Benefits of IOT

A device which is not connected to the internet is a dumb device. IOT device can improve usefulness and save costs.

IOT is beneficial in Health care, Transportation, Automating tasks, understanding patterns, Tracking behavior for real-time marketing,   Enhanced situational awareness,   Sensor-driven decision analytics,   Process optimization,  Optimized resource consumption,   Instantaneous control and response in complex autonomous systems

• Ubiquitous networks – personal wi-fi on your mobile phone and on every other device. Everyone (and everything) wants and needs to be connected.
• Connected computing – we want all of our devices, phones, televisions, music players, vehicles, etc. to keep track of what we are doing, viewing, reading, and listening to as we move through our day, from place to place – the handoffs from device to device are already happening.
• Ubiquitous sensors – on everything. It is already here – the Internet of Everything and the wearables revolution.
• Intelligence at the periphery of the network – Jim Gray, the visionary database guru from Microsoft, envisioned smart sensors acting as a mini-database with embedded machine learning algorithms. Here is how he said it (10 years ago): “Intelligence is moving to the periphery of the network. Each disk and each sensor will be a competent database machine.”
•  Analytics-as-a-Service – the API and App economies are already vast and growing – this enables any “thing” to “do something interesting” as long as it can connect to an API or invoke an App that performs a network-based service. The “thing” is a data generator and/or collector that also learns from, makes predictions, and maybe even takes data-driven actions in response to the data that are collected (through the versatility and convenience of an App or API call).
• Marketing automation – mobile customer engagement, geolocation, Apple’s iBeacon, etc. are all creating a network of knowledge about customers’ locations, intentions, preferences, and buying patterns. Of course, this degree of location-based knowledge needs to strike the right balance between user privacy and the timely delivery of useful products and services to that user.
•  Supply Chain Analytics – delivering just-in-time products at the point of need (including the use of RFID-based tracking). Essentially, everything is a customer (including machines, automobiles, manufacturing plants, ATM machines, etc.), and the IoT is monitoring, watching, and waiting for a product need to arise.
• Aging workforce! Really? – Yes! There is a huge hiring gap in manufacturing, which is pushing toward more automation, robotics, M2M (Machine-to-Machine), machine log mining, 3-D printing, predictive and prescriptive analytics in the machines that are doing that work for us. As the classic rock song “2525” predicted would happen in the year 5555: “some machine is doing that for you.”
•  Transportation: We have been using GPS to track movement of delivery trucks for years. IOT eases and simplifies the entire process by introducing a monetary sensor that helps to track distance and time locations and other contributing factors.
• Inventory management: As managing fleet, inventory management and tracking is also a major task. IOT is used to tag radio frequency sensors to track the location of products in real time. It has been instrumental in tracking the level of inventory and to stock it in advance, making alerts for unforeseen stoppages, automatically placing orders, etc.
• Promotions: Many businesses use IOT to send mobile promotions to frequent shoppers. This is done by keeping track of the shoppers history and shopping interests. It utilizes location-based tracking of the physical shoppers as well as those shopping over the internet.
• Assessing web user intelligence: IOT is used by third party web data aggregators to have a better understanding of their customer by tracking them on social media networks. This is essential to identify the key customers and their preferences.
• Facilitates warranty and maintenance services: IOT enables product tracking. This in turn helps to keep a track of products that require maintenance or warranty. This also helps in crisis moments like thefts to track and place a product.
• Vending technology: IOT has played a big role in enhancing the working of vending machines by enabling them to communicate to monitor inventory levels, determine pricing, etc.

While this chapter highlights some key benefits of IOT, in the next chapter I have explained the terms like RFID and AR markers because they are important to the concept of IOT, especially RFID.

Some of the communication protocols for iot

• Http
• Xbee
• MQTT
• BLE
• RFID

some new protocols came up, designed specifically for iot devices to be more efficient.

Http

this is the basic protocol, where we pass data as a json via url to the cloud server or any of our web server.

Xbee

Xbee is the wireless microcontroller made by Digi International, it uses zigbee protocol, it is basically communication between 2 wireless radios.

it consists of 3 pins and an antenna, it has 11 digital pins and 4 analog pins, iam pasting the image below, how it looks like

MQTT

it is better than http for iot devices, mqtt is more designed for iot devices, http requires more bandwidth and much more battery power, which is inefficient for small iot devices,  mqtt is much like meteor framework programming model, subscribe publish model, communication is in binary format, so less bandwidth, lightweight and consumes less battery power.

https://mosquitto.org/

you can download open source program for it from the website, and run it as a broker, any clients which are connected to particular topic will receive messages, if there are any new messages on that particular topic.

Ble

it is wireless network technology based on bluetooth protocol, but it requires lot less energy, major adopters of ble technology is health and fitness devices and apps.

RFID

For developing IOT devices, we must understand RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) as well, RFID is barcode in chip format,  information on chip  can be updated as well, and is capable of communicating with RFID reading enabled other devices, as the prices are getting RFID chips are getting lower and lower every day, its use is only going to increase.

RFID provides unique identification for an object, without RFID there would be no way for wireless networks to identify each other, currently it’s used in many devices like mobile phones, tablets, computers, credit cards, access cards, and many other things

What is AR Markers

Ar Markers (Augmented Reality) Marker is effectively two dimensional symbols, similar to a QR code that allows a camera to determine position and rotation relative to a surface. With this information, a camera can do many different things.

It is used in video games, when you scan AR marker with your mobile camera,  an animated character will come out of it

You can check this YouTube video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTK_qfh2fD8

or search in YouTube for AR Markers

You will get several demo videos