# I3 Mote: An Open Development Platform for the Intelligent Industrial Internet
## 2 Related Work
### Industrial-Oriented Platforms  
Unlike in the previous two categories, the variety in the industrial platforms is relatively scarce. Low-power wireless systems have traditionally tried to replace existing equipment, but not to connect to it. This fact has caused that there are few programmable wireless platforms with connectivity to industrial buses.  
The Libelium WaspMote [11] platform is one of the exceptions. It is based on a 8-bit ATmega1281 microcontroller. Libelium follows a modular approach, mainly aimed to prototyping purposes. On the sensor side, there are 10 different modules available, with more than 100 sensors in total. In addition, the WaspMote supports several industrial protocols as RS-232, RS-485, Modbus, Controller Area Network (CAN) Bus and 4-20 mA. Finally, regarding the communications, the Wasp Mote is based on the Xbee and compatible modules, providing up to 16 radio technologies (Xbee devices have become popular connectivity hardware modules thanks to their well-known form factor and their availability of wide variety of radio technologies, ranging from Zigbee, WiFi and their own proprietary DigiMesh implementation. The devices provide a serial based command interface with a very well-defined set of commands that enable simple technology replacement).  
The main problem with this platform is energy consumption. The Wasp Mote is based on a microcontroller literally from the past century, and power management is not up-to-date. A second weak point is its size, a problem derived from its modular approach. A third weak point is its Arduino-based programming model and operating system, limiting the multi-threading capabilities of an application as well as making it impractical for any real time operation.  
One interesting initiative that is emerging in recent years is the MangOH project [12] MangOH is an open-source hardware sensor-to-cloud platform for building wireless IoT solutions. The design philosophy behind the MangOH project is simple: MangOH designs try to cover 90% of the IoT prototypes out-of-the-box so that software developers can easily create reliable solutions and hardware designers can customize it to create new hardware IoT devices in a short time.  
The MangOH ecosystem is built around the Green platform, an embedded Linux board with different connectivity options (USB, RS232, RJ45...) and multiple expansion slots. There are several expansion modules currently available. Among them, it is worth mentioning the industrial Ethernet and the CAN bus cards, which provides industrial connectivity.  
As in the case of Libelium, this platform is not targeted at high efficiency and low energy consumption, but modularity and ease of development. Therefore, and still being an interesting alternative, it does not cover the requirements addressed in this work.  
In Table 1, we have summarized the review in this section according to four criteria: low-power capabilities, wireless standards, industrial connectivity and sensing capabilities.  
In summary, the studied platforms lack one or other features that we believe are needed to support platform-based design for industrial products, as presented in Section 1. First, power management for battery operation and support for harvesting technologies should be integrated in the platform, but it has rarely been done. Second, industrial wireless connectivity is partially supported as some of the technologies are too power hungry or not reliable enough for certain scenarios. Third, they lack support and interfaces to external sensors that are already present in the industry. Finally, we have seen almost none of them providing the capability to interface to industrial buses, with the exception of those platforms with a clear orientation to prototyping.