Cuno Pfister - Getting Started with the Internet of Things

The first part tells you how to set up the development environment and write and run a program. It shows how to write to output ports (for triggering so-called actuators such as LED lights or motors) and how to read from input ports (for sensors ). It then introduces the most essential concepts of the Internet of Things: HTTP and the division of labor between clients and servers. In the Internet of Things, devices are programmed as clients if you want them to push sensor data to some service; they are programmed as servers if you want to enable remote control of the device over the Web.

The second part focuses on examples that send HTTP requests to some servicese.g., to push new sensor measurements to the Pachube service ( http://www.pachube.com ) for storage and presentation.

The third part focuses on examples that handle incoming HTTP requests. Such a request may return a fresh measurement from a sensor, or may trigger an actuator. A suitable server-side library is provided in order to make it easier than ever to program a small device as a server.

This contains a simple test server that comes in handy for testing and debugging client programs.

This shows the .NET classes that are needed to implement all examples, and the namespaces and assemblies that contain them.

This summarizes the interface of the helper library Gsiot.Server that we use in .

Artists and designers

You need a prototyping platform that supports Internet connectivity, either to create applications made up of multiple communicating devices, or to integrate the World Wide Web into a project in some way. You want to turn your ideas into reality quickly, and you value tools that help you get the job done. Perhaps you have experience with the popular 8-bit Arduino platform ( http://www.arduino.cc/ ), and might even be able to reuse some of your add-on hardware (such as shields and breakout boards ) originally designed for Arduino.

Students and hobbyists

You want your programs to interact with the physical world, using mainstream tools. You are interested in development boards, such as the Netduino Plus, that do not cost an arm and a leg.

Software developers or their managers

You need to integrate embedded devices with web services and want to learn the basics quickly. You want to build up an intuition that ranges from overall system architecture to real code. Depending on your prior platform investments, you may be able to use the examples in this book as a starting point for feasibility studies, prototyping, or product development. If you already know .NET, C#, and Visual Studio, you can use the same programming language and tools that you are already familiar with, including the Visual Studio debugger.

To remain flexible, you want to choose between different boards from different vendors, allowing you to move from inexpensive prototypes to final products without having to change the software platform. To further increase vendor independence, you probably want to use open source platforms, both for hardware and software. To minimize costs, you are interested in a platform that does not require the payment of target royalties, i.e., per-device license costs.