Charles Bell - Beginning IoT Projects: Breadboard-less Electronic Projects

Much has been written about the Internet of Things (IoT). Some sources are more about promoting IoT as their latest innovation (that costs more money); other sources seem to suggest IoT is something everyone needs or be left behind in the dust of antiquity.

Fortunately, books and similar media avoid the sales pitch to expand on the science and technology for implementing and managing the data for IoT, while other texts concentrate on the future or the inevitable evolution of our society as we become more connected to the world around us each and every day. However, you need not dive into such tomes or be able to recite rhetoric to get started with the IoT. In fact, through the efforts of many companies, you can explore the IoT without intensive training or expensive hardware and software.

However, most publications That is, until now.

In this book, we will explore how to build IoT solutions using a series of basic projects without the need to learn the difference between a diode and a resistor . In fact, we will be using two modular platforms that you can connect to your host board without the need to wire anything together! This is accomplished by using a special adapter board/shield for your device that permits you to connect to modules that include sensors, displays, switches, and more!

However, before we get into the details of devices, boards, modules, etc., lets take a moment and learn what the Internet of Things is and what sort of solutions are classified as IoT projects.

So what is this IoT? While it is true that the IoT employs technology and techniques that already exist, the way they are employed, coupled with the ability to access the solution from anywhere in the world, makes the IoT an exciting concept to explore. Now lets discuss what the IoT is.

The essence of the IoT is simply interconnected devices that generate and exchange data from observations, facts, and other data, making it available to anyone youd like only yourself or immediate family or share it with the world. While there seem to be some marketing efforts attempting to make anything connected to the Internet an IoT solution or device (not unlike the shameless labeling of everything cloud), IoT solutions are designed to make our knowledge of the world around us timelier and more relevant by making it possible to get data about anything from anywhere at any time.

As you can imagine, if we were to connect every device around us to the Internet and make sensory data available for those devices, it is clear there would be potential for the number of IoT devices to exceed the human population of the planet and for the data generated to rapidly exceed the capabilities of all but the most sophisticated database systems. These concepts are commonly known as addressability and big data, which are two of the most active and debated topics in IoT. But dont worry about these terms I mention them here for completeness and possibly to pique your interest. You can read more about these issues at your leisure.

However, the IoT is all about understanding the world around us. That is, we can leverage the data to make our world and our understanding of it better.