Newry Digital Meetup held an IoT meetup on Tuesday in conjunction with DigitalNMD (Newry, Mourne, Down District Council), Southern Regional College and South-Eastern Regional College.
Michael Forster started proceedings explaining the local council’s DigitalNMD programme to support local business in the use of emerging technology such as drones and VR.
Martin Naughtan then took the podium explain the radio frequencies available for IoT devices which center on the 868 Mhz frequency.
Martin spoke about the LoRaWAN network that can be used at no charge to registered users. He passed around several IoT devices used for prototyping including the FiPy.
Following Martin’s talk we had Conor Moran of local company First Derivatives who played a video about a Formula 1 project the company is working on to analyse data from thousands of sensors on the elite cars. Conor explain the KDB+ time-series database technology and the Q language used to query the data. The technology is available to download at no cost here and is even available for ARM architectures!
A general discussion after the talks was useful in gauging opinion on the topics of interest to attendees when planning future Newry Digital Meetups. For me there was several positives to take away from the event. These included the interest shown by the BCS and First Derivatives in local technology meetups. Fiona from FD also described how the company support one day training sessions in Q to allow students and those interested in career change – and this sparked the attention of the educators in the room including Kieran Swail of SRC.
