Courtesy apitronics.com
The title here is not to suggest that Apitronics is inferior to the ManyLabs/SODAQ stack. Apitronics is built around the Beagle Bone Black, which was featured in a previous post about Agduino. Apitronics doesn’t use Postgresql, instead the system uses CouchDB, which may interface cleanly in data transfers to PostGIS, but I’m not sure. In general, I get the sense that Manylabs may be a bit further along in the process, but this is difficult to gauge with the information I have available. It would be nice if some of the disparate groups could begin to find a way to merge projects under a common umbrella, at least for the software development piece.
An interesting component of Apitronics is the “Hive” approach.
From the Apitronics website:
Our architecture is extremely modular consisting of Bees that can be “plugged” into any sensor and actuator, allowing the same device to be a weather station, an irrigation controller, or a control system for a greenhouse. Multiple Bees are coordinate [sic] by a single Hive which is a gateway device plugged into the user’s router. This device is a local coordinator for the entire network and preserves functionality without internet connectivity, making the Apitronics platform more robust and reliable than other cloud-based solutions.
I’ll be curious to see how this approach plays out in practice. Overall, Apitronics seems to be a solid project with committed project leaders. You can follow the primary lead for this project on twitter @thierylouis.