In the previous sections, we looked at the basics of achieving IoT prototyping with the Arduino platform and an IoT cloud platform. With this basic knowledge, you are encouraged to start exploring more advanced IoT scenarios. As a future inspiration, the following smart retail project idea is being provided for you to try by applying the basic principles that you have learned in this book. After all, the goal of this book has been to show you the light and make you self-reliant with the Arduino platform.

Imagine a large retail store where products are displayed in hundreds of aisles and thousands of racks. Such large warehouse-type retail layouts are common in some countries, usually with furniture sellers. One of the time-consuming tasks that these retail shops face is to keep the price of their displayed inventory matched with the ever changing competitive market rates. For example, the price of a sofa set could be marked at 350 dollars on aisle number 47 rack number 1.

Now let's think from a customer's perspective. Imagine being a potential customer, standing in front of the sofa set; we would naturally search for the prices of that sofa set on the internet. It would not be very surprising to find a similar sofa set that is priced a little lower, maybe at 325 dollars at another store. That is exactly how and when a potential customer would change her mind. The story after this is simple. The customer leaves store A, goes to store B, and purchases the sofa set at 325 dollars.

In order to address these types of lost sale opportunities, the furniture company management decides to lower the prices of the sofa set to 325 dollars, in order to match the competition. Thereafter, all that needs to be done is for someone to change the price label for the sofa set in aisle number 47 rack number 1, which is a 5-10 minute walk (considering the size of the shop floor) from the shop back office. In a localized store, it is still achievable without further loss of customers.

Now, let's appreciate the problem by thinking hyperscale. The furniture seller's management is located centrally, say in Sweden, and they want to dynamically change the product prices for specific price-sensitive products that are displayed across more than 350 stores, in more than 40 countries. The price change should be automatic, near real time, and simultaneous across all company stores.

Given the preceding problem statement, it seems a daunting task that could leave hundreds for shop floor staff scampering all day long, just to keep changing price tags for hundreds of products. An elegant solution to this problem lies in the Internet-of-Things.

Referring to the preceding figure, it depicts a basic IoT solution for addressing the furniture seller's problem to matching product prices dynamically on the fly. Remember, since this is an Arduino prototyping book, the stress is on edge device prototyping. However, IoT as a whole encompasses many areas that include edge devices and cloud platform capabilities. Our focus in this section is to be able to comprehend and build the edge device prototype that supports this smart retail IoT solution.

In the preceding solution, the cloud platform takes care of running intelligent program batches to continuously analyze market rates for price-sensitive products. Once a new price has been determined by the cloud job/program, the new product prices are updated in the cloud-hosted database. Immediately after a new price change, all the IoT edge devices attached to the price tag of specific products in the company stores are notified of the new price.

Utilizing the knowledge that we gained in Chapter 6, Day 4 - Building a Standalone Device, we can build a smart LCD panel for displaying product prices. For internet connectivity, we can reuse the ESP8266 Wi-Fi chip that we learned in this chapter. Taking the LCD wiring described in Chapter 6, Day 4 - Building a Standalone Device simply merge the ESP8266 wiring described in this chapter.