8 IoT Open Source Platforms and Tools to Take Your IoT Dream Next Level

Open Source Platforms and Tools

Here at floLIVE, we love championing any company that’s helping to make the route to IoT more attainable. That’s why we’ve scoured the length and breadth of the world wide web to find the best IoT open source platforms and tools that can support you in your IoT goals.

Adafruit.io

Adafruit has been making electronics and hardware since 2005, and is all about making IoT easy and accessible for all. Adafruit sells innovations such as the Feather Huzzah development board, or the IO Starter Pack which is a great choice for beginners looking to get to grips with the IoT world. Once your IoT project is up and running, Adafruit offers Adafruit.io, a simple platform to stream, log and interact with your data, playing nicely with any device.

Sparkfun

SparkFun are known for their open-source components, tutorials and resources, and for good reason! Open source is part of their culture, and we love their belief that this encourages growth, collaboration and helps people learn better from one another. We agree! Top sellers include the SparkFun inventor’s kit, and the SparkFun expLORaBLE Thing Plus, a Feather-footprint development board that uses the Qwiic Connect System for easy integration with the rest of your system.

Kubernetes

It might sound obvious, but we can’t make a list of the best open-source platforms without mentioning Kubernetes!  After all, at floLIVE we use it ourselves! The concept is simple, grouping containers into logical units that can then be easily scaled up and down according to your business needs, even to millions of devices (perfect for Massive IoT needs). Kubernetes is also great for IoT because of the ability to quickly roll out new features or updates without impacting connectivity or availability, and with zero-downtime deployments, and seamless rollbacks if anything goes wrong. Because of its open-source structure, you can easily move workloads anywhere, whether that’s on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, or a hybrid infrastructure, and especially relevant for IoT – at the edge, to get the best possible response times, reliability, and QoS.

Arduino

Arduino is a favorite of professionals, fun-lovers, and side-hustles alike, and is an open-source electronics platform that can read inputs via a microcontroller and its own Arduino programming language. Inputs could be anything from a light, to a finger sensor, to a tweet, and these will then create outcomes, which could be any physical action from turning on a light or activating a motor, to publishing something on the web. Using Arduino Create, you can write code from your browser, connect to your IoT devices, and even integrate with Alexa!

Eclipse

Eclipse is where more than 350 open source projects, from runtimes, tools and frameworks were born. Let’s highlight just two awesome open source frameworks that Eclipse offers. Firstly, Leshan is a lightweight M2M standalone server, providing libraries that help anyone to develop their own M2M servers and clients. It includes modular Java libraries, and supports IPSO objects. Secondly, Wakaama is files to be built with an application, written in C and therefore fully portable on POSIX compliant systems. Wakaama is mono-threaded and provides APIs for a server application to send commands to LWM2M Clients, including checking commands for access rights and syntax before dispatching them.

Mosquitto

Also a brainchild of the Eclipse foundation, Mosquitto is an open source message broker that uses MQTT protocol versions 5.0, 3.1.1 and 3.1. Using a pub/sub model, it offers a lightweight way of carrying out messaging, which just happens to be perfect for IoT messaging. Think about low power sensors or microcontrollers, and you’re on the right track. Choose between running your own instance, or using the test server with flexible options.

Node-RED

The browser-based flow editor at Node-RED makes creating flows really simple, (we’re talking drag and drop simple) and includes template functionality for saving flows for later, as part of the library feature. These can then be deployed to runtime in just one click. If you’re thinking about building event-driven applications, Node offers an easy way to visually wire together devices, services and APIs. Plus they have a cool name, what’s not to love?

M2Mlabs Mainspring

Check out M2MLabs Mainspring for an application framework built for M2M applications. Written in Java, think logistics and tracking such as automotive use cases, or machine remote monitoring in Industrial IoT for example. In the communication between the IoT sensors and the server, Mainspring is all over the device communication and configuration, and also handles data storage and retrieval. That means your developers can stay focused on business logic.

IoT is moving at the speed of light! We love being right at the forefront, with our one-of-a-kind software-defined connectivity solution, a converged, cloud-native, global connectivity service with inherent billing, fully designed and built for IoT. When you’re ready to take your IoT dream global – let’s talk.