This year, I was fortunate enough to attend The Things Conference in Amsterdam – a conference dedicated to the development and application of the Internet of Things (IoT) and LoRaWAN technology.
The conference follows a two-day, single-track format of keynotes, workshops, podcast recordings and round table discussions. The conference focuses on the practical applications of IoT, with over 100 different IoT devices on display and numerous real-world use cases demonstrated during the two days of conference talks and workshops.
Flying Out - Tuesday, 24th Sept
Each conference day had a full schedule starting at 09:30. So that we could maximise our time at the conference, we opted to fly out the day before, which meant setting the alarm for 04:45 to catch a 09:40 flight from Manchester to Schiphol.
We arrived with plenty of time to spare, and we were through security in about 20 minutes. We found somewhere that served coffee and had plug sockets so that we could get on with some work while we waited for our gate to be called.
The flight was uneventful and took just over an hour to travel the ~500km to Amsterdam. Once we landed, however, we spent a tedious 2 hours queuing to traverse the ~50-meter passport control hall.
Finally, we made it out of the airport and took a short Uber ride to the Airbnb that would be our home for the next few days.
After a few more hours of work, we ventured out for the evening to explore Amsterdam. Between the exploring and the conference, I had a felling that we'd certainly be racking up the step count on this visit.
Amsterdam operates public ferries, which are free of charge, which makes exploring Amsterdam on foot easy, but don't forget to watch out for the excessive number of cyclists!
Amsterdam has a pretty good reputation for beer, so we couldn't resist trying a few places to see if there was any truth to the rumours – it turns out Amsterdam has excellent beer!
Later that evening, we met up with a friend, Filip. Filip has worked for us as a Software Engineer Intern this summer and last summer. He's since finished his bachelor's degree and started his Master's in Amsterdam a few weeks ago.
Conference Day 1 - Wednesday, 25th Sept
Like with all conferences, our priority on Day 1 was getting through registration to get our badges. We got to the conference shortly after registration opened, and we picked up our badges promptly as there was barely a queue.
As we'd allowed plenty of time for registration, we had a fair bit of time free before the opening keynote, so we took the opportunity to explore the various vendor stands and have a nosey at some of the LoRaWAN devices on display:
Shortly before 09:30 we settled ourselves in the main theatre to get ready for the opening keynote.
The Things Conference is well attended, with 1500+ attendees from 70 countries making it to the two-day event.
The theme of this year's conference was the Total Cost of Ownership for IoT deployments. The adoption of IoT and low-powered devices is becoming increasingly popular as industries realise the benefits they can gain from IoT.
Like with most other technologies at scale, cost becomes a key consideration once a solution moves out of prototyping and into a mass-adoption production environment.
With IoT, the total cost of ownership can be affected by several different factors:
- Device Costs
Device costs include the expense of purchasing IoT devices, sensors, and any additional hardware. Depending on the complexity and number of devices, this can make up a significant portion of the TCO, especially when factoring in device lifespan, replacement, or upgrades. - Installation Costs
Setting up IoT devices often requires specialised labour, physical installation, and possibly calibration or configuration in the field. These upfront costs can vary significantly based on the deployment scale and the environment's complexity. - Connectivity Costs
IoT devices need reliable network connectivity to transmit data, which may require cellular, Wi-Fi, or LPWAN services. The ongoing cost of maintaining this connectivity (such as data plans or bandwidth consumption) can significantly impact TCO, especially in deployments with a large number of devices or remote locations. - Maintenance and Support
Ongoing maintenance is critical to keeping the IoT system operational, from replacing faulty hardware to troubleshooting connectivity issues. Support services, such as software updates, repairs, and customer support, also add long-term costs, which can escalate with larger deployments. - Data Management
IoT solutions generate vast amounts of data that must be stored, processed, and analysed. The cost of cloud storage, computing resources, and data processing infrastructure can be substantial, especially if advanced analytics or machine learning algorithms are applied. - Security
Protecting IoT devices, networks, and data from security threats requires investment in encryption, authentication protocols, monitoring tools, and compliance measures. Security breaches can lead to costly remediation, impact the system's overall reliability and reputation, and increase TCO. - Software Development and Integration
Another key cost is developing custom software to manage IoT devices, analyse data, and integrate with existing enterprise systems. This also includes ongoing updates, bug fixes, and integration with third-party services, all of which can drive up the TCO. - Scaling
As an IoT system grows, costs associated with scaling up infrastructure, bandwidth, and data processing increase. Scaling introduces new complexities affecting all system aspects (hardware, software, connectivity, and support), leading to higher long-term costs.
Once the opening keynote was finished, attendees were free to pick and choose which talks, workshops and roundtables they wanted to attend.
On day one we attended:
- Zero Touch Provisioning - Touchless Configuration Deployments of LoRaWAN Gateways
- Exploring IoT device implementation strategies and their impact on total cost of ownership
- The Twelve-Factor Thing
- Investing in existing Building Infrastructure: Long-term value vs. short-term costs
- How to correctly measure temperature in harsh environments?
- Generative AI and IoT, is there a match?
- Welcome in the IoT Casino - place your bets
- Keys for IoT ROI : infrastructure maintainability
"The Twelve-Factor Thing" talk was probably one of my favourite talks of the day. In The Twelve-Factor Thing, Brandon Satrom presents a set of 12 principles for building robust and scaleable IoT systems – very much inspired by Heroku's twelve-factor app methodology.
The talk on zero touch provision was also one of the more interesting talks because being able to provision device en masse that are suitably configured to be deployed into a physical environment out-of-the-box is a challenge that is faced with almost all IoT deployments.
After a full day of conference talks our brains were pretty tired, so we headed back to our Airbnb to drop off bags and head out for some food en route to The Things Conference Party which started at 8pm at Chateau Amsterdam.
Conference Day 2 - Thursday, 26th Sept
Day 2 was largely a rinse-and-repeat of the day before, with talks and workshops covering a variety of IoT use cases and challenges.
Our schedule on the second day covered:
- Enterprise IoT software: Build vs. buy – can low-code deliver on the promise?
- LPWAN trends and economic evaluation of satellite IoT solution deployment
- Embracing LoRaWAN for Smarter Societies: The Necessity of LPWA Targets for Government
- Moving to Zephyr: Enhancing your existing and future IoT Devices with Zephyr RTOS
- Monitoring and alerting in industrial manufacturing
- Developing an Open Source (Hardware and Software) LoRaWAN Sensor
- The Future of IoT: Data Sharing and Collaboration
- Closing Words
One of the great things about The Things Conference is that many of the talks and workshops are based on use cases or case studies of how IoT has been used.
Day 2 was certainly packed full of interesting use cases from "Monitoring and alerting in industrial manufacturing" through to "Developing an Open Source (Hardware and Software) LoRaWAN Sensor". This latter talk on developing an open source sensor was a real-world IoT use case where a museum is using IoT sensors to monitor the environmental condition of artefacts that they keep in archive/storage. As you can imagine, some environmental factors, such as humidity, could damage historic artefacts.
The day started with a talk on build vs buy for IoT ("Enterprise IoT software: Build vs. buy – can low-code deliver on the promise?"). This talk was interesting because it contrasted an off-the-shelf IoT platform with a use case where a prospect had built their own IoT platform from scratch. Whilst the build-from-scratch solution did eventually work, it proved how difficult and costly building an entire IoT ecosystem from the ground up can be. After all, you have to tackle the challenges of hardware, provisioning, remote management, connectivity, security, data management, etc, before you get even close to tackling the actual problem you tried to address with IoT.
Like the first day, we'd packed our schedule on the second day with back-to-back talks and workshops. Once the final "Closing Words" session rolled around, we were quite tired from another full-on day of absorbing information, and it was time to head back to Airbnb before heading back out into central Amsterdam one last time to do a bit of evening sight-seeing and sample the beer one last time.
Flying Home - Friday, 27th Sept
We had an Uber booked first thing in the morning to take us back to Schiphol Airport to fly back to Manchester. Our flight home was delayed due to bad weather in Amsterdam but was otherwise uneventful.
The week had been busy and tiring but a thoroughly enjoyable experience. The Things Conference was well organised, with some great speakers and workshops.
Like with most conferences, workshops can be pre-booked, and we pre-booked all of the workshops we attended, which proved to be a good idea as some of them were very popular. We also weren't sure how much time we'd need to look around the vendor stalls. But after our first day, between the spare time we had after registration and time on our lunch break, we'd pretty much exhausted exploring all the vendor stalls, which meant we didn't focus on the vendor stalls on day two.
Amsterdam is also a great place to visit, and we did a good job of trying to fit in some sightseeing in the bits of downtime that we had!
Hopefully, we'll return to the conference next year!
