IoT

ELI5 is an urban slang short for ‘Explain Like I’m Five’ which literally means explaining something to someone like you would to a five-year-old kid…Well not quite exactly, because that would involve a lot of unnecessary poop jokes 🙄, but in layman’s language. In this series of blog posts, we SunnySide’Sup on various technical terms selling like hot cakes in the market which you have no clue, whatsoever...Don’t worry we got you! First in line is IoT or the Internet of things

To understand the IoT tech stack, I’m going to take you back to your biology lessons of school to remind you of how we humans respond to a stimulus (should have focused on the lecture instead of staring your beautiful science teacher, isn’t it? 😜) — a change in the physical environment or a stimulus is detected by a receptor, this receptor converts this stimulus into electrical nerve impulses which are transmitted to the central nervous system(CNS) through the network of neurons, the CNS interprets this signal and takes appropriate decision and transmits an appropriate response. Similar process is followed when an IoT device functions.

The change in the physical environment is detected by the first layer which comprises of actuators or sensors which are embedded within the IoT objects or the physical environment in order to capture information or events for the application in use.

Actuators are the devices that accept a control command in the form of an electrical signal to produce a change in the physical system by producing motion, force, flow, heat, etc.

Sensors, on the other hand, do the opposite of actuators. They detect and respond to some form of input from the physical environment that could be in the form of light, motion, heat, moisture, pressure, etc by converting them into electrical signals.

The CNS and the network of neurons can be analogous to the second layer of the IoT tech stack which consists of micro-controllers and internet connectivity.

Microcontrollers and internet connectivity share the collected data and information within the IOT objects with the application cloud or act on the basis of this information to make changes in the physical environment. This layer allows local or cloud-based storage of collected data through internet connectivity for data processing. The internet connectivity is needed to send the collected data to the cloud database. Since some sensors generate approximately ten thousand data points or even more per second, it becomes imperative to pre-process and clean the data before sending it to the cloud storage for reducing the volume of unnecessary data to be sent across the network, thus saving cost on data transmission and cloud storage. This pre-processing can be done by the microprocessor. This microcontroller is a small processor embedded within a chip that helps the IOT device in storing and pre-processing the data collected by the sensors and actuators, before sending it across to the cloud storage. This microcontroller possesses a processor, a small amount of RAM to hold the data, EPROM or flash memory to hold the embedded software and a solid-date memory to cache data.

The network connectivity could be of two kinds- episodic or continuous. Episodic network connectivity doesn’t require an application to keep track of historic data for insight generation. For example a healthcare application track record of heartbeat and other body vitals and send them to the cloud application for storage, only to record fresh data the next day. Whereas continuous network connectivity may require access to historic data for generating application insights.

The third layer of the IoT stack, i.e, the service layer may mirror the transmitted response in the response-stimuli chain. The service platform layer is responsible for controlling the IoT product’s end-to-end experience and updating firmware. This layer essentially delivers value to the customers by automating the processes and delivering rich data analytics. It is important for this layer to create a feedback loop between IoT device and device management software for appropriate upgrading of the application based on positive or negative feedback.

What is more important to know is how this technology has been easing up our lives, with this we move to three interesting use cases of IoT.

With this, we close this topic for now. Hope you are in a better position to throw a few jargons of yourself in your next tech interview!

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