According to Wikipedia, IoT is a network of physical objects or things embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and connectivity. These things interoperate within the existing Internet infrastructure. They achieve greater value and service by exchanging data with the manufacturer, operator, and/or connected devices.
Properties of things involved in IoT:
- They are physical objects with input (sensors) and/or output (actuators). They interact with the physical world.
- They have connectivity to the Internet or local connectivity via Ethernet, Bluetooth, GSM, Wi-Fi, or any RF transreceiver.
- They exchange data with Internet websites or cloud or other things. Often this data is available to the end-user via smartphone, tablet, or PC.
- They have some kind of unique ID like IP address, RFID, or QR code.
- They do have small software logic that they follow. Once set up, almost no physical human interaction is involved.
- Set of interrelated things form a system, for example, a traffic control system gets formed by smart traffic cameras, smart road notice boards, servers that collect data from traffic cameras to display traffic information on smart road notice boards. IoT is a system of such systems.
You can think of IoT as a human body. There are five senses—light by eyes, sound by ears, touch by skin, smell by nose, and taste by tongue. Human actuators are sound generation by various parts of the mouth, movement of various body parts by muscles, various biochemical changes by controlling glands, and many more. The human body has a respiratory system, digestive system, muscular system, skeletal system, circulatory system. These systems exchange information with the centralized brain via nerves. A human body is a system of these systems. All these systems work together to achieve our living.
BeagleBone is a natural choice for the IoT developer. It is small in size. It has a built-in Ethernet port unlike regular microcontroller boards. The USB port on BeagleBone allows you to attach Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or any RF USB adapter to have that connectivity. It has lots of GPIO pins, analog control pins and buses to talk with sensors, and actuators. It needs less electrical power to operate than a regular PC. The BeagleBone CPU is powerful enough for lots of processing. It has a full-fledged Debian Linux running that supports lots of programming languages and many softwares including various server software. You can conduct moderate data processing, storage-retrieval using database software, and data analysis locally inside BeagleBone. There is no need for extra server machines for this. Kernel, bootloader, rootfs—all software is open source. That means software can be modified to individual needs. Even hardware design files are open source. Anybody can modify those to implement his/her custom IoT solution. All these benefits make BeagleBone the perfect candidate for IoT. With all this theory considered, let's move to write a few IoT programs using BeagleBone. IoT products can be classified based on scope into smart wearable, smart home, smart city, smart environment, smart enterprise. All the exercises in this book fall into the smart home category.