Gravelnet: Eindhoven’s first open IoT facility

IoT engineers need to make choices on the sensing, actuation and connectivity hardware, the communication protocols, platforms and middleware before implementing their solution. Yet, no facility out there gives them the flexibility to simultaneously integrate, prototype and validate all these choices. Sparked out of own projects, researchers at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) decided to build one themselves, with the intention to significantly shorten the development cycle of integrated IoT solutions and improve their reliability.

The result is Gravelnet, a distributed testing facility for hardware and software systems in the IoT era. It helps a designer of distributed embedded systems and applications validate their behaviour in dense setups. Amongst other things, the facility allows for easy deployment of hardware components on an evaluation board, runtime configuration, and quick testing of communication modules, protocols and network QoS parameters in a real-world environment. For educational purposes logging and various application complexities can be hidden.