One of the highlights from last week’s Autodesk Accelerate conference in Boston was an autobiography-slash-testimony from Electric Imp Founder Hugo Fiennes. He said that when he founded the company he was driven by wanting to do something “worthwhile” for the world – “but I’m an engineer, so it has to be engineering.” A former Apple and Google designer, his relatively new (2011) cloud services company joined up with Autodesk to make a streamlined cloud service.
The IoT Discovery Toolkit powered by Electric Imp combines Electric Imp’s IoT platform and Autodesk’s Fusion Connect. It enables manufacturing OEMs to easily connect and organize various types of Internet of Things data. Autodesk Fusion Connect brings “no-coding” solutions for data management, cutting out the need for a programmer or data scientist to monitor the system. Meanwhile, Electric Imp provides the device communication from the cloud, with considerations for scalability and security.
“The potential impact of IoT-enabled devices in industrial applications is vast and can enable predictive maintenance and streamline service operations,” Fiennes said in a statement. “The collaboration with Autodesk offers manufacturers a powerful business advantage – the ability to develop custom IoT-enabled products in a fraction of the time within an industrial-strength ecosystem that helps reduce risk through end-to-end security.”
The Autodesk Accelerate conference brought Autodesk customers together for two days, from Aug. 22 to Aug. 23, and plenty seemed interested in what Fusion Connect could bring. I spoke to customers about the challenge of adopting IoT to existing systems, some of whom said that the biggest challenge when working with IoT was to find ways to use their data after it has been gathered. With so much data, companies need a simple way to get it organized.
“IoT is about building your business and your products around real-world data and driving precision business outcomes,” said Bryan Kester, director of IoT, Autodesk. “IoT is a very complex challenge because it combines a wide range of hardware, networking, and cloud technologies. By teaming up with Electric Imp, our goal is to simplify the technology so that businesses can move straight to evaluating IoT business opportunities.”
The IoT Discovery Toolkit comes in one box designed for ease of setup. It was available to view at Accelerate, but if you didn’t get the chance to see it there, a free limited edition version is available here. The IoT Discovery Toolkit is based on Fusion 360, which includes CAD in the cloud and is supported by Fusion Lifecycle for PLM and Fusion Connect for IoT data management.
Filed Under: Rapid prototyping
