Anders Riise Mæhlum is currently working with the TILES project for his Master thesis. The Internet of Things, or IoT, is growing rapidly in popularity, and many toolkits for developing IoT applications are emerging. The TILES toolkit developed for the TILES project is one such toolkit, providing tools for rapid prototyping of IoT applications using TILES Square modules. The TILES Square modules are open source embedded hardware devices (http://tilestoolkit.io/) that can be used to interact with the real world through several input and output peripherals. Developers using the TILES toolkit will be able to use peripherals from multiple TILES Squares to prototype and implement their IoT applications, and connect the application to the digital world through provided web service interfaces.
In his specialization project, conducted in the autumn semester of 2016, Anders wrote the project report “TILES Toolkit: usage and ideation workshops and integration in IoT ecologies”, where several improvements to the TILES toolkit were made. During this project, Anders co-organized workshops for high school students in order to discover what facilitation mechanisms were necessary in order to support development of IoT applications for non-experts. During several iterations of workshops, the TILES toolkit were extended with appropriate tools that allowed the non-experts to create full-scale IoT applications with little guidance from toolkit experts.
Now, for his master thesis, Anders is building on top of his previous work, using the outcome from the workshops to implement a more robust TILES toolkit that supports multiple programming approaches. In addition, the extended toolkit will add support for future extension of the toolkit as the TILES Squares are evolving to feature new and improved input and output peripherals. This adds support for both the non-experts and TILES application developers, as well as toolkit developers that wants to extend the toolkit and add support for their own custom peripherals and possible additional hardware. This offers a high degree of customization in order to use the TILES toolkit in a wide variety of different scenarios.
