After four years of incubation<\/a> at Mozilla<\/a>, Krellian<\/a> is proud to become the new commercial sponsor of WebThings<\/a>, an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today we are announcing the release of WebThings Gateway 1.0<\/a> and setting out a vision for the future of the WebThings project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n WebThings is an open source implementation of emerging W3C Web of Things<\/a> standards and consists of three main components:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following a company restructuring<\/a> in August, Mozilla was looking for a new home for the WebThings community to continue their work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having co-founded the project whilst working at Mozilla, I joined discussions with two of my former colleagues Michael Stegeman<\/a> and David Bryant<\/a> about spinning out WebThings as an independent open source project. We worked with Mozilla on an agreement to transition the project to a new community-run home at webthings.io<\/a>, and have spent the last three months working together on that transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today marks the public release of WebThings Gateway 1.0<\/a> and the formal transition of the WebThings platform to its new home at webthings.io<\/a>. Going forward, Krellian will be sponsoring the new WebThings website and replacement cloud infrastructure, to continue to provide automatic software updates and a secure remote access service for WebThings gateways around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can read more about the 1.0 release and the transition of existing gateways to the new infrastructure on the Mozilla Hacks blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Krellian\u2019s mission<\/a> is to \u201cextend the World Wide Web into physical spaces to make our built environment smarter, safer and more sustainable<\/em>.\u201d WebThings provides an ideal open source platform, built on web standards, to help achieve that mission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the short term Krellian will be leveraging the WebThings Cloud remote access service as part of our new digital signage platform. In the longer term we plan to explore other enterprise use cases for the WebThings platform, to help make buildings smarter, safer and more sustainable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These commercial applications of WebThings will help provide revenue streams to support the long term sustainability of the open source project and allow it to continue to develop and grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Krellian highly values the thriving community who have supported the WebThings project over the last four years. From hackers and makers to educators and hobbyists, the community have been pivotal in building, testing and promoting WebThings around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amongst their achievements is the translation of WebThings Gateway into 34 spoken languages, the creation of over a hundred gateway add-ons and the building of countless DIY projects in a dozen different programming languages. Community members have contributed their time and effort to help build and promote WebThings and support other members in using it in thousands of private smart homes around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We intend to support the community to continue with their great work, and have put in place an open governance structure<\/a> to distribute decision making and foster leadership amongst the global WebThings community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following are some ideas about where to take the platform next, but we\u2019d also very much like to hear from the community about what they would like to see from the project going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n WebThings has been developed in parallel with, and has contributed to, the standardisation of the Web of Things<\/a> at the W3C. Since the last release of WebThings Gateway in April, the W3C Thing Description<\/a> specification has reached \u201crecommendation\u201d status and is now an international standard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019d like to work towards making WebThings compliant with this standard, as there are still a remaining number of differences<\/a> between the W3C and Mozilla specifications. In order to fill in the gaps between Mozilla\u2019s Web Thing API<\/a> and the W3C\u2019s Thing Description standard, we plan to continue to lead work on standardising the Web Thing Protocol<\/a> as a concrete protocol for communicating with devices over the web.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The main WebThings Gateway software image is currently built on top of the Raspbian Linux distribution. This served the project well for its initial target of DIY smart home users, using the popular Raspberry Pi single board computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the platform matures, we would like to explore a more production-quality IoT operating system like Ubuntu Core or Balena OS on which to base the WebThings Gateway distribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This will have the following benefits:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was previously a project<\/a> to build controller software for WebThings, to run on a controller device such as a smart speaker or smart display. The initial prototype was built on Android Things, but was discontinued when Google locked down the Android Things platform to specific OEMs and introduced restrictions on how it could be used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Krellian would like to explore new controller software built on our open source Krellian Kiosk<\/a> web runtime, which could allow for touch and voice input. This software would be designed so that it could either run on the same device as the gateway software, or on a separate controller device.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A native WebThings mobile app could act as a general purpose Web of Things client. This could potentially:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, we would like to explore expanding the WebThings Cloud offering. This could include an online dashboard for monitoring and controlling devices across multiple premises, and cloud to cloud integrations with other IoT platforms and voice assistants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019re excited about this new chapter in the WebThings story, and look forward to working closely with the community on our vision<\/a> of a connected world where technology is seamlessly woven into the spaces around us and improves the lives of those who use it<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can find out more about WebThings at its new home of webthings.io<\/a>, follow @WebThingsIO<\/a> on Twitter and sign up for the email newsletter<\/a> to keep up to date with all the latest news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After four years of incubation at Mozilla, Krellian is proud to become the new commercial sponsor of WebThings, an open platform for monitoring and controlling devices over the web. Today we are\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,20,19,18,17],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-internet-of-things","tag-iot","tag-open-source","tag-smart-buildings","tag-web-of-things"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1021,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions\/1021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tola.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}WebThings<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1600\/1*cCddqvUn7QyYHfG7jC8mzg.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nFlying the Nest<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
WebThings Gateway 1.0<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1600\/1*OttaSy_jcQlW0TZYOKMmdA.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nKrellian & WebThings<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1600\/1*DMBthesZhbZDKdWuud0yGQ.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/cdn-images-1.medium.com\/max\/1600\/1*jwATmqWMLQuT-AzQ-9Qkxw.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe WebThings Community<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Future Roadmap<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
W3C Compliance<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Production Gateway OS<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
WebThings Controller<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
WebThings App<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
WebThings Cloud<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n