CES 2018 Jan 9-12th, 2018 – Part I

In the week of Jan 8th, 2018, Classmethod Canada attended the Consumer Electronics Show,  CES 2018 hosted by Consumer Technology Association (CTA) in Las Vegas, Nevada. We exhibited at the Canada ICT booth for 2 days, attended Amazon Alexa workshops, and visited the amazing Amazon Smart Life RoadShow.

The conference took place at Las Vegas Convention and World Trade Center (LVCC), with 11 exhibition venues in meetings rooms and hospitality suites located on The Strip. The venues were categorized in 3 geographical locations, namely Tech East, Tech West (The Venetian/Palazzo Sands Expo), and Tech South (ARIA).

We shared a booth at the Westgate ballroom, Tech East, with other Canadian exhibitors and ICT West. We prepared a little gadget to demonstrate our IoT solution using SORACOM cellular sim network to send real time data from an ultrasonic distance sensor to the SORACOM Harvest data visualization console. This was how our setup at the booth look like:

A number of people approached us and ask whether we are smart cities solution provider, some thought we were  education company. Most people were attracted by our distance sensor demo. Basically, we connected an ultrasound sensor to Raspberry Pi, and read the GPIO pin to measure distance using ultrasound travel speed. Then using the python script from SORACOM Harvest tutorial real time distance data were sent to SORACOM console.

This is the real time data shown on Raspberry Pi

This is the SORACOM Harvest Data console:

It was a successful exhibition and we were approached by business owners and media, as well as government personnels.

Now, let's look at other cool exhibitions at CES2018.

TOSHIBA Symbio, a smart home solution that has security camera, smart speaker, and smart home hub, all control with a single Toshiba Smart Home App. It's voice-controlled with Amazon Alexa.

808 Alexa Voice Service Speaker features high quality speaker and music streaming. 

Panasonic Living Space Autonomous Cabin

Hisense Amazon Alexa-enabled TV

OMRON VOR technology sensing movements to detect early signs of drowsiness and prevent car accident.

OMRON FORPHEUS, the ping-pong player robot.

It was an eye opening experience and I will wrap up my first post with a beautiful Las Vegas sunset. Stay tone for my next blog posts on Amazon workshops and the amazing Intel & Alexa Smart Life Roadshow. (P.S. the white circle is a CES logo balloon)