IoT: The road to sustainability

How can a simple JSON file solve the IoT industry's massive e-waste problem and make devices truly interoperable?

#1about 3 minutes

The problem of unsustainable IoT devices

Major tech companies like Sonos, Apple, and John Deere create electronic waste by locking down devices and limiting repairability.

#2about 2 minutes

Taking responsibility and fighting for repair rights

Engineers must take responsibility for product lifecycles, while consumer and legal actions can force companies to adopt right-to-repair policies.

#3about 2 minutes

Building sustainable hardware with open source

Open source hardware, championed by companies like Adafruit and SparkFun, provides accessible circuit designs and PCBs to enable repair and modification.

#4about 3 minutes

Achieving interoperability with Web of Things standards

The W3C Web of Things (WoT) standard aims to solve device fragmentation by enabling different IoT devices to communicate with each other.

#5about 5 minutes

Understanding the Web of Things Thing Description

The core of WoT is the Thing Description, a JSON file that describes a device's capabilities, metadata, and API endpoints for interaction.

#6about 5 minutes

A practical demo of a WoT-enabled device

A live demo shows how to interact with an ESP32 OLED display using its Thing Description and a simple Node.js application.

#7about 8 minutes

A developer's journey from web dev to IoT

The speaker shares his career path from early hardware tinkering to web development with PHP and JavaScript, and back to embedded systems with Riot OS.

#8about 5 minutes