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Last Tuesday, 300 participants came together in San Jose for the third annual edition of Mbed Connect, Arm's developer conference. With nine technical sessions, nine workshops and 990 beverages consumed this was our biggest US event to date. If you were present, we hope that you learned a ton from our speakers, workshop organizers and the other attendees; if you weren't present, we've gathered the best resources from the day in this blog post.

Also: you're not too late to register for Mbed Connect China (next Monday) or Mbed Connect Japan (5 December) yet!

Johan Stokking giving his keynote at Mbed Connect 2018

The Day

Ever seen a hundred developers standing in line? We have! Our workshops proved very popular, and a huge queue formed to sign up for them. And no surprise with a great mix of new technologies, showcases by our partners, and practical development skills. One workshop proved so popular that we had to run it three(!) times. If you couldn't make it to your favourite workshop we're sorry, we'll schedule even more workshops next year!

Busy tables at the workshops

Fortunately, we also had a great track with technical presentations running in parallel. The day started with a fantastic keynote by Abhinav Khusraj, CEO of Petasense talking about industrial IoT and predictive maintenance. Johan Stokking, CTO of The Things Network, continued in the industrial direction with a talk about scaling your LPWAN deployment. Two great sessions by technical founders to show that IoT is real.

After lunch Bartek Szatkowski, the new tech lead for Mbed OS, led us through the past, present and future of Mbed OS. Did you know that every Mbed OS release now is tested for over 40,000 hours on real hardware?! Dan Shemesh, CTO and co-founder of Jumper then showed us that that might not even be necessary, showing their emulation technology for continuous integration of IoT device software on virtual devices.

Damon Civin showing the various parts that make up an end-to-end data science solution

After that we went into the machine learning segment. Neil Tan, tech lead for uTensor demonstrated how we can run TensorFlow models on Mbed-enabled development boards (with a demo of a self-balancing robot). Damon Civin, our lead data scientist and my partner in crime at Data Science Africa (here's a blog post), showed the 'other side' of IoT, and had some fantastic stories about llamas being mistaken for giraffes.

After some well deserved coffee, we had a session by Hannes Tschofenig about the role of standards in IoT, and especially about the secure device access work in the IETF. Then Andy Frame continued the security angle with a talk about real attacks on IoT systems, showing how hackers target IoT devices and what we need to do to prevent it. The day was closed with Martin Kojtal talking about the new low power APIs in Mbed OS. With the introduction of tickless mode and the sleep manager Mbed OS devices can now automatically go into sleep and deepsleep modes without any developer interference.

Yours truly opening Mbed Connect

Reading material

If you want to relive the day, here's some reading material:

If Abhinav Khushraj's and Neil Tan's sessions have gotten you excited about Machine Learning on the edge, then it's time to take out your development board and start with a uTensor tutorial. The uTensor GitHub page has a quick start, the MNIST demo, and an ADL example available.

Damon Civin spoke about Data Science Africa, for an in-depth background into the conference, read his excellent write-up. To see all the code that was deployed in the field, find the article on the Mbed blog.

The importance of device management and firmware updates came back in a wide variety of sessions, including the ones from Johan Stokking and Hannes Tschofenig. To get started with Arm Pelion - Arm's device management platform - and Mbed OS, head over to the Pelion Quickstart.

Johan Stokking also spoke about The Things Network and LoRaWAN. If that has gotten you thrilled about community networks, we have a guide on building your own LoRa network and devices using Mbed OS and The Things Network.

Also see our introduction to test automation with Jumper, Arm's Platform Security Architecture (PSA), and the Mbed OS docs, with plenty of details about the roadmap and low-power design.

China and Japan

Missed Mbed Connect US? There's two more opportunities to learn everything about the present and future of IoT… Mbed Connect China (next Monday) and Mbed Connect Japan (5 December) are still on the agenda, so sign up now!

Hope to see you all in 2019!

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Jan Jongboom is a Developer Evangelist for the IoT at Arm and he slept 12 hours after the event.