Internet of Things (IoT) is a buzz word now days. Few days back I attended one seminar on IoT, which was talking about your machines getting connected to Internet. Since that seminar was for Industries in automobile related industry, they looked at IoT in perspective of Industrial Users.
There seems to be more opportunities in consumer market when we talk about IoT. Here I am trying to showcase you one simple IoT application. This is not merely theoretical walk through but a practical scenario which you can implement at your home or office.
We have created a module which can sense the temperature of atmosphere and send the temperature to one web service (kind of web site), where you can check that temperate from anywhere in the world.
So there is one backbone of IoT systems i.e. Internet Connectivity. You may not need your Thing to be always connected to Internet, but there must be some pre-defined frequency when you want your Thing to talk to Internet for sharing the data. So if you can develop any Thing which can send SMS and shares the information, which could be part of IoT community.
Here, we have used following hardware:
- Raspberry Pi Microprocessor
- One Digital Temperature Sensor
- Internet connection i.e. Modem or Wi-Fi router
- On other end of communication you might have computer or Mobile phone which again connected to Internet
For this IoT experiment, we need following software:
- Python program running of Raspbian OS which can read temperature and send the data to Internet
- One Thing name on http://dweet.io/ : Dweet.io is free service provider for communicating information between your things over internet. There are other services too which you can explore.
Once you connect Digital Temperature sensor to RBPi, you need to read the temperature in intervals and then send that temperature information to Dweet io service using python libraries. (https://github.com/paddycarey/dweepy)
Once Dweet io service receive this information from your thing (You have to give name to your thing whenever you are talking to Dweet io), so same information gets published on internet so anyone can access that. You can restrict this information using lock mechanism available for paid users of Dweet io.
The given temperature information can be accessed by any other thing if other thing know the name of the thing which is sending the information using the following url :
https://dweet.io/listen/for/dweets/from/<my-thing-name>
Alternatively Dweet io provide user friendly UI interface to read the dweeted information:
https://dweet.io/follow/<my-thing-name>
Now you can think what would you like your machines to share with each other. You can imagine the world where you can see machines talking to each other and helping humans to reach the goals which we would have never imagined J
Reference:
Temperature Sensor and Raspberry Pi related à http://www.themagpi.com/issue/issue-23/
Dweet io à http://dweet.io/
Python Library for Dweet io à https://github.com/paddycarey/dweepy
Break-Make-Invent 