Helium's Smart IoT Sensor Kit Gets A Ship Date

Smart sensor start-up Helium will begin shipping development kits for its programmable IoT platform in February, the company confirmed at CES today. Dubbed the Helium Sensor Development Kit, it's expected to make industrial and enterprise monitoring more straightforward, with a software-defined, field-programmable sensor.

Along with the sensor itself, the kit includes a new extensible daughtercard, along with access to a new set of web APIs. The latter are intended to more rapidly bridge Helium sensors with existing production services using REST-based endpoints.

Helium came out of stealth running back in October 2015, looking to shake up the sensor market with a heavily-customizable, multi-functional platform.

Rather than demanding each sensor be equipped with its own, custom software – something both expensive and time-consuming, at first deployment and should any changes be required down the line – the Helium sensors can be remotely reconfigured through a simple web interface.

That same interface also offers full access to any data collected by an attached probe – whether that's a door being open, temperature, or something else – and the sensor's own status, like battery life.

NOW READ: How Helium will be "the Android of IoT"

Meanwhile, a new mobile app for iOS – with an Android version in the pipeline – offers the same sort of remote control and monitoring, but from a phone instead.

Pricing for the Helium Sensor Development Kit is yet to be confirmed, but it'll ship out next month.

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