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Kaa, the open source IoT middleware platform, is at the Samsung (News - Alert) Developer Conference in San Francisco, and the company has announced that it will join Samsung’s growing Artik development community. The Artik processor group was announced in March, and is a key element in Samsung’s IoT strategy. Kaa will be working with the three new Samsung Artik processors using its platform.

It looks like IoT is the biggest story coming out of the Conference, with more than a dozen sessions and demonstrations across Samsung’s mobile, Smart TV, wearables, virtual reality, health and medical technologies. The new family of processors is designed specifically for the IoT, with its small size and brutal power, Samsung is trying to show that Artik can power everything from servers to sensors, smartphones to drones and wearables, in industrial and consumer settings.

The smallest module is the Artik 1, designed for small low-power devices, and will reportedly cost under $10. The ARTIK 5 is about an inch square, and designed to power devices like smartwatches and drones. It has a 1GHz dual-core processor, 512 MB of DRAM and 4 GB of flash memory and has Wi-Fi, bluetooth and video encoding capabilities. The ARTIK 10 will power devices like smartphones and home servers with greater requirements for computing resources. With 2 GB of DRAM and 16GB of flash memory this module includes Wi-Fi, bluetooth and HD video, and is expected to cost under $100.

Of course, Artik-powered smart devices can pair with the Samsung SmartThings Open Cloud, a service available to developers who use the Artik modules, so they can more easily create applications. And that is the part of the ecosystem where the Kaa platform gets its open source middleware into play.