IOT 101

We’ve been writing about WiFi in IoT connectivity post, but what I’ve noticed lately is that everybody is talking about the NB-IoT, LTE-M, LoRa, Sigfox or BLE, ZigBee, Z-Wave - so I wonder, what’s happening with the good old WiFi?   As written in our earlier post, WiFi in it’s latest ac version can provide more than 1 Gbps, but the range is limited to typically 100 meters, even less than this indoors. Additionally, there are new WiFi standards developed for IoT: WiFi HaLow (802.11ah) published in Q4 2017 and HEW (802.11ax) that’s expected to be finalized in 2019. For…

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…

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…

Introduction and IoT ecosystem Before writing about any IoT platform, a few words must be said about IoT platforms in general. There are several definitions available so I will try to simplify my view about it. In each case before even talking about IoT platforms, one must first define what is the IoT ecosystem (or IoT stack, IoT  architecture…) and where does IoT platform fits inside this ecosystem. IoT ecosystem in most cases consists of four major components: Things (hardware) are devices in the form of sensors (for temperature, pollution…) that collect data from the environment or in the form…