On Tuesday night at DevNation, Eurotech sponsored an evening of IoT hacking. The object was to create a laser tag-style game. Participants were given a TI SimpleLink SensorTag development kit and a laser pointer. The sensors use Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) to communicate with the Eurotech IoT gateway running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

There were a number of tables of developers with their laptops. Each table had an IoT gateway on it that the developer's sensors communicated with. The gateways used Eclipse Kura to report the data to a central server that was able to show statistics for the whole room. Earlier in the day, Red Hat's Henryk Konsek gave a talk describing this architecture: Building open source IoT gateways using Eclipse Kura and Apache Camel.

Developers pulled down code from GitHub in order to register their tags with the gateway and run a JavaFX application to test their sensors. Each developer needed to complete a number of steps in Java and then compile and run the application. There was also a browser-based dashboard display that was shown on the main screens in the room.

You can get the code at the Red Hat Internet of Things Research GitHub repository (RHioTResearch).  The game is RHioTTag (pronounced riot tag).  The github repos are:

Thanks to Eurotech for sponsoring this fun hacking session, providing the hardware, food, and drink. Red Hat is partnering with Eurotech to make it easier for organizations to build scalable and secure IoT systems.

Last updated: February 6, 2024