The 10 Hottest New IoT Devices And Products Of 2019

From AdLink AI at the Edge to Helium's Hotspot gateway, CRN takes a look at the 10 hottest new IoT devices and products of 2019 that are making the connected world a better place.

From Development Boards To Cryptocurrency-Mining Gateways

When you consider the number of IoT devices and other kinds of endpoints entering the world, it can be staggering. Gartner forecasts the number of enterprise and automotive IoT endpoints will reach 4.8 billion at the end of the year and grow 21 percent to 5.8 billion.

What's important to keep in mind with this explosion of endpoints is the importance of the IoT devices and products that enable things, processes and people to work together in a way that is smooth and fast. These devices and products can range from software for connectivity and messaging to new kinds of development boards and cryptocurrency-mining gateways.

With that in mind, CRN took a look at 10 of the hottest new IoT devices and products of 2019 that are making the connected world a better place.

Get more of CRN's 2019 tech year in review.

AdLink AI at the Edge

AdLink wants to make it easier to deploy artificial intelligence in edge devices for machine vision applications with its end-to-end AI at the Edge solution. The solution provides everything needed to build machine learning models, from the way they're designed and deployed to how they're improved. This includes Intel's OpenVINO toolkit, which optimizes deep learning applications on Intel architecture while also streamlining deployments from the edge to the cloud. It also includes Amazon Sagemaker for managing the machine learning workflow, AWS Greengrass for bringing AWS capabilities to edge devices, AdLink Data River for simplifying complex data network programming and AdLink Edge software suite for things like device management, analytics and data subscription management.

Akamai IoT Edge Connect

Akamai is providing a new IoT message broker service called IoT Edge Connect that uses the Cambridge, Mass.-based company's global content delivery network of 240,000 edge services across more than 130 countries to make IoT messaging more scalable, economical and secure. The service, which is available as part of Akamai's Edge Cloud solution line, can support hundreds of millions of endpoints and 10 times more messages than other IoT or in-app messaging cloud solutions. The service, which is based on the popular MQTT messaging protocol, features end-to-end authentication as well as streaming data and key-value-store database capabilities.

BehrTech MYTHINGS

BehrTech is taking on the proprietary LoRa long-range protocol for industrial IoT networks with its MYTHINGS software platform, which it claims can enable wireless connections in deep indoor and underground environments with lower interference using standard gateways and sensors. MYTHINGS is supported by a growing partner ecosystem that includes edge computing vendor Advantech, which provides a MYTHINGS module for its M2.COM sensor platform. The MYTHINGS platform also supports the new MYTHINGS Smart Sensor, which comes with sensors for acceleration, temperature and humidity, among other things.

Cisco Catalyst IE3x00 Switch Series

Cisco is bringing intent-based networking to the IoT edge with its new IE3x00 series of switches. The new switches, along with the new IR1101 integrated services router, are ruggedized for industrial use cases, such as networking for oil and gas rigs, and can be easily upgraded with new technologies, such as 5G, thanks to their modular and programmable nature. The Catalyst switches, which run on Cisco's IOS XE operating system and are managed using the company's DNA Center management system, support options for fiber, copper and Power-over-Ethernet ports.

Kudelski Group And CoreKinect's FreshTrack

The Kudelski Group and custom IoT sensor maker CoreKinect are tackling food waste with a new cold chain tracking solution called FreshTrack. The tracking and sensing solution is designed to fit into boxes, pallets or food packaging to monitor temperature, humidity and other conditions as food items get transported throughout the supply chain. Designed to reduce food waste and its associated business costs, the solution combines Kudelski's hardware-based device and data security with CoreKinect's flexible tracking technology. The product was announced after the two companies reached an agreement to develop joint solutions earlier this year.

Helium Hotspot

The Helium Hotspot is a $495 gateway that serves as the critical building block for Helium's "LongFi" wireless network for IoT devices. The San Francisco-based startup is incentivizing consumers to purchase these gateways with the promise of receiving the startup's cryptocurrency, which is mined using the gateways. The Helium network, which is now active in more than 425 U.S. cities, claims to provide 200 times the range of Wi-Fi at 1/1,000th of a cellular modem. Companies using the Helium Network include Nestle, InvisiLeash, Agulus and Lime.

Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX

Nvidia's Jetson Xavier NX is a credit card-sized computing board that the chipmaker calls the "world's smaller supercomputer" for artificial intelligence applications at the edge. The company claims the new chip can provide "server-class performance" in a 10-watt power envelope with 384 CUDA cores and 48 tensor cores, allowing it to deliver up to 21 Tera Operations Per Second. As such, the Jetson Xavier NX is targeted for performance-hungry devices that are "constrained by size, weight, power budgets or cost," such as commercial robots, high-resolution factory sensors and industrial IoT systems.

ReFirm Labs Centrifuge Platform

ReFirm Labs' Centrifuge Platform is tackling IoT security by analyzing the firmware of devices for vulnerabilities that can leave businesses open to attacks. With its platform, ReFirm Labs provides "automated firmware decomposition and analysis at scale," eliminating the time-consuming manual work of extracting and analyzing firmware of devices. It does this by extracting the file systems from the compiled binary image of a device's firmware and then builds a bill of materials for the firmware's open-source software components for cross-reference with vulnerability databases.

SiFive Learn Inventor

The SiFive Learn Inventor is a hardware development platform that aims to make it easy for makers, students and academics to begin developing IoT devices. Made by RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions vendor SiFive, the Learn Inventor is a microcontroller development system that comes with a 150MHz clock speed, 512 KB flash storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, 64 KB of SRAM and a 6-by-8 array of RGB LEDs that can display 262,000 colors. The system is compatible with Amazon's FreeRTOS real-time operating system and certified by Amazon Web Services to connect to AWS IoT Core services.

Wind River Helix Virtualization Platform

Wind River's Helix Virtualization Program aims to future-proof industrial IoT by allowing multiple operating systems to run at once on an edge device so that legacy software can continue to run while new applications are developed. The Helix Platform brings together the company's real-time operating system (RTOS) and an embedded distribution of Linux within a single edge compute platform that can also run other operating systems. The goal is to future-proof these systems while also enabling them to continue running with no downtime.