We are Innovate UK competition winners!

What is the problem you wish to solve and why is your proposed approach a good and innovative solution?

Kettle Companion is an assisted living product, which helps those who live apart to stay connected, by illuminating a miniature kettle in a home when a loved one activates their kettle at their home. This is signalled through a smart monitoring plug and communicated via Wi-Fi to a paired model “Kettle Companion” in the other home. Additionally, if there is a change in pattern of use, for instance, an elderly parent has not had their habitual morning cup of tea by the usual time, the paired Kettle Companion will illuminate red. A text message alert can also be sent to the owner of the appliance, prompting them to check their loved one is well. Kettle Companion is an Internet of Things (IoT) project that utilises the very latest software and hardware techniques to deliver a simple idea reliably and affordably.

While it is only at a prototype stage, with further development needed to make it into a full product, it has been released to consumers as a trial version.

Kettle Companion is a direct consumer product marketed to family and friends seeking reassurance about the wellbeing of loved ones. Exploring its more official use will be part of the funded project.

Kettle Companion is different

Firstly, it relays the information in an easily understandable way, the glow of a kettle. It connects initially through a human connection to light and sympathy of routine rather than raw data. Data is available, but is subsidiary to the visceral experience. Secondly, it is designed for much easier set-up than competitors. It will use traditional 2G, Cat M and NB IoT to automatically choose/set-up the best low power connectivity without need for manual set up. To work in an informal Social Care setting, these products and services need to be designed for the average person rather than professionals used to analysing data from advanced sensors.

Other solutions are by their all encompassing nature, and reliance on expertise to monitor, necessarily expensive. The Kettle Companion prototype pack is just £50. The expanded version will be a similar price. During this project it will be improved to be even more usable and friendly, but moving away from Commercial Off the Shelf components to specially made will bring down the manufacture price.

What will be the impact of receiving the grant to your business?

The Kettle Companion improves health outcomes as those concerned about friends and family more ably provide support to maintain the health and independence of potentially vulnerable people. This fits with the NHS Long Term Plan’s emphasis on supported self management. Kettle Companion is explicitly a Tech for Good project. It is the application of the most advanced IoT techniques to help older people live independently for longer.

It is anticipated that Kettle Companion is the first of many such products. Profits will be reinvested in expanding the range. Current Competitors solutions are designed as interlinked sets and sensors and analytical techniques designed to be interpreted by professionals. Kettle Companion starts at a cheap and understandable single product. However, we intend to grow the elements that can be added, while crucially preserving the immediacy and focus on the natural rhythms of life. The connection needs to feel natural and spontaneous, rather than ‘monitoring’. User consultation shows older people are resistant to being ‘spied on’ but like feeling part of their families and friend’s lives.

Introduction

We are proud to announce that we are taking part in the Digital Security by Design programme!

Digital Catapult is the UK authority on advanced digital technology. Along with other companies, we will be working with prototype cybersecurity technology which could massively affect the future of cybersecurity.

Dynamic Devices have been given access to ARM’s Morello SoC and development board which is an industrial demonstrator of a capabiility architecture (CHERI) developed by ARM and Cambridge University. Morello implements a CHERI-extended ARMv8-A processor, GPU, peripherals and memory subsystem. This board will play a vital role for our research into the CHERI architecture.

The vast majority of cyber attacks exploit conventional hardware and software memory vulnerabilities. To overcome this issue, University of Cambridge researchers with colleagues at SRI International developed CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions), a novel instruction set architecture that could stop two thirds of cyber attacks.

As part of the project, Arm designed and built a prototype system on a chip (SoC) and demonstrator board, the Arm Morello board, which was made available to UK businesses for industrial evaluation earlier in 2022. The DSbD Technology Access Programme, managed by Digital Catapult, allows companies to experiment with the Morello board.

– digicatapult.org.uk

In the picture, you can see the ARM Morello board which we will be working on for the next 6 months.

Aim for the DSbD Programme

In terms of what Dynamic Devices wants to accomplish with this programme, we hope to work with the existing Morello build support and integrate this to the greatest extent possible into the Yocto Embedded Linux build system resulting in an accrediated Yocto Compatible meta-cheri layer.

What we’ve done so far

So far, we have:

• Built Cheri-BSD for Morello and QEMU.
• Installed Cheri-BSD onto the Morello board.
• Tested purecap/capabilities on Cheri-BSD with example tests and also developed our own programs to test the secure architecture.
• Researched on Linux/Android for Morello
• Built Android for Morello
• Researched into Yocto support for Cheri

Conclusion

We would like to offer a massive thank you to Digital Catapult for enabling Dynamic Devices be a part of the Digital Security by Design programme. It is fantastic to be working alongside so many other innovative companies to further research these technologies which will undoubtedly shape the future of cybersecurity.

This programme is 6 months long and we will provide updates as we progress our research into CHERI & Morello.

See related information for the DSbD here on Twitter & LinkedIn.

Welcome to the world of Biohacking!

Previously, our Founder, Alex Lennon has installed an xNT NFC Chip which he uses on a daily basis to unlock the RFID secured doors at DoES Liverpool. After years of success using this product, Alex has decided to take a step further into the biohacking world! 

Alex has recently installed a chip in his arm which allows him to perform a variety of actions, such as uploading applets.

The device Alex has installed into his hand is a VivoKey Apex Flex, which can be seen below:

The Apex Flex is a patent pending subdermal contactless secure element enabling fully autonomous separation of your cryptographic keys and functions from vulnerable general computing platforms such as your smartphone or computer. The ability to not only carry your OTP, PGP, and other cryptographic keys with you at all times, but also perform cryptographic functions in vivo (generate OTP codes, encrypt & decrypt data, etc.) without ever revealing private keys to the NFC interface you are interacting with is a huge step forward for personal digital identity and data security. – dangerousthings.com

VivoKey has already created a few applets to use with the Apex Flex, including:

• OTP
• NAK
• NDEF
• U2F
• PGP

Alex has already began playing around with what the VivoKey Apex Flex is capable of. Take a look at the video below for an interesting glimpse of what Alex can do with his new implant:

Alex says, 

I’ve wanted to start looking at strong digital authentication based on a “proxy digital me” for many years. You may have seen I’ve had an RFID tag in my hand for 3 years or so which I’ve been using to unlock the doors in my office at DoES Liverpool. However this is easily cloned. Enter the Dangerous Things Apex Flex, an NXP P71 JavaCard OS computer chip which I can run my own applications on and which communicates over NFC. The clever people at Dangerous Things have been writing and porting various applets including OTP, HMAC/SHA and most recently PGP. In this video, I show how I can now use private GPG/SSH keys stored in my hand to sign my code commits and authenticate to SSH servers to send those commits up to the cloud.

We think it’s incredible that Alex has had this procedure done as he is one of the first in the world to have a crypto implant installed such as this one.

Let us know what you think of Alex’s new implant or if you have any ideas about what Alex could do with the Apex Flex!

To learn more about biohacking and human implant technology, please visit dangerousthings.com.

Introduction to our Digital Marketing Display

We were contacted by local SMEs asking if we could help them to create a low cost, easily maintained digital marketing display to go into local shops here in Liverpool, UK. This seemed an interesting project and something that we could build with Balena Cloud so we took a look… 

The Hardware (Display + Computer)

At the present time, the SME had a pretty standard low cost display monitor with a VESA 100 mounting at the back, so we decided to look at how to mount a Raspberry Pi on the back of this, connect it to BalenaCloud and look at how we could then display slideshows of marketing material for them.

You can see the back of the display on the left.

The Cloud

Balena

Firstly, we created a new Fleet within Balena for this project, downloaded an image to uSD Card and added this Raspberry Pi onto the BalenaCloud. The dashboard for this can be seen below.

Afterwards, we then added two blocks as services, the Balena Browser block, and the Balena Audio block.

Additionally, the Browser block allows us to run up a full screen “kiosk mode” web-browser which we can then use to display a wide variety of content. The Audio block supports the Browser block for audio output although this is not really needed for the digital marketing display.

We can configure the block with Balena environment variables. Details are on the Browser Block GitHub page. We have configured it here for full screen mode with a specific LAUNCH_URL which it loads on startup

Also, one of the issues we found is that if the vc4-fkms-v3d overlay is loaded we don’t seem to get audio out. You can remove this and then you do get audio!

Google

So the next question is… how can we easily create some content to display on this screen. As it is a web-browser we can display pretty much anything you can display on a normal PC but for small business we wanted a really straightforward way to manage slideshows. Enter Google Slides…

Evidently, we created a simple four slide Google Slides slideshow as you can see here:

Not everybody realises how easy it is to publish Google projects directly onto the web, and you can do this with your slideshow with File->Publish To the Web

We create an embedded link as shown on the left.

NB. We modified the HTML a little to remove the Google Slides notification bar:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSe4Xl9N9ZfXqC0wkIKCf8iFEvsklvPBMoaNO8boLQiWISafu1y2bOKIg7hWYvy1PA8WGSrPj79GOcn/embed?start=true&amp;rm=minimal&amp;loop=true&amp;delayms=10000" frameborder="0" width="1920" height="1080" allowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

So if you browse to this page you will see whatever the latest slideshow is!

See: https://www.williamsonsfamilybutchers.com/shop-display

And sure enough, when you boot up our Digital Marketing Display you see this slideshow!

Costs for the Digital Marketing Display

On the whole, the Bill of Materials so far for this project, excluding the actual display itself. It comes to about £106. This could be reduced by laser cutting the VESA mounting brackets and enclosure for the Raspberry Pi.

Introduction to Makefest

Hello everyone! We can officially call Makefest 2022 a complete success!

Firstly, Makefest gives us the brilliant opportunity to demonstrate our brilliant Kettle Companion product to a creative crowd of creators and great people.

Kettle Companion

As a matter of fact, you can see our Kettle Companion kit in action on the left!

The two mini kettles are known as our ‘ambient kettles’. These are the devices which indicate using an LED whether the kettle it is linked to has been boiled yet.

Red indicates that the kettle has not been boiled whereas green evidently indicates that it has!

This is signalled through a monitoring plug and communicated via Wi-Fi to a paired Kettle Companion in another user’s home. A text message alert can also be sent to the owner of this appliance if their Kettle Companion has turned red.

Fellow Creators and Makers from DoES & Merseyside

Plenty of our friends from DoES Liverpool were also in attendance and were able to showcase their creative skills!

Have a look at the pictures below for an idea of the inventions featured at Makefest from our friends at DoES.

Additionally, we would like to give a big thank you to everyone who visited our stand at Makefest yesterday as well as everyone who helped bring Makefest together this year.

Also, are looking forward to Makefest 2023 as we’ll have new and exciting projects to show you!

For more info please visit liverpoolmakefest.org

Lastly, click here to see more of our blog posts.

Getting our Swarm Kit back online!

Firstly, everyone at Dynamic Devices would like to give a massive thank you to Swarm.

Due to some of the terrible stormy weather in the UK, our previous Swarm kit suffered some damages!

However, the team at Swarm were kind enough to send out a replacement panel so we could get our Eval Kit back up and running (and connected to space).

What is Swarm?

According to Wikipedia,

 

“Swarm Technologies, Inc. is a private company building a low Earth orbit satellite constellation for communications with Internet Of Things (IoT) devices using a Store and forward design.”

How is this useful to us?

At Dynamic Devices, we are all about using the latest innovative technologies and pushing the boundaries of IoT devices.

We will be using the Swarm kit for experimenting with space telemetry and how IoT can be globally accessible, even in the most remote areas of the world.

Our Set Up

As of today, our Swarm kit is back online! With a new panel installed, we should see some results very soon. Please take a look at our kit below, and check back soon for more updates!

To learn more about Swarm you can visit there website.

Earlier, let you know that our CEO, Alex Lennon, was representing Dynamic Devices at the Yocto Project Summit 2022! Last week he presented his journey with “Yocto Layer CI Build and Test with GitHub Actions”.

For those of you who didn’t manage to attend the Yocto Summit his  presentation has now been uploaded to YouTube for all to see.

See the presentation here.

“The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded system deployments. Primarily, the systems are for connected edge devices, servers, or virtual environments, regardless of the hardware architecture.

As an open source project, the Yocto Project operates with a hierarchical governance structure based on meritocracy. This enables the project to remain independent of any one of its member organizations. Furthermore, our member organisations participate in various ways and provide resources to the project.“ – Yoctoproject.org

Please feel free to share Alex’s talk around the embedded space!

Also, If you would like to learn more about the Yocto Project, please visit https://www.yoctoproject.org/.

Additionally, If you want to watch more of the Yocto Project 2022 Summit, including Alex’s presentation, please visit the YouTube playlist.

Finally, if you’re interested in what Dynamic Devices has been up to recently, please visit our blog.