Sensor applications expand to the home

Swiss-based u-blox, developer of wireless communications and positioning semiconductors and modules for the industrial, automotive and consumer markets, provided the winning hardware platform to Team ‘Car Bon’ at the recent AT&T Mobile App Hackathon held at this year’s CTIA Supermobility Show in Nevada.

At the Hackathon, developers built apps that focused on connected vehicle and home automation with over $100,000 in prizes awarded to the winning teams.

This year’s winner in the category Home Automation was team CarBon, who developed a sensor application that detects dangerous levels of carbon monoxide in a home garage, automatically informs the owner, remotely switches off the car engine and opens the garage door to vent the poisonous gas. The team was awarded the grand prize of $10,000 for their potentially life-saving application.

The app was developed using u-blox’s AT&T certified LISA-U2 2G/3G cellular modem technology and the company’s C027 Internet-of-Things starter kit that allows quick prototyping of location-aware, wirelessly connected applications. The C027 is supported by the powerful and flexible open-source ARM mbed development platform which provides free software libraries, hardware designs and online tools for professional and rapid prototyping of ARM-based designs.