IoT DIY: A Round-Up of SDKs for IoT and Wearables

It's fairly clear that not everybody agrees on how to define the Internet of Things, but certain aspects are more generally agreed upon. For example, DIY computing (along the lines of Raspberry Pi) is opening up in a big way because of the growth of IoT, allowing developers to solve a lot of new problems in new spaces and think outside of the box a bit. To illustrate that point, Sunanda Jayanth at Contract IQ has assembled a round-up of SDKs for IoT and wearable devices.

The list covers six SDKs, each with a brief description:

• Google’s Android Wear SDK
• Samsung’s Tizen SDK
• IBM + Libelium
• WunderBar by relayr
• Microsoft Windows on Devices
• u-blox + ARM

Some of these SDKs - Windows on Devices, for example - are not available quite yet, but have been announced and are coming soon. Beyond the round-up, Jayanth warns of possible hurdles for IoT, despite the bright future:

At the stage of growth that IoT is in right now, incumbents are in danger of stifling growth simply by accidentally introducing complexity. If your things and my things have to talk together, we need a common language. A rapid development and uptake of common platforms and standards that encourages seamless cooperation is what the industry is in dire need of.

But the solution Jayanth suggests, is open source software. Industry-wide standards for architecture and APIs could help prevent these problems, and developers taking advantage of these new SDKs and growing a community - an open source community, ideally - around these new technologies could go a long way to keeping things orderly in the future.

That, and making sure we don't end up with mountains of bug-ridden, unkillable IoT devices.