Things Gateway 0.5 by Mozilla

Hi everyone,

I'm excited to share the news that Mozilla have announced the 0.5 release
<https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/08/things-gateway-0-5-features-experimental-smart-assistant>
of the Things Gateway <https://iot.mozilla.org/gateway/> today. This is an open
source implementation <https://github.com/mozilla-iot/gateway> of a Web of
Things gateway which bridges existing smart home devices using ZigBee,
Z-Wave, Bluetooth, HomeKit etc. to the Web of Things. The 0.5 release comes
with customizable things, actions & events, a powerful rules engine,
interactive floorplan, developer settings and an experimental smart
assistant UI.

As well as the more user-facing features, this release brings the gateway
implementation much closer to the latest Editor's Draft
<https://w3c.github.io/wot-thing-description/> of the Thing Description
specification.

It includes support for @context
<https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#context-member> and @type
<https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#type-member> annotations using an
experimental capability schema repository <https://iot.mozilla.org/schemas/>
(we hope to also eventually support shared repositories like iot.schema.org
once they become more mature).

It also supports a links <https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#links-member> member
for properties <https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#properties-resource> (so you
can get all property values at once), actions, events, custom HTML UIs and
WebSocket <https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#web-thing-websocket-api> endpoints.
It provides a UI for actions <https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#action-object>
and events <https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#event-object> and supports action
inputs and property <https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/#property-object> labels.

As well as bridging existing smart home devices to the Web of Things, the
gateway can discover what we call "native web things" which directly expose
a Thing Description, either by manually entering their URL or via a
Physical web beacon or mDNS broadcast. Those web things can be created
using Mozilla's Things Framework <https://iot.mozilla.org/things/> with
open source implementations for NodeJS
<https://github.com/mozilla-iot/webthing-node>, Python
<https://github.com/mozilla-iot/webthing-python>, Java
<https://github.com/mozilla-iot/webthing-java>, Rust
<https://github.com/mozilla-iot/webthing-rust>, Arduino
<https://github.com/mozilla-iot/webthing-arduino> (C++) and MicroPython
<https://github.com/mozilla-iot/webthing-upy>.

The current Web Thing API <https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/> the gateway
supports is documented online and we look forward to further converging
that with the Working Group's latest Thing Description draft. If you'd like
to do any interoperability testing then check out the instructions on the
wiki <https://github.com/mozilla-iot/wiki/wiki/Test-Gateway-Instance> to
find out how to use our live test instance
<https://w3c-interop.mozilla-iot.org> in the cloud.

You can find out more at iot.mozilla.org or find us on Discourse
<https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/iot> and Twitter
<https://twitter.com/MozillaIoT>.

Happy Hacking!

Ben