# I3 Mote: An Open Development Platform for the Intelligent Industrial Internet
## 2 Related Work
### Communication-Oriented Platforms  
In the late 1990s, several low-cost wireless technologies were created to fill a gap in the connectivity space, tackling low power communication and addressing machine to machine (M2M) or personal area communications. Associated with this emergence, a large amount of research activities were developed, which in turn paved the way of a considerably large number of development platforms exploiting unlicensed wireless communications bands. Among them, it is worth mentioning the work developed at the University of California, Berkeley (see [6] for a brief historical introduction to their family of platforms). An outstanding platform that derived from the UC Berkeley experience was the LTP590x, engineered by Dust Networks (The Smart Dust project at UC Berkeley led to the founding of Dust Networks in 2002, to provide commercial applications of the project. Later on, in 2011, Dust Networks was acquired by Linear Technology, Milpitas, CA, USA). The LTP590x is a platform based on the Eterna SoC (System on Chip), which combines a 32-bit Cortex-M3 microcontroller and an IEEE 802.15.4-compatible radio transceiver. One of the main characteristics of the SoC is the low current consumption of the microcontroller and the radio transceiver. On the communications side, the SoC is compatible with both SmartMesh, WirelessHart (the wireless version of the Highway Addressable Remote Transducer HART protocol) and SmartMesh IP [7]. The LTP590x can be operated autonomously or in combination with an applications processor. When operating autonomously, the LTP590x uses the OnChip software development kit (SDK) to allow users to write applications directly on top of the SmartMesh IP network protocol stack running on the SoC. Contrarily, when operating with an applications processor, the SmartMesh IP network protocol stack runs on the application processor and the SmartMesh C library is used to exchange data with the network processor through a serial port. Another important milestone in this story was the creation of the OpenWSN project [8], an open-source, standard-based implementation of a complete constrained network protocol stack [9]. Associated with this project, a new generation of open prototyping platforms appeared. OpenMote [6] is the latest Berkeley-designed more. It is based on a SoC Cortex M3 microcontroller from TI that provides very low energy consumption. The OpenWSN [8] and Contiki [10] projects have been ported to OpenMote complementing an open-hardware and software ecosystem for industrial low-power connectivity. Yet, OpenMote is only addressing network connectivity and embedded sensing without considering industrial device interfacing. Nowadays, associated with the arrival of the IoT, there is a continuous demand for connectivity in the new generation of devices. This demand has led to a significant increase in the options available in this market segment, both open and proprietary. A good example is the OpenPicus initiative. OpenPicus is a hardware and software open platform, conceived to speed up the development of professional IoT devices and services. This platform is built around the Flyport concept, a collection of compatible modules with different connectivity technologies (Wi-Fi 802.11g, General Packet Radio Service quadband and Ethernet). The software layer is an open source framework based on FreeRTOS, that manages the TCP/IP software stack, integrated web server and the user application. All the Flyport family members are powered by the same core (the PIC24 low-power processor) and are pin-compatible, which makes them interchangeable, at least at the application level, hiding the type of Internet connection used in each case. This interchangeability feature reinforces the idea of platform-oriented design. In summary, all these platforms have grown with the idea of providing connectivity to other subsystems (working as a communications module) but do not aim to become the entire product.