In today’s world, tasks have become more manageable for modern homeowners and business owners alike. Using mobile phones, anyone can turn on robot cleaners, regulate a room’s thermostat, lock doors, and adjust light bulbs for better brightness and ambiance.
Aside from communicating with your appliances and gadgets through your phone and smartwatch, these devices can talk to each other! A lock can signal a security camera to start recording when opened. The garden sprinklers can regulate the optimal amount of water depending on data they get from moisture sensors in the ground.
Creative Innovations
MQTT is known to be a de facto data transmission protocol for IoT. Therefore, one can use it to automate communication between IoT devices, such as a thermostat in your home and an app that manages temperature there. Pro Mosquitto MQTT broker is known to be a middleman between IoT devices and ensure smooth data transmission. For devs working on their smart home project, check the Mosquitto Docker guide and set up an MQTT broker for your project.
With unique configurations using underlying technologies like Mosquitto Message Queuing Telemetry Transport or Mosquitto MQTT (a message broker between smart devices), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Amazon’s Alexa, it’s now common to create better ‘triggers’ that provide convenience to the occupants of the house.
What Is IoT?
In general, IoT is a collection of web-based machines and devices connected to each other through a series of physical networks, communication protocols, and software. The smart home is one area of use. There are many other applications for IoT. You can find it in agriculture, supply chain management, logistics, transportation, urban management, business automation, manufacturing plants, and others.
Components Of An IoT System
The Internet of Things is a fascinating realm. It’s at the edge of computing technology and is a combination of many layers and components. But how do IoT devices talk to each other? The answer to this question depends on the industry in which the devices are used and the goal for their deployment. Still, how smart devices communicate can be summed up using these five segments:
- Physical Network – The bottom layer comprises the physical devices, like sensors, transponders, processors, and embedded chips in home appliances or industrial equipment.
- IoT Gateway – A gateway can be hardware, software, or both that connect the devices in an IoT system. It acts as a governing platform and connects everything to a central hub.
- IoT Platform – An IoT platform is another layer. Here’s where customization comes in. Depending on the system’s needs, it can have a cloud platform for sending sensor data to the cloud and a connectivity platform to ensure the different devices, often from different manufacturers, can share data among themselves. If needed, it can also employ an analytics platform for decision-making.
- Communication Standards – Communication standards or protocols are sets of rules created to make data transmission between devices easier. Usual examples are Ethernet for wired connection and Wi-Fi for wireless setups.
- Apps And Interfaces – Certain IoT devices will need to receive input or send output to or from a human user. For example, rental car companies that use AWS IoT FleetWise from Amazon Web Services can view each vehicle’s health by collecting data from embedded car sensors. Once this data is sorted and made human-readable, it’s sent to the cloud, where an analyst checks it using FleetWise’s interface.
Depending on the use case, an IoT system’s layers and components can be as complex as those of a rental car business or as simple as a vacuum cleaner connected to a speaker.
A Simple And Common Example
To take the vacuum cleaner-speaker example, iRobot’s Roomba is considered a smart cleaning appliance with different types of sensors to perform its task. On the other hand, the Echo Dot is a smart speaker capable of speech recognition (i.e., you can talk to it like how you communicate with other humans). Both are part of the physical network or physical devices mentioned previously. They’re separate from each other and have their own firmware.
What connects the two is Alexa Voice Service (AVS), or simply Alexa, a cloud-based IoT platform. It has pseudo IoT gateway capabilities because it can connect other smart devices to the cloud and to each other. The usual communication protocol for this setup is Wi-Fi because the app or interface is accessed using a Wi-Fi-enabled phone.
But you don’t need the phone to give the cue. When you voice ‘Alexa, send Roomba to vacuum the kitchen,’ the smart speaker will receive your instructions and prompt Alexa to wake up. Alexa, in turn, sends the command to the cloud via the Wi-Fi router.
Once Alexa has retrieved spatial data pertaining to ‘the kitchen’ and specialized commands called ‘skills,’ it connects to your vacuum cleaner via the same communication channel. The Roomba will comply and clean the kitchen floor. Once it’s done, it’ll alert you via phone notification.
In Conclusion
The Internet of Things is an area of active research and work. It encompasses many industries and has uses in many aspects of life. Current use cases can be found primarily in developed countries. But because the IoT is a beneficial system, the adoption rates in other regions are promising.
