was brilliant for my children to be able to take part in this and see how their experience with IOT devices compares to others. It has instilled confidence in them that simply cannot be taught or replicated. For that I am very grateful.”
2. Babu Balakrishnaiah – Solution Architect, HANA Partner Engineering, SAP
“IOT Services is very simplified process to learn in few minutes and use it to enable sensor to action. IOT services user interface screens are quite simple and step by step tabs are easy to follow in defining the device types and devices itself to map and to onboard the sensor data into HANA. With IOT services you can quickly onboard and manage connected remote devices to get real time predictive analytics. Good to have the information somewhere as what quantity of data we can stream at a time using IOT services to HANA.”
3. Sascha Wenninger- SAP Mentor
“I thought the event was really nicely organized, and the workshop space with all of the hardware, tools, and professional help by Blag and Aaron was really great, and conducive to getting a result produced on the day. Having the organizers allocate people to teams actually worked well in the case of our team, as we had a good mix of an experienced Arduino programmer (Marc), and an excellent presenter (Andreas) - so a really good mix of technical and non-technical skills on the team. We used HCP for reporting the times that the chair was occupied back to HANA :-) “
Thus, overall, it was a really wonderful experience to see so many creative ideas. If you are inspired to build your own IoT Services projects, please check out this linkwhere you can find tutorials on SAP HANA Cloud Platform IoT Services.
Try out HCP IoT services and let us know what YOU dream up and build with IoT on HCP!
To learn more about SAP HANA Cloud Platform, check out the following resources:
SAP HANA Cloud Platform Developer Center SCN page
SAP HANA Cloud Platform SCN Page
SAP HANA Cloud Platform Podcast Series
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