Getting Hands-on Experience Prototyping Innovative IoT Solutions at your Startup

Connecting and managing devices in the cloud and then using the data to drive insights and actions can help solve for a myriad of use cases across industries. Startups have used AWS Internet of Things (IoT) services to build innovative solutions, from differentiated consumer products to platforms that optimize agricultural or other industrial processes to applications that lead to healthier spaces. For example, iRobot created the robot vacuum industry in 2002 and then revolutionized it again when they introduced their first internet-connected vacuums in 2015. Charity: water, with the help from AWS partner Twisthink, built a connected water pump that enables remote monitoring. The pump’s sensors can detect whether a pump will fail before it happens and send an alert to a mechanic to fix the pump before it stops working to reduce downtime. This IoT-enabled solution delivers more consistent, healthy water to rural and remote communities. Beewise reinvented the 150-year-old process of beekeeping with an automated beehive that uses IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor and take actions to improve the health of bees and increase their honey output.

Get hands-on with IoT

While IoT has nearly limitless potential for the problems it can solve as a bridge between technology and the physical world, it’s not without a few common challenges. One of the most common challenges customers face that could hamper the next generation of innovative startups is the lack of hands-on experience building end-to-end IoT applications. Customers may have great use cases and ideas for what they want to build, but they are unsure how to do it. That’s why we launched AWS IoT EduKit, a program that provides an extensible and easy-to-use reference hardware kit, tutorials, and sample code to quickly get started. With AWS IoT EduKit, startups can quickly get hands-on experience prototyping innovative solutions with technologies such as machine learning and Alexa voice assistance.

Reinventing Healthy Spaces, a Hackster Community Contest

To make it even easier and more engaging to get started with building, we are sponsoring a hackathon that challenges participants to reinvent healthy spaces with innovative solutions. Over the last year, we’ve learned healthy best practices as well as adapted to new normals. As people can gather once again in homes, businesses, and public spaces, it’s more important than ever to have strong safety protocols and continue innovating new solutions that keep us safe. These may include temperature screenings, physical distancing guidelines, face covering requirements, occupancy limits, and enhanced cleaning and air flow. Technology can clearly play a role in reinventing how we keep people healthy by making it easier to follow safety protocols and best practices.

Hackathon details:

• Who: Builders of all IoT experience levels (individuals or teams)
• What: Build an innovative smart space solution with AWS IoT EduKit
•  Where: Hosted on Hackster.io
• When:
  • Submit your idea proposal to win hardware by June 30
  • Build your solution and submit your project by August 15
  • Winners announced by August 31
• Why: Demonstrate your inventiveness, gain hands-on experience, and win prizes ($10,000 total)

Whether or not your startup is in the healthy building space, participants in this hackathon can expect to get immersive, hands-on experience with support from AWS IoT experts as well as a community of like-minded builders. It’s a low-risk opportunity to quickly build and iterate prototypes by yourself or with a team to tackle real-world use cases. Learn more about AWS IoT EduKit and participate in the hackathon with a total of $10,000 in prizes. Plus, we are giving away 150 M5Stack Core2 for AWS IoT EduKit reference hardware kits for use in the competition to the most inventive and exciting solution proposals (application required).