Home Assistant tries a new hub: The Home Assistant Amber campaign is now live. For $ 149, customers can buy a Raspberry Pi computer pre-loaded with Home Assistant software and several radios, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee. (Zigbee Radio will support Matter once the certificate is released.) Although some people are familiar with SmartThings or other more in-depth home automation platforms, this is a device that normal people can use to get started with the Home Assistant platform. without having to worry about buying your own computer, attaching keys or installing software. (CrowdSupply)
Your fitness data may have expired: The health data of 61 million people was leaked by an artist called GetHealth, who left unsecured fitness data on the open internet. It is not clear whether anyone with bad intentions had access to the data; it was first discovered and accessed by a security researcher who notified GetHealth of the problem and then published the leak after receiving notification that the data was protected. Related to this violation is the news that the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday issued a political statement reminding health information holders that even if they are not covered by the Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act, they have a responsibility to notify consumers if their data privacy is violated. Honestly, this is good news for consumers, as third parties are often the cause of sensitive data breaches. (Computer weekly,, FTC)
Flexible memory can enable smart clothing: This week, Kevin explains how the combination of foldable processors and flexible memory would make smart clothing more believable, which in turn would change the way we monitor our health. It provides examples of smart hats that could detect heat exhaustion and kinesiology tape or braces that can track twisting and stress on the joints. I am very excited about the ideas here. (StaceyonIoT)
Arm prepares for the software-defined car: The chip design company Arm has launched an ambitious open source software project that will make car development more like network development. As cars become more and more like computers on wheels, the many different chips and software that they combine to make up the car’s safety system, infotainment system and drivetrain become a single system. And to make sure that safety, security and development time were acceptable, carmakers needed a new way to build these systems. Arm believes the new way will look like the current way developers build enterprise software using containers, over-the-air updates and cloud features. To facilitate the transition, Arm developed the Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE), an open source framework for building automotive software, and created a special interest group to manage the framework. Several car suppliers are involved, including Volkswagen’s CARIAD and Continental. (Hand)
Infineon’s 64-bit microcontrollers now have more security qualifications: Infineon Technologies says it has achieved the Arm Platform (PSA) Level 2 Security Architecture certification for its 64-bit MCU family used in industrial and IoT applications. Arm announced its PSA security program in 2017. The program has three levels of security, with level 3 being the most stringent. Level 2 certification involves an external assessment of the hardware root of trust and requires pen tests to determine whether the nine Level 2 security requirements are met. (Infineon)
Cisco is embedding its sensors in a California vineyard: Man, this story takes me back to the early days of 2015, when Intel, IBM and Libelium set out related stories about the vineyard. This week, Bouchaine Vineyards said it would use Cisco Industrial Asset Vision sensors to measure temperature, light levels, humidity and more. On rod-mounted cameras and sensors. As with most of these stories, the news tells how sensors can reduce water consumption, but I was more intrigued by the promise that data from these sensors, when analyzed, could take hundreds of years of anecdotal data from walking in the vineyards. and digitize it. This means that collecting such data would allow farmers to compress generations of knowledge based on what would be a limited set of data. Although, given climate change, it is unclear whether knowledge from 100 years ago will help too much. (The spoon)
Connected