Internet Of Things..!!

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings together devices, sensors, data and the cloud. Unlike a computer or tablet, IoT devices can access specific hardware like lights, sensors and motors. This lets you build both fun projects and professional devices.

Before developing any project, what we need is an Idea. The ideas come, when we have already identified problems and are designing the solutions. The solutions that are connecting the internet with any sort of things, are the IoT solutions.

Microcontrollers are the backbone of any IoT project. Some of the easily available microcontrollers are Arduino (Uno/Nano/Mega), Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi zero, Raspberry Pi 3 etc. From Texas Instruments, we have MSP430G2553, MSP430F5529 and MSP430FR5969. To get started, we can use Arduino Uno/Nano or MSP430F5529.

Then comes the Sensors. Sensors are to be chosen as per the need of our project. For example, a car accident can be detected using an Accelerometer (a sensor), whereas location can be detected by a GPS sensor.

Thus, with the help of microcontrollers and sensors, a simple embedded project can be developed. Let us assume we want to develop a project that demonstrates how to control an Arduino from an app running on our phone. It fetches our GPS coordinates, gets forecast from the National Weather Service and presents that information via animation on our picture.

Now, this project requires Arduino Uno, GPS and Cloud. Why Cloud? Because there are over a lakh cities and villages all over the nation. Thus, our database is too large and cannot be stored in phone or microcontroller. Thus, we access the data of required place from internet (Cloud). In this project, we can however use data sent by some satellite, but many of the times we might want to create our own database, and it is always good to upload them over the cloud.

The IoT is the field with large scopes as it has the flavor of Electronics with Information Technology and Computer Science. Everyday hundreds of developers are creating hundreds of IoT products.