An Introduction to IoT Architecture, Hardware, and Real-Life Applications

If you are a practitioner within the tech industry, the term Internet of Things (IoT) should not sound foreign to you. With the growing reliance of industries on the power of the internet, the web of IoT continues to expand. We now see it everywhere around us, even if we sometimes do not realize it.

IoT, through its various implementations such as real-time sensor data retrieval and automated task execution based on this data, plays a pivotal role in the development of smart cities. These systems, equipped with numerous sensors, take action when specific thresholds are exceeded, demonstrating IoT’s profound impact on our urban landscape, which is increasingly evident all around us.

In this chapter, we will explore IoT in your everyday life, how it contributes to the bigger picture of its ever-expanding ecosystem, and how to understand the architecture and hardware that make it up. As part of this, you will learn how to create simple systems diagrams for designing IoT architecture, build your own repository to store these solutions, and write code for a temperature sensor practical exercise. You will also be seeing the big picture of how component-based IoT is; that is, how small subsets of the architecture make up the larger implementations of it. These will be the foundational building blocks of designing industry-grade, complex systems, which we will build up in the later chapters of the book.

In this chapter, we will look to discuss the following main topics:

• What is IoT?
• Setting up the development environment of the book
• Choosing between IoT hardware
• Designing a simple IoT system diagram
• Defining systems and processes for smart objects
• Practical – creating a mini weather station