Internet of Things

(IoT)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Khalid Al-Hussaini

Mechatronics Engineering
Engineering Faculty/Thamar Uni.
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The Internet of Things has become a very widely

spread concept in the last few years. The reason for
this is mainly the need to computerize and control
most of the surrounding objects and have access to
data in real time. Think about parking sensors, about
phones which can check the weather and so on.

The Internet of Things represents the whole way

from collecting data, processing it, taking an action
corresponding to the signification of this data to
storing everything in the cloud. All this is made
possible by the internet.
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Let's take sensors as an example, they collect data

and send it to a processing device, which will
perform the convenient actions. Then, the data will
be stored locally and, by using the internet, it is
subsequently sent out to the cloud. The problem
here is that the data stored in the cloud is
sometimes not useful. There is not enough local
processing happening before data is saved in the
cloud.
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The ideal scenario towards which the Internet of

Things is headed, would be to have a computer
store data locally, process it, check for
abnormalities or search for relevant segments and
upload only this information to the cloud. This
concept is called either Edge, according to Intel, or
fog computing as stated by Cisco, implying what
happens before the cloud.
The IoT is involved in medicine, agriculture or
transportation due to sensors and cloud storage.
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IoT Stack
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They transform analog data given from scanning the

environment to digital data, but they merely do any
processing. On the bright side, they don't consume much
power and can live on batteries for a long time. Sensors
are present in everyday life more than you would expect.
They improve industry, agriculture, homes, transportation
or smart phones for example. They are tools which help
monitoring the environment, collecting data about it and,
with the help of computers, acting accordingly.
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Local processing devices are the second level and

third in IoT. At this point, data is locally stored and
processed, ideally not sent forwards unless relevant.
This part is explained in detail in the hardware section,
as said devices are nothing more than microcontrollers
and embedded boards, which handle the data they
receive from the sensors.
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• There is hardware which connects to the previously

described devices, pulls out data and sends it to the
cloud to be stored. There are 4 protocols used at this
level: CoAP, MQTT ( less secure and designed for
machine to machine communication), HTTP (web
protocol) and XMPP which functions as a chat.
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In the cloud, which comes next, data is collected

and the main goal is for it to reach the point of
making predictions based on the stored information.
The cloud however, even though it represents one of
the most useful features of the internet, is not used
properly. Data sent to the cloud didn't reach the level
of being formerly processed. Which means there is
no preselected data. The cloud is constantly loaded
with irrelevant information and thus losing it's
property of being practical.
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An important subject concerning the IoT is open

hardware. The designers of such hardware publish
the schematics which, when the current started, was
a real boost for the IoT.
Microcontrollers were the first one to appear as an
option for developers. They are small computing
devices, easily connectable to hardware. The
development tools were, however, an obstacle and
made using them very complicated.
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The first easy to use microcontroller was Arduino. It

is a small programmable device, on which you can
run a simple, open source software called firmware.
The only fault was that it didn't have enough
processing power and, as a result, no more than 4
network connections were supported. Its RAM being
of 2KB. Shortly, the Arduino does not run an
Operating System, what it runs is called Firmware.
Basically, it runs only one program. The result is
that you can estimate what program sequence gets
executed at a certain time. Program written to the
Arduino remain there until they are replaced with
another program. Even when powered off, Arduino
stores its software.
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Conversely, since it is a computer, the Raspberry Pi

runs an Operating System. That means that you can
run multiple programs on it and you can run
applications that use Internet services. However,
this also implies that the application you run on the
Raspberry Pi is not real time, thus you cannot
estimate when a certain sequence will get executed.
Raspberry Pi came second with the qualities of
being cheap and useful. It is actually a small
computer, it runs Linux as operating system and has
a full network system, solving thus the processing
problem of the Arduino.
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The appropriate hardware can be found by checking

many aspects. There are many boards, but they are
good for different kinds of projects.

For sensor handling Arduino, ChipKIT and

LounchPad are the best options.
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The appropriate hardware can be found by checking

many aspects. There are many boards, but they are
good for different kinds of projects.
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For sensor handling Arduino, ChipKIT and LounchPad

are the best options.
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For processing: the STM32 with 128KB of RAM,

Particle with an ARM chip and wifi, Espruino which
is actually a JavaScript machine and so, you can
write JavaScript code to run on it
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For processing and network, there are the

Raspberry Pi; Intel Galileo which handles hardware
pretty good, has 256MB of RAM and a Qark
processor; The Intel Edison which comes as an
improvement to the Galileo, can be used with wifi
and bluetooth and has a 4GB flash memory;
Beaglebone Black also brings flash memory; UDOO
Neo is a combination of a Raspberry Pi and an
Arduino, project started on Kickstarter; Parallella
which is very different from the others, being a
prototyping board, plus, it has a chip which
processes 16 or 64 programs at a time
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Prototyping is a necessary process while building a

professional product. The software used for it
should be fast to write, easy to deploy when finished
and it's there to make a proof of concept. However, it
is not supposed to be user level grade.
Prototyping has the only property of making a
statement, whereas professional programming can't
have any faults, can't break and has to meet the
client's needs. The softwares built for this job are
Eclipse, VIM, MBED- online platform where you can
write the code and download the binary file for the
board- ,Intel XDK which uses JavaScript as
language for developing and also offers HTML as an
alternative.
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The field of data acquisition and analysis brings:

Xively, which collects data and displays it, offers
libraries for you to integrate into your project, send
the latter to the cloud. Here, you can add graphs and
monitor everything.
Microsft Azure, through which you push data to the
cloud with failure detection as target. With this
software, there's no need for machine learning
algorithms when you can use Microsoft's
technology and knowledge to build prediction
models.
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Solution builders such as Wyliodrin STUDIO allow

prototyping and build solution projects to be sent to
the clients.