Embedded system deployment and showcase service on a marketplace

Abstract

Many innovative projects are started and prototyped by students in COSIS and CEDATE every year. These projects have been motivated by community, research, and commercial problems and thus provide early-stage solutions. However, taking early-stage technologies to market can be a time-consuming and expensive proposition. This explains the fact that when student teams present the technical proof of concepts as prototypes, a majority of the projects are abandoned by the teams and left to die permanently. These prototypes are merely proof of concepts and are no near adoption and commercialization in as much as they are innovative. The initial work on this innovative marketplace was started in 2018 and it is on-going and expected to mature in 2021. This marketplace is novel in the sense that it will be the first of a kind that will host a variety of software artifacts in the prototype phase, software architectures, it will host innovative computing algorithms that have been developed by the researchers in Makerere University and it will host artifacts that will be used to reassemble innovative embedded systems. This project is aimed at creating a web-based marketplace for IoT projects that need funding, collaborators, interested buyers, and technical advice in form of feedback from people who are interested in these projects and devices once deployed.