GLOBAL EVENTS

Hack Your Car with LTE-M Cellular Connectivity - makerfaire.com/maker/entry/67751
Presented by: Will Caruana, Macchina
Zone 3 in Make: Electronics by Digi-Key
Saturday, September 22, 2018
4:00 pm - 4:15 pm

Keynote Presentation: IoT and Product Development
Presented by: Scott Nelson, Vice President of Product; Digi International
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
6:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Scott joined Digi in October 2017 as Vice President of Product and is responsible for directing the company’s vision, strategy, and product roadmaps in collaboration with Research and Development, Sales, and Operations. Scott will discuss the IoT market – what’s new, where it’s headed and what it means for increased sales of electronic components.

Cellular technology, and more specifically LTE has become an integral part of public safety communications. With coverage and connectivity improvements, first responder's now use LTE-connected apparatus to record, transmit pictures, voice and video for an array of purposes. With the ratification of mission-critical enhancements by 3GPP, including mission-critical push-to-talk, proximity-based capabilities (D2D), and one-to-many broadcasting in Releases 13, 14, first responder's can now really consider LTE more fully as the backbone for mission-critical communication network. Since this is the first time that public safety shifts from private-radio-like solutions for this purpose, this panel will discuss different points of view from various areas of the public safety solution chain and ecosystem on the adoption of cellular for the job.

Mission-Critical Communications for Transit - Roundtable Discussion
Steve Mazur, Business Development Director-Government; Digi International
Tuesday, October 24, 2018
4:45 pm - 6:00 pm ET
Table #1

City officials and residents can expect their regional transit systems to run on schedule and dynamically redirect capacity where needed for events and unforeseen incidents. They are also expected to activate emergency response procedures following a disaster. All this requires a communication network that is fail-safe, low latency, interoperable and secure. Most would agree that today’s networks aren’t adequate, that improvement is needed to achieve effective communications.

Fortunately transit agencies can leverage both existing LTE and advancing 5G international standards for mission critical services over commercial cellular networks. The services are built on protocols and mechanisms that guarantee priority and preemption for voice, video and data.

The mission critical services are being deployed in stages. Fortunately, the structural network technology used for priority voice, video and data is now in place. Bandwidth on shared or reserved spectrum can be allocated for priority access using dedicated bearers with associated quality-of-service levels. Transit agencies who deploy equipment compatible with these structural capabilities can take advantage of the priority data services available today, and then efficiently layer future services such as group video calls with simple firmware upgrades.

Due to advances in network equipment and services, most all buses have an onboard cellular router which functions as a communications gateway for the various systems. A bus has become a mobile data center of sorts. Coordination of the bus fleet is accomplished through transmission of location and voice communications with central dispatch. Voice communications is increasingly implemented using IP technologies, Voice over IP (VoIP) or Voice over LTE (VoLTE). Therefore these systems are mission critical, and need to run over a fail-safe communications network. The recent standards developments are just now enabling deployment of mobile access routers having forward compatibility with the many new services envisioned for mission critical applications.

The Newest Technology in MedTech: Using VR/AR/AI and Machine Learning
Panelist: Scott Nelson, VP of Product; Digi International
Track: Medtech Central
MedTech Central Booth 1347
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
3:00 pm - 3:55 pm
Tremendous technological changes in medicine and healthcare are quickly making an impact. These trends touch the entire healthcare ecosystem. They are important because of how they impact product design and patient care delivery. This panel will discuss these new disruptive and innovative technologies, and whether they are today's fad or the future. Topics to be included:

• How artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving the needle in medical decision making and changing current devices on the market.
• Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) and their use in design and product development.
• Trends in machine learning for manufacturing the medical device supply chain.

Choosing an operating system for an embedded system is one of the most complex and critical tasks for building a connected device. It has significant long-term ramifications that affect both development and the market success of a product.

There are several factors that make choosing a Linux-based OS a smart choice: acquisition cost, source code availability, and its broad architecture support —all these factors lead to a significantly improved time-to-market and a reduction in platform design risk and effort.

However, choosing a specific Linux-based OS can be confusing. A frequently asked question is: “With so many Linux-based platforms available in the market, why use the Yocto Project instead of a standard non-embedded binary distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu?” This session will provide the answer to that fundamental question.

Attendees will learn about the array of embedded operating systems available today and the benefits of choosing a Linux-based OS, specifically Yocto Project.

For many Internet of Things (IoT) applications, high-throughput standards such as LTE-Advanced, with its throughput of 300Mbps, are overkill, since the amounts of data are relatively small. What’s more, devices and sensors are often deployed in far-flung, remote areas that often lack access to power, making a high-powered router unfeasible.

To address this segment’s low-power, low-bandwidth requirements, the 3GPP, the cellular-standards body, is putting forth new “narrowband” standards. LTE Cat 1, LTE-M, and NB-IoT are designed to connect devices and sensors that dribble data and operate at very low power, allowing them to last multiple years on a battery.

As design engineers push to create the next great IoT solution, it’s not enough to simply connect to the Internet of Things. This session will help you choose the right type of network, the one that best fits the specific demands of your IoT devices and applications.

This session will address selecting the best connectivity technology for low-power, low-bandwidth requirements in the IoT. LTE Cat 1, LTE-M, and NB-IoT are designed to connect devices and sensors that dribble data and operate at very low power, allowing them to last multiple years on a battery.

Today, almost every company in every industry sector needs near-instant data to be successful.  Many IoT applications rely on cloud infrastructure for data processing, analytics and storage.  As connected devices become more powerful, edge computing provides an opportunity to bring this intelligence closer to the source of the data, with benefits like improved latency and reliability, reduced cost and increased security.  A balance of cloud and edge computing along with a renewed focus on hardware can help companies deliver intelligence everywhere and enable a new class of applications. However, bringing intelligence to the edge demands a different way of thinking about existing IT infrastructures. Attend this session to learn how to extend your compute capabilities to the edge of the IoT in an intelligent way.

IoT device manufacturers need to build more compute power into their products. With more resources, edge devices can open up new opportunities and revenue streams that can deliver significant ROI in a short period of time. Attendees will learn new ways to improve speed to market, reduce cost of failure, and achieve payback in less than 12 months.