
Google Developing “Brillo” Internet of Things OS Based on Android - ingve
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/05/google-developing-brillo-internet-of-things-os-based-on-android/
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AceJohnny2
"aimed at ultra low-power devices with as little as 64 or 32MB of RAM."

I know Moore's Law and everything, but damn I must be getting old because
that's not low-power by my standards.

My low-power standards are an MSP403 microcontroller running on a coin-cell
battery.

Granted, it's going to be hard doing some level of interesting IP networking
on that kind of hardware, especially with the increasing requirement of
cryptography.

Maybe something slightly beefier running Contiki [1], but I can't resist the
reactionary thought that anything Android- (or even Linux-)related is way too
fat for many IoT applications.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contiki)

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rakyll
You must interpret low-power devices as low-end Linux boards. No one is aiming
to target the microcontroller market with a Linux/arm board.

~~~
erbdex
He is right. We run contiki with 128 bit AES on these systems. We need 30KB
ROM to run a full ip stack.

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mmanfrin
I realized the other day that in this race to become the nexus (pun
unintended) of home automation/IoT, the horse I think most likely to win the
race is _Amazon_. The Echo just came out with updates that control wemo
switches and hue lights, meaning you can now say out loud in your house
'alexa, turn on the kitchen lights', and your kitchen lights will turn on.

People have also made hacks to allow it to control a nest, which seems like
something that would be an actual feature (since the same person also hacked
in hue lights before amazon did it officially).

And the edge that Echo has is that people aren't buying it for Home
Automation, they're buying it on its own merits.

~~~
vnchr
A lot of that is simplified by IFTTT having channels for Nest, Hue, Echo (via
Alexa), and Wemo.

I don't mean to be contradictory. It's exciting that we are getting glimpses
of internet connected things! I wonder about IFTTT alternatives, especially
self-hosted open options that can enable those interactions and more from a
community.

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monitron
I wish Google would focus on making regular Android more stable instead. Given
the memory management issues I've had on my Nexus 5 and other devices since
Lollipop, there's no way I'd choose to inflict Android on a low-memory IoT
device...

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seiji
Google is not a person. Google is a transhuman organization with over 60,000
individual consciousnesses taking part in it. Google can do more than one
thing at a time (if their management infrastructure doesn't require a single
person to approve every action).

~~~
meatysnapper
Java for low-power devices. This is some high-level trolling by Google!

~~~
rakyll
There is not a single mention of Java at the Brillo announcement.

Irrelevant but flush your biases and assumptions down to the toilet. Java can
statically compile to microcontroller architectures with minimal runtime
footprint. Stop blaming the languages, blame the runtime implementations.

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Zigurd
There are a variety of interesting small-ish RTOSs out there for IoT SoCs and
devices. Most of these are are significantly smaller-footprint than a full
Android implementation.

BUT the 64MB RAM target they are aiming for could be reached by a "headless"
variant of Android. The Android runtime does a lot of interesting things to
minimize memory use and power consumption. Android's installable service
components could make updatable, highly flexible IoT nodes realistic.

In the context of the (scant) facts in the article, it does make sense.

It doesn't make sense if you think of an IoT node having only a few kB of
program memory, a sensor io link, and a Zigbee radio. These ain't going to be
$2 nodes.

~~~
rakyll
Brillo contains a very minimal part of Android for HAL and the network stack.
64MB is our medium-end target. The ART is not in the scope of Brillo.

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sumitgt
I feel like this is a reactionary measure after Microsoft announced Windows
for IoT, and Facebook announced Parse IoT.

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rakyll
Google is building their own hardware, an embedded Linux distro is primarily a
need at Google to support our hardware projects for a long time. But, for the
first time, the industry is capable of building hw projects at scale. It's not
surprising we reinforce our interest to get involved by opening what we're
already doing.

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balls2you
And it will be called .. wait for it.. the Internet of SLOW Things !

