Okos Polip was built from the ground up as a passion project with a single focus: making device state ingest easy. The project started as a way for me, Curt, to build something for my hobby automation projects that I could deploy on a Linux PC in Python as easily as a C program running on an ESP8266.
Exploring the landscape of competitors, there seems to be a notion of more is better. More features, end-to-end solutions, pre-built KPI dashboards, overly prescriptive typing, specific OS constraints, etc.
End-to-end solutions are great for a quick-and-dirty prototype but what happens when the next supply chain disruption occurs? Prescriptive type definitions are great until your project dares to innovate outside of the narrow vision of a standards body. I wanted to build something à la carte with a clean separation of concerns.
Users should be able to adopt Okos Polip into their project easily and more importantly leave Okos Polip at any time. Hard vendor lock-ins are an anti-pattern.
Team
Curt Henrichs – Founder
Responsible for backend service development, application development, and general operations. Background is in embedded systems development and human-robot interaction.
Jaimish Ashar – Contract Frontend Developer
Frontend React developer responsible for implementation of dashboard and digital twin GUI. Experienced full-stack web developer.
Timeline
Okos Polip was started in 2022 as a quick-and-dirty prototype to link an Alexa skill lambda with an ESP8266 hacked air filter. Soon after, its design evolved to support a digital twin interface; generalizing the underlying device ingest service. Three client libraries (Arduino C++, Python, and Javascript) were developed along with wrappers for Python ROS support and Typescript web support.
By end of 2023, device ingest model, service infrastructure, authentication and user account logic were implemented. State API and Factory API were still in progress.
Currently (April 2024), State API is taking shape for generalized access to arbitrary device state.
End-of-year target to release alpha factory dashboard as well as write several awesome example docs.
Future Vision
Looking forward, Okos Polip is set to evolve and grow. First by expanding our tools with the upcoming Factory dashboard. We are also playing around with integrating LLMs into the dashboard for device type development. Hopefully making our platform easy-to-use while keeping a high degree of powerful customized semantics. Our goal is to make a single-focused device-to-cloud software layer that equips you to tackle any project with creativity and ease.