 I put loads of slides together because I wasn't sure how much Mark was going to be updating and see if there would be some interest there that was great and some great news that came through. So I'm Mike the Bee Beardmoor. There's loads of Mike Beardmoors around and when I started my Twitter account I think I needed a name that was shorter than my full names to make me unique. So I created Mike the Bee and it seems to be successful. I always say with the Twitter handles and things people need to be able to spell them. So if I say Mike the Bee with two E's generally people get it. So I like to think of myself as a tech ninja having grown up before mic processes, interested in computers but being big things and didn't want to do punch cards. When mic processes came it gave me a real opportunity to get involved and I've enjoyed doing it both professionally and now as a maker and helping people and others. But this is how I think I might look but I suspect you look at me and you think I'm like this really. Hopefully the smile comes through even if it isn't on my face as it is on the character here. It came from the open clip part and it's a great thing to see some really nice useful bits of an open clip part that I could include. So we've talked about TTN. Who actually knows something about the Things Network? OK, good. Mark's given a bit of introduction as to what it is so I'll be able to slip through quite quickly. But I'm very keen on what the Things Network people put in their original charter really which was to create an internet for the internet of things. So a community developed internet that would be free and available to everybody globally. So the confusion often arises when I'm talking to people interchangeably using Laura, Laura Wan and other terms. Laura is the radio protocol. It is basically peer-to-peer, just a single channel. Laura Wan extends that to multiple radios and multiple channels, spectrum and parallel data flows. It can be proprietary in some ways in the way that it's actually implemented or it can be open in the way that Things Network are doing it. All encompassed under the LP Wan. So one of the great things I'm looking for although some of the we'd like to say would be open but we can't use totally open radio technology. This is a patent by Semtech but they've formed the Laura Alliance or were one of the first members of the Laura Alliance which is a group of all interested parties who have extended the protocol to allow both commercial and open implementations to be done in a secure way. Open Laura are one of the groups that are pushing the open side of things. The Things Network are a group that got together in Amsterdam after an arts project. They were so inspired by the arts project connectivity option that they chose which was based around Laura Wan. One of the guys there who was a serial entrepreneur said, I have some money. I'd want to really bring this out throughout the world. How do we do it? Well, we create a community that rolls out and build all the models but also support them in terms of hardware and software by crowdsourcing. Last November, so that was last July 2015, last November, Mark Stanley was inspired to stand up a Reading Geek and inspired another group of people to get together including myself and form TTN Reading. So, how do we build TTN Reading? Well, there's some really good webcasts on the Things Network YouTube channel about building it. And the most recent ones were from New York, New York City and also a small town outside New York. Small, big, 150,000 people, they say, a little tiny place, 150,000 and how they did there. The latest one was about Sydney and another town outside Sydney, Australia, where a semi-commercial company that's already doing radio systems was inspired by the open nature and they decided to adopt the Things Network and Laura and they're rolling that out and they tell us how they did it. And both of the common two things there were that they wanted to involve the communities and get the groups together. Building a network of communities to build the network around the globe and roll it out. Mark Stanley's bit about Reading was presented there and one of the things he said about the community side, about building bridges and used a common theme of bridges. He started off by talking about the bridge in Reading and the bridge in Sydney and commonalities. I found this one and he said how long the bridge took to build and I think that's a good reminder of me that we think we've done well in one year, which we have indeed, but we may end up slowing down before we move forward and I think Mark's reference to, as the profile increases the regulatory involvement comes in and that could slow things down and we need to keep pushing forward if we're going to be successful. The Reading Bridge, which we're going to use for a Reading 2016 year of culture illuminating project, will have a TTN data feed to it and we want to use that as an example of an arts use case because we want to bring in a lot of the arts community who aren't very geeky and don't really see the need for incorporating radio stuff and we'd like to show them how they can move on and use it, especially given the license-free nature of the TTN. So it was also a community bit of a project in that they had a naming competition and it was a time just before really the famous name came along but various suggestions were Lady Dice Bridge, Ricky Gervais of course coming from Reading was one of the suggestions, Swan Shredder I think because of all the guidelines that hold in the bridge up and Allie Allie O, I didn't understand it but apparently it was something to do with the end of September so if you understand it then explain it to me later but there were no Bridgy McBridge faces suggested so I think it was just prior to that bridge well no, Mcgate I guess. So where are we? Well we've got ten gateways around hosted by individuals and companies and the grow incubator here at the bottom which is a grow at Green Park under the big wind turbine for anyone who's been along them for we'll know that and now the job is to get nodes rolled out so we've got to build bridges, we've got to build bridges and we've done this Mark Stanley's been very active himself, geeks and norms we might say arts and business and we've got all these various people on board but also the local council are very interested because they see it's a way of lowering the costs of monitoring such things as traffic management which they currently pay a fee per node with so these are all the various places we've been currently talking to Reading Geek Night was the start as one of the evenings where various presentations are done Sage are a company that do asset management and resource tracking with their accounting packages and so they are interested in technology and they are very active I mean we know Sage as a small accountant or at least I know them as a small accounting company but they're very keen and they're really into all of the technology and incorporating it into their accounting Buses are very interesting, one of the most innovative bus companies in the UK as far as I can see and I think they've won awards on that, they've done a student bus which has a chill area at the back it has a game pad in it, it has a book case even interestingly and this bus is in big demand by various schools as they'll say well we'll lend it to or we'll use it as the school bus route for a certain number of weeks and they'll have a competition as to who because there's so many kids want to ride on this bus and you can find some photos if you look on the Reading Buses site Solent IoT won a group which is going to be a bit like the Australian model a little bit commercial and a little bit public and part of the idea is to be able to leverage both sides of it and make it a sustainable and of course the Solent area is ideal because there's a lot of marine equipment which is very expensive so the cost of a small device isn't so much but you might want a number of them so how are we going about going forward to the next stage we set up a company called Thingitude which is a limited by guarantee company which Mark tells me is a very good place to be in a very useful way so the idea being that it will potentially be a way of purchasing lots of things in bulk and distributing them out, a marketplace for people who have items to sell a way of providing a platform for both links for software and hardware and be able to basically make it sustainable for the Reading area but we want to extend it further than that so Thingitude is basically available for everybody it's not just limited for Reading because one of the difficulties with a global network is how do you balance the geographic and the task elements of it we have to have a geographic nature because the gateways are geographically located but the idea is that there shouldn't be borders around them so things like Solent, it's fine for funding and things then also we want to get on, talk to people like everybody here try and get everybody involved, try and bring you here and then use the social channels like Slack and the forums I also have a Twitter at TV TTNUG which is a Thames Valley extension of it which is something we did for 3D printers when 3D printing so next steps deploying sensors Andrew will be talking about Think Innovations and the workshop tomorrow Our Things is a brand that we've created at Reading Makerspace and I'll just quickly zip through some of the things we've done to actually get some sensor hardware to be available for people so this one, the microchip module you see in there with a shield, a very early prototype shield that Andrew created it inspired me to start soldering bits and pieces he provided a code for Arduino and the small version was a little one that you could plug on to any device that would do serial communications so then went on using that small device together with a plain Arduino UNO then I used my 3D printing to create an enclosure this one intrigued Ann Diamond when I did an interview on Radio Berkshire he thought it was a weird looking device so he drew sufficient attention on her radio show then we went on, obviously going through the normal process other members in the hackspace were inspired to look at it and went through this process of taking some of the raw SEMTech trips that are available on modules from RS doing, we always used to do prototyping on breadboards but now you use prototyping boards to create a device next stage it went off to China and produced some boards they came back and there were some ideas that we didn't need all these aerials and tantas sticking out so you've got GPS at this end, you've got TTN at the other end and an ARM Cortex processor in the middle that was then revised with a small display and then, so this is the basic board realised we didn't need the antennas so we got some active antennas at the end and evaluating the difference between a piece of wire and an active antenna and then we went on to make an enclosure for it and I have the device available in three minutes to have a look at it zip through so then they said well that's all very well but you need to do C programming bits and pieces and we've now done a version for the micro bit and want to get this out so that people can do it in education and I'll just zip quickly through if I can so we know all about the micro bit and this is the micro bit and the Laura or the things network Laura WAN compatible device which I have to show for people as well ok my name is Mark Hill from OpenTRV two years ago Damon from OpenTRV gave a talk about what OpenTRV is so I'm going to rush through that part and then get on to the meet and talk today which is all about the things network so very quickly we're about cutting carbon and this is how I'd like my heating controller to be as in turn it on in October and turn it off in May and not have to think about it in between that's what you get right now ok and yeah it's tough all these schedules and settings and numbers and all the rest of it and to be honest I just like it to work so that's what we're setting out to do and this is how we do it we have TRVs which are smart they contain electronics they detect whether or not you're in the room and if they think you're not going to be in the room for a while then they'll turn the heating down and then try and turn it up again when it thinks you're coming back ok pretty simple concept no one else out there is currently doing it you can have a look on GitHub all the hardware, the Gerbers, the Schematics the software it's all there it's all completely open now the relevance of this to long distance radio LP1 low power wide area networks Laura, long range Sigfox is similar technology I'm just throwing out the buzzwords just in case it triggers in you ok yep I've got that one I know which one it is basically what it is is a very low data rate internet of things and a radio to do that and the radios are quite small this little silver blob on the top is a typical one this is a microchip module in there and they're very low power and you can potentially run things for years and years and get your data onto the internet and the particularly intriguing part of what we're talking about today the things network is you don't need to pay somebody for that bandwidth you don't need to pay a yearly fee and you can use other peoples around the world as they set up on the things network as well so in particular what we're interested in doing is putting these low power radios into TRVs which are those little blobs there and groups of four in peoples houses get the data communicated to an IAT gateway which is basically a Laura gateway and then stick it into a data store and that can be on the internet but it doesn't have to be because you can set up your own IAT gateways for this as well and that's crucial because you can then share your IAT gateways with other people and we're looking at doing that in social housing by the way so that's the background for OpenTRV and why we're interested in Laura primarily however it comes with its own difficulties one being that I'm not a lawyer however Ofcom is interested in this kind of stuff and there have been some questions raised in the UK about whether or not this falls under the regulations of a public network for communications and it's not clear if it is or not and not being a lawyer and not sticking my neck out on this one I'm not going to say it is or it isn't but I'm just saying there are some issues around this if it is a public network we must have registration fine that happens we must have data retention as in the security forces or the police are allowed to ask for what data flowed across this network now this is done by ISPs all the time and it's transparent to us but it happens it's just where does that requirement land for a network like this which is layered on top of the internet is it the internet that requires this regulation or does this network require it and then terms of service so if you are a business customer it's quite clear in your terms of service you're allowed to set up a gateway and make it available to anyone any member of the public happens to walk by it's a device that works such as the one down at the bridge rectifier hebden bridge mill which isn't turned on at the moment Mike says by the way it is now fine if you've got business terms of service on your internet it works if you've got residential grey area we don't know if it's going to be accepted or not I had a look at mine it's not conclusive okay now more off-com stuff in theory this is particularly relevant for maker spaces rather than individuals if you are doing some R&D and not trialling by the way there's a difference between research and development and trialling if you are doing some research and development the testing regulations in off-coms say you need to have a licence because you're using a certain spectrum and your stuff is not CE compliant therefore you must have an R&D licence now the good news about this is they only cost 50 quid per location for 12 months the bad news about it is it takes something like 6 weeks at best to get yourself one of these licences as a maker space it's probably smart to go for one of these as an individual personally I'm not going to bother because the chance of anyone coming after you about this is not going to be large but anyway those are the URLs to apply for a licence and the guidance that off-com provide for it it's very important that if you do go and apply for one of these make sure you explain what you're doing in terms of the battery powered devices that you're going to take away at a distance because you want all those covered within that licence so that no one says oh great you've got that gateway covered you've set up but you haven't got all those little devices covered third one Mark Stanley who's not here today but he's very active in TTM Reading has been having a conversation or two with off-com and this is their most recent email back to him but the most exciting part is yeah, we're looking at it that's it, that's all off-com are giving us right now and yet we're suggesting to them that this is having a chilling effect on development as we're not developing this stuff as fast as we can because there is fear and uncertainty and doubt about what you're allowed to do with all these radio devices and this new type of network which potentially could replace a telecom's network and the telecom's companies and actually give all of us access to an internet of things network where you do not have to pay and there is good, I'm not saying universal good coverage not only in this country but around the world now that's quite threatening for a telecom's company and so there is some fud being spread in London now I know this is a northern audience and there are TTM networks up in Manchester and other places I'm down in London they are some people with money digital catapult they have bought some gateways from a company called Evernet which is a Russian-based company and they will happily dish out a gateway and give it to you if you agree to host it for Evernet now Evernet wants to make money out of this it's a commercial arrangement but you could at least get your hands on a gateway for probably a very little or no outlet there's also a meet-up happening specifically for low-pound wide area networks it's happening in London and then the things network themselves the guys out in Amsterdam and the guys in Rotterdam will be getting their TTM gateways out to us the latest update was November so that's a £200 gateway €200 €250 gateway let's do the right one €250 gateway that you can then have your own node on the things network that will allow anyone to connect so that's for the gateway the chips basically the little things that roam around all over the place, the devices there's two major licensees so far from Semtech of the core technology Microchip and ST, ST are quite late to the game compared to Microchip, Microchip are quite a bit further advanced on what they're doing at the moment they're not doing any work on the European version they're working on the US version a £915 megahertz one which is useless here because we can't use it so it's in its current state the same state has been since the beginning of the year interestingly however with their atmail acquisition they now have access to ARM cores and they're sticking a Cortex M0 core with the receiver circuitry for a node for the things network into a single chip they're going to have a tool chain that lets you stick your code that runs on the ARM into that, connects it up with their code that they need to have that's been certified that you're not allowed to touch because it complies with transmission regulations and all the rest of it in terms of duty cycles and lets you just have one processor inside your device which means the cost comes down this is where we're trying to get to ultimately it makes for cheaper devices currently they're flogging their devices at between £8 and £10 okay we'll have to wait and see how much they're actually going to charge but yeah, preliminaries maybe if we're lucky something like $8 they're having a workshop on their toolchain but it's horrendously expensive it's their global microchip go and do lots of courses thing STM, whom I used to work for by the way once upon a time have not released much details correct me if I'm wrong anybody but I haven't actually run into many details of what they're doing at the moment and that's been a long time since then and then the other thing everybody needs to think about with this and before you go and put all your eggs in this basket is what's happening with NBIOT and LTEM which are a whole basket of acronyms but basically are the telecoms companies versions of what's going to be a low power wide-air network if we fall asleep if we don't do anything about this if around the world groups like us don't do anything about getting a crowd sourced IOT network out there we'll be paying the telecoms companies to use theirs so if we want to have a crowd sourced IOT network we do have to do something now and whether that's just host a gateway or whether that's more actively joined in with devices and technology and so forth now's the time and lastly shameless plug okay OpenTRV as I mentioned we're interested in Laura for these things we're going on Kickstarter with our product in October November time if you want an open source way to control your radiators please go and visit myradbot.com and sign up and we'll let you know when our Kickstarter campaign starts okay and it's all open and feel free to go and get hub now and download it okay that's me