All posts – Page 10

IoT connectivity suitable for SCADA systems?

So, we have already been writing about IoT connectivity, but I wanted to investigate if there’s solution suitable for existing SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems. I’ll be focusing on wireless connectivity of SCADA systems for critical utility services that we take for granted, but without them we couldn’t live on a today's standards, like for example water, electricity, oil and gas. SCADA systems for controlling and monitoring of water, electricity, oil, gas are pretty much mature, stable systems and they support usage of different wireless connectivity solutions. In today's businesses, everybody is looking for a way to optimize…

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July 29, 2018

All posts / IOT 101

Node-RED great visual tool for easy programming of IoT projects

Introduction Node-RED is an open source visual tool for wiring physical and digital world hence an ideal tool for developing IoT projects. IoT projects are most often quite complex since they need to combine different devices, APIs and one or many other services for the integrated solution. The idea behind Node-RED is to create and manipulate different streams of events from the both physical and/or digital world even if you are not a programmer. For more complex projects and specific requirements Node-RED does require some coding knowledge but even for these situations it greatly simplifies the whole process. Node-RED started…

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July 29, 2018

All posts / IoT news

NEWS: Choosing the right microcontroller for your IoT project

When we talk about things in the IoT world, we not only talk about sensors or actuators, we are actually talking about smart objects that are effectively microcontrollers with Internet connectivity. The difference between a microcontroller and microprocessor is the fact that microprocessor is more powerful and general purpose, and microcontrollers are slower, cheaper, purposely made hence they include memory and input/output peripherals so effectively small complete systems. Good comparison can be found here. When choosing a microcontroller some of the options are: number of bits, quantity of RAM and flash memory, number of GPIO pins, type of connectivity, power…

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July 26, 2018

All posts / IOT 101 / IoT news

NEWS: LoRa vs SigFox news note and SigFox problems

Although I have already wrote about connectivity options for IoT systems and also about Lora vs SigFox, here I would like to link to another very good and brief article from Link-labs. The article compares SigFox and LoRa, two of the most prominent players in the unlicensed LPWAN market. SigFox chips and modules are made by several manufacturers and they are quite low cost, but the network and backend is totally owned by SigFox or the appointed SigFox operator which is good since allows roaming and bad since you have only one option. On the other hand LoRa is made…

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July 23, 2018

All posts / IOT 101

Arduino development platform for your Io(T) things

Introduction Arduino is one a well known open source microcontroller systems, software platform and community of people that are interested in developing their own (DIY) projects. A lot of people think that this platform is used only by hobbyists and amateurs when starting their electronics journey, to blink LEDs or control motors, but actually Arduino is nowadays used to build a lot more professional projects, build 3D printers, build drones and especially it is used more and more in IoT while it’s gaining such a momentum. Regarding IoT the biggest benefit is rapid prototyping of projects from the initial idea…

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July 22, 2018

All posts / IOT 101

What is NB-IoT?

NB-IoT stands for “NarrowBand Internet of Things” and it’s low power wide area (LPWA) cellular radio access technology standardized by 3GPP with aim to enable a wide range of IoT devices and services. 3GPP has defined a set of frequency bands for NB-IoT use: Release 13 list consists of bands: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 26, 28, 66 and Release 14 added the bands: 11, 25, 31, 70 and by Release 15 we’ll have additional bands: 4, 14, 71. There are three deployment modes specified by 3GPP: LTE in-band mode, LTE guard-band mode and…

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July 17, 2018