Amazon Web Services (AWS) last week opened its AWS IoT Lab in Shenzhen – the second such facility in Greater China, nearly six months after launching its first lab in Taipei in March.
The lab is designed to help customers accelerate Internet of Things (IoT) application design and deployment by offering qualified hardware and software solutions built by AWS Partner Network (APN) partners
“In order to continue to help our customers solve critical business problems, we have launched AWS IoT Lab at the centre of the world’s device manufacturing hub in China,” said Dirk Didascalou, vice president, AWS IoT.
He said: “IoT experts are working with APN partners that produce devices to accelerate device integration within AWS IoT services. With the expanded catalogue of AWS qualified devices, our IoT team is helping APN partners focus on creating strategic proof-of-concept prototypes and solutions that help our customers quickly deploy IoT solutions to their businesses.”
The AWS IoT Lab is staffed with cross-domain engineers and solution architects with IoT expertise, using the entire suite of more than 165 AWS services, to assist APN partners and customers on projects that range from hardware qualification to application development, testing, and deployment of end-to-end solutions.
Reducing the IoT product development cycle
With customers demanding faster delivery of solutions, the lab will explore architecture design, evaluate concepts, provide guidance on best practices, and help identify the best technologies from a complex ecosystem of IoT building blocks, to create prototypes that enable solutions to be built and deployed faster.
“Experienced AWS IoT Lab engineers collaborated with our engineering team, and we worked together to get our products qualified for AWS IoT Greengrass,” said Ark Sun, senior product marketing manager, Lenovo DIBG China. “We were able to greatly shorten the development cycle of Lenovo Leez SBC C515 (Ti57080) intelligent development board, getting the product qualified for AWS IoT Greengrass, and we were able to more quickly move these new products into promotion. During the device qualification process, the IoT Lab experts responded quickly and worked with us to address technical problems as they came up.”
According to Sun, Lenovo products are now fully compatible with AWS IoT, with its rich IoT technical components for a wide variety of industrial applications.
Similarly, TCL Communication was able to successfully build a full-scale of smart home appliances platform with AWS’s sophisticated IoT services.
“With AWS IoT Lab experts onsite with us, we’ve successfully completed architecture design, Alexa AVS Skills connection, and system demo establishment within two weeks, which is beyond our expectation. With AWS IoT Lab experts’ support and the technology breadth of AWS, we were able to shorten the R&D lifespan significantly, reduce the trial cost and improve our efficiency of time-to-market journey,” said Yajun Hu, general manager of TCL Communication.
Working with APN partners
The AWS IoT Lab works with APN partners on hardware pre-qualification, providing expertise that takes full advantage of the AWS IoT community to create a catalogue of market-ready IoT components and solutions.
According to Elaine Chang, corporate vice president and managing director of AWS Greater China, sharing AWS’ IoT expertise with APN partners helps to accelerate engineering integration, and to double the amount of qualified hardware available through AWS device qualification program. “With the second IoT Lab in Greater China now operational in China’s manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, our IoT lab experts are working with AWS customers to create strategic proof-of-concept demos and prototypes that empower them to get to market faster with their products and solutions,” said Chang.
APN partners can now use the AWS IoT Device Tester for Amazon FreeRTOS, a test automation tool for microcontrollers that determines whether a device will run Amazon FreeRTOS and interoperate with AWS IoT services. AWS IoT Device Tester also tests to make sure cloud connectivity, over-the-air-updates (OTA), and security libraries function correctly on microcontrollers. The program includes development kits, embedded modules, gateways, sensors and cameras, validating that they work with AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT Greengrass, Amazon FreeRTOS, and Amazon Kinesis Video Streams.
