Development of Ukrainian programmers from the company Fractal Tools will soon become available for students of the DOED Department
Fractal Tools is an IoT environment for designing smart home, home automation. Students will be able to work with 10 development licenses and get access to modern IT technologies.
The Ukrainian Fractal Tools team is engaged in a product in the field of IoT. But it does NOT just another “smart” gadget, but a designer for such devices. Rather, it is a hybrid of the designer and the IoT platform. According to the founders of the company, with the help of this service, people without programming skills will be able to create IoT solutions of any complexity. This startup was a member of the Ukrainian pavilion at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Co-founder Evgeny Lokhmatov and Sergey Kornienko met at the robotic forum and started working on the project at the end of 2015. Lokhmatov, project CEO, previously worked as a project manager and manager in IT companies. Kornienko took the place of the STO project. Before that, he worked with civil and military IoT systems.
The lack of simple and affordable solutions became the impetus for the creation of Fractal Tools: designers like Visuino and Labview and IoT platforms, such as Buddy and Amazon AWS, were already on the market, but it was difficult and long to work with them.
In early 2016, the project participated in the IoT Hub acceleration program, received angel investments from Roman Kravchenko, traveled to Silicon Valley at the Traction Camp AgTech Silicon Valley Tour, then exhibited in the Ukrainian pavilion TechCrunch Disrupt. The EGAP Challenge incubation program is underway.
The user of Fractal using the service can set the logic of the microcontrollers, combine them in the network, connect mobile and web applications to them, connect AI elements, etc. Fractal is responsible for the interaction between hardware and software, firmware devices, the server part, etc. The cost of service for users is $ 1 per month for each connected microcontroller. If paid services are connected, like AI-elements, they are included in the price.
To understand how the service works, imagine a person who wanted to create a smart home with voice control through a microphone. He buys the right devices (controls based on Arduino or Raspberry PI, LED-lamp, motor for an automatic cat feeder, drive for the door, etc.). After the equipment is installed in the right places and connected to the network, software is needed for it. At this point, you can use the Fractal constructor, where the management of all elements is represented as simple squares and connections.
After the user has set the logic of the system operation with small squares and clicked “Start”, the connected microcontroller receives the generated firmware code, and the devices start working according to the specified voice commands.
Now the service is preparing to launch a beta version, the startup team already has 15 people. The first customers are already there: for example, a greenhouse complex near Kiev. For him created a system that determines the humidity, lighting, temperature, necessary for greenhouse crops. All this without human intervention. The development of the system took several weeks, the cost of starting one greenhouse is about $ 1,500. After the release, the team hopes to reduce the launch time to 1 day.
Students’ acquaintance with this platform will allow you to master the approaches to designing and develop modern IoT solutions.
