If you are a practitioner within the tech industry, the term Internet of Things (IoT) should not sound foreign to you. With the growing reliance of industries on the power of the internet, the web of IoT continues to expand. We now see it everywhere around us, even if we sometimes do not realize it.
IoT, through its various implementations such as real-time sensor data retrieval and automated task execution based on this data, plays a pivotal role in the development of smart cities. These systems, equipped with numerous sensors, take action when specific thresholds are exceeded, demonstrating IoT’s profound impact on our urban landscape, which is increasingly evident all around us.
In this chapter, we will explore IoT in your everyday life, how it contributes to the bigger picture of its ever-expanding ecosystem, and how to understand the architecture and hardware that make it up. As part of this, you will learn how to create simple systems diagrams for designing IoT architecture, build your own repository to store these solutions, and write code for a temperature sensor practical exercise. You will also be seeing the big picture of how component-based IoT is; that is, how small subsets of the architecture make up the larger implementations of it. These will be the foundational building blocks of designing industry-grade, complex systems, which we will build up in the later chapters of the book.
In this chapter, we will look to discuss the following main topics:
What is IoT?
Setting up the development environment of the book
Choosing between IoT hardware
Designing a simple IoT system diagram
Defining systems and processes for smart objects
Practical – creating a mini weather station
Technical requirements
Despite there being no technical requirements in particular, general knowledge of microcontrollers and networking technology would be helpful. As we will be working with microcontrollers, it would also be great to know some foundational C++. C++ is a powerful language that is used in many low-level environments, and it is an especially powerful language for building IoT systems. Because of this, the book’s hardware-based exercises are all based on C++. If you are not familiar with ++C, that’s alright, as we will explain what is happening in every part of the code and allow you to get familiarized with this language.
For this chapter, you can obtain all the code that will be used at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/IoT-Made-Easy-for-Beginners/tree/main/Chapter01. All code that is used throughout this book will be in their corresponding chapters within the IoT-Made-Easy-for-Beginners repository.
We recommend looking up any technical concepts that you do not understand, though we will keep it as foundational as possible to allow you to build up on the foundations from here.